Pressure Mounts for Sudan’s President Bashir

When the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President, a lot of armchair academics in the United States predicted calamity. We argued they were wrong then; we still think they are wrong now. An important Sudanese opposition leader has just called on President Bashir to be turned over to The Hague, according to the news agency Reuters. The opposition leader, Hassan al-Turabi, is usually a hard-line figure in Sudan’s Islamist movement and used to be quite close to Bashir, before the two had a major falling out. Said Turabi of Bashir: "Politically we think he is culpable. He is responsible for all the crimes. In politics, whatever happens below a minister, for example, he will have to resign for it and assume responsibility... and he should assume responsibility for whatever is happening in Darfur -- displacement, the burning of all the villages, systematic rapes."

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