Come fly with me: U.N. loans plane to accused war criminal

The French government issued a formal complaint to the United Nations last week in protest against a decision to use an U.N. airplane to escort an accused Sudanese war criminal to a meeting with government-backed tribal leaders, U.N. based diplomats told Turtle Bay.

Ahmed Haroun, one of three Sudanese nationals – together with President Omar Al-Bashir and Ali Kushayb, a pro-government militia leader — charged by the International Criminal Court with committing war crimes in Darfur, appeared in an Al Jazeera news report de-boarding a large white passenger plan with the U.N. insignia:

Under a U.N. legal ruling, U.N. officials are supposed to only have with accused war criminals in extraordinary cases. 

The video has alarmed the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, who had called on the U.N. Security Council last year to facilitate Haroun’s arrest. Moreno Ocampo told the council then that the failure to hold Haroun, who now serves as Bashir’s governor in Kordofan, accountable for his alleged crimes in Darfur "carries a price," citing fears that he could promote further violence in his new job. "I’m afraid reality is confirming what we predicted in 2010 at the U.N. Security Council," Moreno-Ocampo told Turtle Bay.

In his first two years in office, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon invested enormous personal energy, and political capital, in forging a personal relationship with President Bashir in order to persuade him to restrain his behavior. But Ban has essentially stopped talking to Bashir after the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest. U.S. diplomats, including President Obama’s Sudan envoy, Ret. Air Force Maj. General J. Scott Gration, have also avoided direct contacts with the Sudanese leaders.

The violence in Darfur began in 2003, when two Darfuri rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum. The Sudanese government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, relying on government-backed Arab militia — know as the Janjaweed — that led to the deaths of more than 300,000 civilians and drove nearly 2 million people from their home. The United States has characterized the government’s role in the violence as genocide.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in 2007 against Haroun, a former state minister for humanitarian affairs, and Kushayb, for their alleged role in orchestrating the mass killings of civilians in Darfur. President Bashir was subsequently charged in March, 2009, with ordering the Darfur killings. Bashir’s government has since appointed Haroun governor of South Kordofan.

Earlier this month, Ban’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, confirmed the U.N. had transported Haroun to Abyei — an oil rich region that is linked by ethnicity and geography to South Sudan, though had been excluded from that country’s landmark independence referendum in South Sudan earlier this month — to help prod leaders of the government-backed Misseriya tribe to strike a peace deal with the region’s Dingka Ngok tribe. Dozens of people were killed in fighting between the two tribes.

In response to a question from Inner City Press, Nesirky said the U.N. is required under the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the decades long civil war between Khartoum and Southern Sudan, to "provide good offices" to various warring parties to help facilitate peace talks. U.N. officials brought in Haroun, who is close to the Misseriya, to help prod the group to stop fighting.

"In accordance with its mandate," Nesirky said, "the mission will continue to provide the necessary support to those key players in their pursuit to find a peaceful solution."

Follow me on Twitter @columlynch