US ambivalent on charge against Sudan leader

[July 15, 2008]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- For years, the Bush administration has taken a strong stance denouncing atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region and labeling them genocide.

Yet it offered only an ambivalent response when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court filed genocide charges against Sudan's president.

For all its criticism of President Omar al-Bashir, the administration is reluctant to take steps that lend legitimacy to a court whose jurisdiction it has questioned and whose treaty it refuses to sign.

The administration offered some praise Monday for prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo's charge.

"In our view recognition of the humanitarian disaster and the atrocities that have gone on there is a positive thing," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

McCormack emphasized, however, that the U.S. view of the ICC is well known.

"We make our own determinations according to our own laws, our own regulations with respect to who should be subject to war crimes and genocide-related statutes. The ICC is a separate matter, and we are not part of the ICC," he said.

Some analysts say the administration is conflicted.

"I think there is probably a tension within the administration between those who would find the ICC to be an irritant and an obstacle to peace efforts in Darfur, whereas there are others who may be arguing that this might facilitate those efforts," said David Scheffer, director of Northwestern Law School's Center for International Human Rights.

As U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues in the Clinton administration, Scheffer negotiated the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Clinton signed it in Dec. 31, 2000. The document was never submitted to the Senate for ratification, and the Bush administration withdrew the signature.

The Bush administration opposes the court because of suspicions that its jurisdiction is too broad and fears that American servicemen fighting abroad or the officials who command them might not be safe from politically motivated prosecution.

The administration's mixed feelings about the ICC are not new. Despite its frequent criticism of the ICC, it effectively allowed the investigation of al-Bashir when it abstained on a U.N. Security Council resolution in 2005 instead of using its veto. That gave the court the authority that led to Monday's indictment.

"At least as a matter of policy, not only do we not oppose the ICC's investigation and prosecutions in Sudan but we support its investigation and prosecution of those atrocities," John Bellinger, the State Department's top legal adviser, later told The Associated Press.

The State Department also strongly supported ICC indictments in 2005 of five Ugandans accused of war crimes in the country's two-decade-old civil conflict.

The move against al-Bashir may be raising another concern, however, because it is an indictment against a current head of state.

"The U.S. is concerned about keeping U.S. officials and particularly the head of state out of the court's jurisdiction," said Madeline Morris, a professor at Duke Law School.

Nonetheless, McCormack says the United States already is considering a recent request from the ICC for information involving Darfur but not al-Bashir.

"The basis of a response probably would be what information we had," he said.

[Associated Press; By DESMOND BUTLER]

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