Bashir Bludgeoning His Way Toward Reelection?

Over the weekend, I heard an interesting take on President Bashir’s decision to expel key humanitarian relief agencies working in Sudan from a colleague. He noted that Bashir may well see winning the upcoming national election in Sudan as his best hope for staving off the arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The decision to expel aid agencies may be directly designed to break apart some of the largest displaced persons camps in Darfur, where the U.N. has declared that more than one million people are now at risk of a grave humanitarian emergency. For Bashir, this population represents an important voting block that would never cast their ballots for him. So by literally trying to starve this population, Bashir is hoping that Darfur's people will be too weak and too dispersed to speak out against his rule at the ballot box. The real question: How will the international community respond to such an outrage?

• International Criminal Court
• Omar al-Bashir
• Sudan and South Sudan