A Spark that May Light the Sudan Tinderbox

Sitting in the sands of Northern Darfur last month, there seemed little to suggest that the UN ban on offensive military flights over Darfur was being taken too by the Khartoum Government. Flying at high altitude above us two Antonov aircraft took it in turns to roll barrel bombs off their cargo ramps on to the sub-Saharan desert.

I suppose they were targeting the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels with whom we shared the only cover - a thorn bush in a dried wadi. A few bombs fell quite close, a few hundred metres away, sending chunks of the wilderness skyward in grey, rolling banks of smoke. But a lot more exploded miles from the rebel position, suggesting that they were being used more as weapons of indiscriminate terror than specifically to target insurgents who are fighting attempts to force out ethnic black Africans in the region in favour of government-backed Arabs.

If the UN is taken as rather a joke by Sudan it only has itself to blame. Sudan has flouted just about every UN resolution on Darfur with total impunity. Little surprise then that President al-Bashir is not taking the International Criminal Court (ICC) very seriously either. Since it issued an arrest warrant against him last month for crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Sudanese leader has been on a regional cock-a-snook tour, sticking two fingers at international justice at every opportunity.

In this endeavour, his neighbours have served him well. Five Arab and African countries have greeted the indicted head of state in the past four weeks. The Arab League, which invited Mr al-Bashir to its summit in Qatar ten days ago, issued a statement of support for “his Excellency” the Sudanese President. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, attended and was in the same room as Mr al-Bashir. He did not speak to him, but did not mention Darfur either.

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