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| Volume XVI, Summer 2009, Number 2 |
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EXCERPT
Darfur, the ICC and American Politics
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| Peter K. Bechtold |
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Dr. Bechtold is the chairman emeritus of Near East and North Africa
Studies, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State. He is the
author of Politics in the Sudan: Parliamentary and Military Rule in an
Emerging African Nation (Praeger, 1976). He first visited Darfur in 1972
and most recently in 2008.
During the past half-decade,
those Americans following
international affairs have been
inundated by media accounts of
genocide in Darfur, supplemented by fullpage
advertisements in the major newspapers,
sponsored mostly by the Save Darfur
Coalition. During the first half of 2008,
activists tried to link the Beijing Olympic
Games to Darfur by labeling them the
“genocide Olympics.” They even enlisted
some prominent American athletes in a
lobbying effort via “Team Darfur.”
Just prior to the games in July 2008,
the activists scored an apparent victory
when the prosecutor for the International
Criminal Court (ICC) filed a petition
against the sitting Sudanese president,
Omar H. A. al-Bashir, charging him with
10 war crimes and crimes against humanity
and responsibility for genocide in
Darfur. The application was acted upon
by a pre-trial chamber of three justices,
who issued an arrest warrant for Bashir on
March 4, 2009, in The Hague.
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