Much to the chagrin of the Sudanese authorities, the UN hands war crimes prosecutors documents and a list of people suspected of committing war crimes in Darfur, writes Gamal Nkrumah On Tuesday, United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan handed over a sealed envelope to chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The envelope contained a list of 51 people, presumably Sudanese, suspected of carrying out atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region. "To protect life," Moreno-Ocampo said, the international community has come together to "end impunity in Darfur". "My duty," he explained, "is to investigate the crimes and to respect the interests of the victims." The Sudanese authorities reacted angrily, claiming that the UN move was a violation of Sudan's sovereignty. Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir says his country refuses to co-operate with the ICC based in The Hague, Netherlands. He said that suspects would only be tried in Sudanese courts and on Sudanese soil. The Sudanese authorities also dismissed UN Security Council Resolution 1593 which was severely critical of the Sudanese authorities and human rights abuses in Darfur. Last week, and in spite of initial US grave reservations, the UN Security Council passed the resolution referring the situation in Darfur to the ICC. The US abstained from the vote, along with Algeria, Brazil and China, but Sudan said that it would not hand over any of its citizens to the ICC. Tens of thousands of protesters have marched through the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, protesting against the UN. They said that the UN Security Council resolution was tantamount to gross interference in Sudanese domestic affairs. The demonstrators also said that they trust and prefer to rely on the Sudanese justice system to bring the perpetrators of abuses in Darfur to book. "Thrice in the name of Almighty Allah," Bashir swore in traditional Muslim fashion, "I shall never hand any Sudanese national to a foreign court." Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Othman Ismail is currently visiting Egypt to brief the Egyptian authorities on the position of Sudanese government over the UN decision to hand over the 51 names to the ICC. The Sudanese foreign minister said that Khartoum seeks the advice and support of Egyptian legal experts who are better experienced at handling international issues than their Sudanese counterparts. However, he dismissed theories that Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha was implicated in Darfur human rights abuses saga. "No one, not even the UN secretary-general, knows whose names are listed in the sealed envelope except for those who authored the report," the Sudanese foreign minister said. It is widely suspected that the list, drawn up by the UN commission investigating allegations of killings, torture and rape in Darfur, includes Sudanese government and army officials. But the chief culprits are allegedly militiamen aligned to Sudanese government. Armed opposition groups are also suspected of committing gross human rights abuses. Earlier on Tuesday, the UN handed other documents outlining the war crimes allegations to the court in The Hague. The African Union has deployed some 1,900 troops to monitor the situation in Darfur. But international rights groups and aid agencies as well as armed opposition groups in Darfur call for the deployment of Western forces with more sophisticated logistical capabilities. The UN has, in any case, indicated that more troops are needed in Darfur. Meanwhile, Japan has declined to send troops to Darfur, explaining that the situation in Sudan is extremely volatile. The Japanese daily Yomiro Shimbun said that Japan would send civilian diplomats and technical experts to Sudan instead of troops. As a result of a January peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), until recently the country's most powerful armed opposition group, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees are returning home. The SPLA is to form a coalition government with the Bashir regime in Khartoum. Four million people were displaced in the Sudanese civil war, which also claimed the lives of 1.5 million Sudanese. In Cairo, the Sudanese foreign minister described the Security Council plan to try criminals in The Hague as "unfair, ill-advised and narrow-minded". However, Darfur's two main armed opposition groups -- the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement welcomed it. Meanwhile, the two groups have rejected an Egyptian initiative to hold peace talks. Egypt is to host a summit on Darfur this month, but the two Darfur groups have persistently declined offers to take part in peace talks held on Egyptian soil. The Egyptian authorities say that they shall continue to pursue peace talks and involve all parties to the conflict in Darfur. The UN estimates that at least 180,000 people have died and more than two million rendered homeless because of the violence in Darfur which first erupted two years ago. A British parliamentary investigation concluded that the Darfur conflict might have claimed as many as 300,000 lives. The New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) this week accused the Sudanese government of trying to intimidate humanitarian relief agencies by arbitrarily detaining aid workers. The London- based Amnesty International concurred with HRW, and blames the Janjaweed and other militias allied with the Sudanese government for instigating much of the violence in Darfur. Additional reporting Magda El-Ghitany
