The International Criminal Court's judges on Monday charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with orchestrating a bloody campaign of genocide against Darfur's three main ethnic groups, the first time the Hague-based court has accused a sitting head of state of committing the most egregious international crime.

The three-judge pre-trial chamber issued a formal arrest warrant for Bashir -- the second time it has done so -- on three counts of genocide. They include the crime of targeted mass killing; the causing of serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction.

"There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. al-Bashir acted with specific intent to destroy in part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups," the judges concluded.

The decision provided a degree of vindication to the United States, which has largely stood alone in characterizing the killing in Darfur as genocide. It also gave a boost to the court's Argentine prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, whose pursuit of the Sudanese leader has generated intense opposition from other African and Arab leaders. Moreno-Ocampo suffered a setback when his case against another alleged war criminal, the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, was suspended for a second time, adding further delay to the ICC's first trial.

Sudan's U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, dismissed Monday's ruling as another politically motivated effort by the court to undercut prospects for peace in Sudan and vowed never to surrender Bashir. "We condemn this in this strongest terms; it will only harden our resolve," he said in an interview. "This court's objective is to destroy chances for peace in Sudan; we're not going to be bothered by it."

Moreno-Ocampo said he welcomed the decision, which essentially reverses a previous ruling by the pre-trial chamber to reject the genocide charges. He said the new ruling honors the victims of the mass killing in Darfur. It may impose new obligations on states that have signed the Genocide Convention, including the United States, to cooperate with the court in its effort to arrest Bashir, Moreno-Ocampo added.

"This decision recognizes the suffering of the Darfuris; the current rapes and starvation in the camps are genocide," he said in an e-mail to The Washington Post. "There is a new scenario: the convention on genocide could apply. Never again?"

U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley urged Bashir to face the genocide charges in the Hague court. "Everyone is entitled to a day in court, and we think the sooner that President Bashir presents himself to that court, the better," Crowley said.

The criminal court issued a previous arrest warrant against Bashir in March 2009, on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sudan, which has never ratified the treaty establishing the criminal court, has refused to surrender Bashir. Despite the charges, Bashir was reelected this year in a U.N.-backed election to a five-year term.

Following first arrest warrant in March, the Sudanese leader expelled 10 international agencies and disbanded three domestic organizations, setting a worrying precedent that local advocates have yet to recover from. President Obama's special envoy, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, negotiated the return of some affiliates of the same aid groups.

Following the elections, Bashir's political party, the National Congress Party, has cracked down on civil society, media and opposition groups. Opposition leaders say that the West's acceptance of Bashir's victory in the flawed elections has emboldened the regime.

The violence in Darfur began in early 2003, when two rebel groups took up arms against Sudan's Islamic government, citing a legacy of discrimination against Darfur's ethnic tribes. In response, Khartoum organized local Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, to help crush the resistance and its followers. The United Nations estimates that as many as 300,000 civilians died as a result of violence or hardships brought on by the forced displacement of nearly 2 million Darfuris.

The prosecutor charged Bashir with approving a counterinsurgency plan that envisaged the "unlawful attack on that part of the civilian population of Darfur -- belonging largely to the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa groups -- perceived by the Government of Sudan" as being close to the rebels. "According to the common plan, the said civilian population was to be subject to unlawful attacks, forcible transfers and acts of murder, extermination, rape, torture, and pillage" by Sudanese forces.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071203651_pf.html

© 2010 The Washington Post Company