Al-Bashir cancels Turkey trip as OIC summit opens
PRESIDENT Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), has pulled out of an Islamic summit in Istanbul after the Turkish government had previously welcomed his attendance and said that he would not be arrested.
He was to attend the summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) which began yesterday.
But the European Union (EU), which Turkey hopes to join, wanted the invitation to be withdrawn.
Sudan's state-run Suna news agency said "new developments" had required Al-Bashir's presence in Sudan.
The Sudanese leader was in Egypt on Sunday, taking part in a China-Africa summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
But Suna said he was returning to Khartoum to "find a solution" to a dispute between his ruling National Congress Party and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
Al-Bashir has visited several African countries since the ICC issued the warrant for his arrest in March, saying he was responsible for atrocities in Darfur.
He has denied the accusations.
Turkey has pointed out it is not a signatory to the treaty which set up the Hague-based ICC.
Officials also said Al-Bashir was invited by the OIC and not Ankara.
But Turkey, which is seeking EU membership, had come under pressure from Brussels to drop Al-Bashir from the guest list.
"The Sudanese see and understand well the difficulties," an unnamed senior Turkish diplo)mat told Agence France Presse (AFP).
Earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioned the charges against Al-Bashir and said that "no Moslem could perpetrate a genocide", according to Turkey's Anatolia news agency.
"If there was such a thing (a genocide), we could talk about it face to face with President Al-Bashir," he was quoted as saying.
The ICC arrest warrant accuses Al-Bashir of running a campaign of genocide that killed 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through a "slow death" and of forcing 2.5 million to flee their homes in Darfur.
The ICC indicted Al-Bashir in March on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but stopped short of including a charge of genocide. The United Nations says as many as 300,000 people have been killed since conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003, although Sudan rejects that figure.
Erdogan's comments could further damage Turkey's already strained ties with Israel, which have worsened since Israel's December-January offensive in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.
The campaigning group Human Rights Watch had said that NATO member Turkey's international image would "plummet" if it did not bar Al-Bashir.
The Sudanese leader has travelled to African countries since the ICC issued its arrest warrant in March.
Meanwhile, defence lawyers for a Darfur rebel leader, currently in the Hague to establish whether there is enough evidence to prosecute him for attacking peacekeepers, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in the Hague, Netherlands, have argued that the Sudanese government had been using an African Union, AU, base to target civilians.
Bahr Idriss Abu Garda, the commander of a splinter group of the Justice and Equality Movement, is alleged to be one of three rebel leaders behind a September 29, 2007 attack on the base in Haskanita, north Darfur, in which 12 peacekeepers were killed and eight wounded. Garda appeared recently before the ICC, voluntarily and following his eight-day confirmation of charges hearing - which ends this week - judges will have 60 days to decide whether or not to proceed to trial.
Prosecutors have argued that the strike was unlawful because the peacekeepers and their base enjoyed the protection afforded to civilians, as they were not a party to the Darfur conflict, had no enforcement mandate, and could only use force in self-defence.
But Garda's lawyer, Karim Khan, suggested that the government of Sudan, GoS, had been using information gleaned at the base to enable airforce bombers to hit Darfur civilians and rebels.
A peacekeeping agreement had provided that representatives from the parties to the conflict - the rebel Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, as well as GoS - could be present at the base.
However, rebels were alarmed by the presence of a GoS representative, an airforce captain called Bashir, suspecting that the base was being misused. One witness statement, read out in court, insisted that between June and September 2007, the rebels prevented peacekeepers from even leaving their base.
"Rebel forces forbade us from going on patrol, and no helicopters were permitted to land in the camp to bring supplies," said another.
Prosecutors said that rebels visited the base on September 10, 2007 and complained about the presence of Captain Bashir, asked for his removal and threatened that if they were attacked again by GoS, they would in turn attack Haskanita.
Bashir was removed the next day, prosecutors said. However, under cross-examination, the second of two prosecution witnesses told the court that Bashir was replaced with another GoS representative named Major Abdul Malik, so that a government representative remained on the base.
Regardless of whether GoS was at the base, prosecutors were adamant that this did not remove the civilian status afforded to the peacekeepers.
On the morning of September 29, Sudanese forces bombed rebels in the village of Haskanita, some two kilometres from the base. An AU report described it as an "unrelenting offensive by the GoS forces" during which the rebels sustained huge casualties.
Rebels attacked the Haskanita base that evening.
