International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Kahn speaks to the U.N. Security Council on Monday via video link from Chad where he had met with Sudaneses refugees. Photo by Manuel Elias/UN
Jan. 29 (UPI) — There are grounds to believe that war crimes have been committed in Darfur by both sides of Sudan’s bloody conflict, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor said, while warning that if more isn’t done to hold those responsible, future generations will be condemned to the same fate.
“Based on the work of my office, it is my clear finding, my clear assessment, that there are grounds to believe that presently Rome Statute crimes are being committed in Darfur by both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces and affiliated groups,” the ICC’s Karim Khan said Monday during a U.N. Security Council meeting.
The Rome Statute is the ICC’s founding treaty that gives it jurisdiction over the four main crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.
Sudan has been submerged in civil conflict between the SAF and its breakaway RSF since April 15, internally displacing some 7.1 million people with another 1.5 million seeking refuge in neighboring countries such as Chad where more than 500,000 now reside.
Human rights and other organizations, including the United Nations, have warned for months about the deteriorating conflict in Sudan, especially in Darfur, where there were mass killings committed in the mid-2000s and where there have been fresh allegations raised of ethnic cleansing being committed during the present fighting.
The ICC was charged by the Security Council in 2005 to investigate allegations of Rome Statute crimes having been committed in Darfur, and in July, Khan announced another investigation into the new allegations.
Khan spoke to the Security Council on Monday via video link from Chad, stating there has been minimal cooperation from the Sudanese government despite having received a promise of support from Sudanese Armed Forces chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in September.
“Despite that promise to me face-to-face, despite the oft-cited investigative committee that the Sudanese Armed Forces say has been established to catalogue and investigate any allegations of crimes, we have received no information whatsoever,” he said, adding that 35 requests for assistance the ICC remained unanswered by the Sudanese government.
“Without justice for past atrocities the inescapable truth is that we condemn the current generation, and if we do nothing now, we condemn future generations to suffering the same faith,” he said. “It can’t be a case of play, rewind and repeat when the people seeing those ugly pictures are those affected the most.”
He said refugees he has spoken to while in Chad have expressed concern that the world is a sleep to their suffering.
“That’s what they feel. That’s what they conveyed. They thought they’re too small, too invisible, too unimportant, too poor to be a real matter of concern to the ICC and also to the international community,” he said.
“These are individuals whose lives have been torn apart. Each of whom has a story of woe, a story of suffering and they have every expectation that collectively the Security Council, the United Nations, member states, regional organization and the ICC can live up to our promises that we’ve repeatedly made,” he said.
“I do hope that there’s a dawning realization amongst the international community that it cannot be business as usual in a negative sense. We can’t continue to apply the law in a piecemeal fashion.”
The announcement comes nearly two months after the United States declared that the RSF and its allied militias had committed war crimes in the country.