The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ordered the arrest of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The issuing of the arrest warrant was announced at a news conference at the home of the court in The Hague in the Netherlands on Wednesday afternoon.
The president has refused to acknowledge the authority of the court and, ahead of the announcement, he told reporters that any attempt to prosecute him would have “no value”.
Sudan’s ruling party has said that it plans a “million man march” in the capital, Khartoum, on Thursday to protest against the warrant.
CNN reported yesterday an statement of a Sudanese soldier, conscripted forcefully, who says:
“They ordered us to kill, to rape children. If we didn’t do it or tried to escape, we had some others who were ordered to shoot us. In my case, I didn’t actually rape them, as there was no penetration, I wasn’t able to. So I only was there during 15 minutos to make everybody think I was raping her. I have nightmares”.
5-year-old children were raped and in several refugee camps 20 children were born monthly as a result of the rapes.
The journalist adds that:
Time and again, though, it seems telling the world their stories has little tangible impact on their reality of their lives.
Will this arrest order have some “tangible impact” on their lives? It’s possible that it won’t. China has already critisized the decision and Al-Bashir has actually danced before the people gathered there to protest for this new form of colonialism which only “has the intention of desestabilizing the country”, as he has called the arrest order.
Today some NGOs expelled 10 NGOs of a country (recently they also expelled a journalist after she asked some questions about the weapons’ industry), in which around 2.2 million people can die of several illnesses and hunger as a direct consequence of this expulsion. The reason is that those NGOs were the purveyors of medical and humanitarian asistence (food, water, etc) needed in the area.
It’s just the same blackmail as ever: in the end, it’s the population which is going to suffer. A population who has suffered sufficiently bad. Among other causes, we can safely name the islamism of the Khartoum’s Government and also the Darfur’s oil reserves which of course, wouldn’t be sudanese if Darfur was independent.
Mohammed Fagirad, 30, a vice consul at the Afghanistan Consulate, brutalized his wife inside their Flushing home from about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday until nearly midnight, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
During the attack, Fagirad bit, slapped, choked and beat the 22-year-old woman with a belt, pushed her down a flight of stairs and sat on her chest, prosecutors said.
At one point, prosecutors said, Fagirad threw his wife up against a wall, held her there by the neck and then let her drop to the floor, where he beat her with a belt.
Fagirad told police his “wife was a dog and he was going to treat her like a dog,” prosecutors said.
When Fagirad left the home, his wife fled and went to the 109th Precinct stationhouse, where she filed a domestic violence report, prosecutors said. She then returned home.
When Fagirad returned, he demanded his wife’s cell phone and called police to file a counterclaim, prosecutors said….
“Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme.”
“Hillary Clinton, who heads to Asia next week on her maiden mission, is bowing to an increasingly powerful region in order to tackle the global economic crisis, climate change and nuclear weapons.
The new US secretary of state’s choice of travel to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China, reflects the quest for a long-term strategy to deal with the changing dynamic in world economic, political and military power, analysts say.
Her predecessors usually traveled first to Europe or the Middle East.
For Michael Green, a former Asia adviser to president George W. Bush, Clinton is right to now focus the ‘US government on the challenges and opportunities’ in Asia.
To be sure, he told reporters at a gathering here organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the crises of the moment are in the world financial markets, the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.”
A Christian defender of human rights in China – whom authorities detained last week – detailed state-sponsored torture he suffered in 2007 in an open letter released on Monday (Feb. 9), the same day advocacy groups criticized a U.N. review of China’s treatment of Christians and other minorities for omitting serious abuses. (…)
The letter gives a detailed account of torture he suffered in September and October of 2007. Gao said his official captors – some of whom he recognized – referred to a report he had written earlier on the torture of Falun Gong members and warned him that he was about to experience the same treatment. They urinated on Gao and repeatedly prodded his body, mouth and genitals with electric shock batons. Other methods used were too graphic and “horrible” to describe, Gao said.
Officials later asked Gao to write articles cursing Falun Gong and praising the government. When he refused, they pressured him to write a statement saying that Falun Gong practitioners had given him false evidence of torture, and that – despite constant harassment – the government had treated him and his family well. Gao said he signed this statement, as well as others in which he confessed to sexual impropriety, after beatings that left him unrecognizable and the insertion of toothpicks into his genitals.
Looks like a wonderful country to mention Human Rights’ abuses, doesn’t it?
Sudan has expelled a foreign journalist for reporting about the Darfur’s crisis and the weapons’ industry in the country, according to US diplomats, who added that the journalists, Heba Aly, has both Canadian and Egyptian citizenship.
Aly, who wrote for the US news agency Bloomberg, the on-line diary Christian Science Monitor and the US humanitarian news agency, IRIN, left the country last week. Ali told his colleagues that the people responsible of the Sudanese security service had contacted her and ordered her to abandon the country some days after she asked some questions about a weapons’ factory based in Khartoum.
Oh, but don’t worry… Sudanese Government is a truly good and humanitarian Government and specially its President, Al-Bashir . Even UN tried to back down their report about the crimes perpetrated by Sudanese Government in Darfur (ans specially his President, who was charged with genocide last summer by La Hague’s General Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo) for more than a decade, firstly against Black Christians and Animists and afterwards against Black Muslims in the area. Of course, if you consider the saying “Tell me who you are with and I will tell you who you are”, we can guess who Al-Bashir is considering that China supported him and “voiced concern about this accusations” (considering they could also be accused… ). And Al-Bashir has supported Hamas some days ago in Qatar’s meeting of Arab Heads of State, as we can see in this photo:
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, cente, attends the emergency Arab leaders summit on Gaza in Doha, Qatar, Friday, Jan. 16, 2009. Pro-U.S. Arab countries boycotted the gathering, fearing it will boost the Palestinian militant group. The Qatar summit underlined the deep divisions in the Middle East over the Gaza violence. Egypt and Saudi Arabia reportedly sought to dissuade other Arab countries from joining the gathering, raising accusations that they were trying to thwart a united Arab stance on Gaza. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Christian Science Monitor has written on the subject…
While she admits that she worked for her final month, January, without accreditation, she says it was only after she started pursuing a story about Sudan’s arms-manufacturing industry that she received a call from National Security agents requesting a meeting. At the meeting, the agents told her that she must leave Sudan by Monday.
“I was never given any written expulsion order, despite my repeated requests,” says Aly, who had been detained twice before during her year in Sudan. “I was simply harassed, and was counselled by someone in government that if I did not leave I would be arrested. I was followed, intimidated into leaving the country, and escorted by national security all the way onto the tarmac to board the airplane. The reason they gave me was that I was asking about arms. But they told me the line they would use publicly was that I didn’t have my work papers.”
The government of Sudan continues to insist that Aly’s expulsion is merely an immigration matter.
Hmm, and the CSM says Sudan has much more press freedom than other countries of the area. Imagine how are the rest…
Lies, lies and more lies… How considerate these fellows from National Security are, aren’t they?
“Western countries called on Saudi Arabia on Friday to halt floggings and amputations, allow religious freedom and abolish a system of male guardianship sharply limiting women’s rights.”
(…) Zaid Al-Hussein, vice president of the state-affiliated Saudi Human Rights Commission, told the forum much remained to be done to ensure that individual followers of Islam uphold human rights standards, as required by sharia law.
(…) Hussein said non-Muslims could follow their faiths in private in the kingdom, but it would be difficult to allow non-Muslim houses of worship as “Islam is the final religion“.
This expression is absolutely final about what we’re dealing here. Some days ago, Saudi blogger Hamoud
Based on information obtained by ANHRI, the Saudi authorities jailed the young blogger at the infamous Eleisha political prison in Riyadh; a prison which in 2004 witnessed the arrest of the reformists Matrouk el Falih, Ali el Domini and Eissa al Hamed.
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But to consider the Islamic tradition to beat the wife strongly, just see these videos:
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