Close up: Karadzic and Al-Bashir By Salama A Salama It may be purely a coincidence, but after a 13- year-old pursuit in which UN and NATO forces took part, the notorious Bosnian Serb butcher Radovan Karadzic was finally apprehended at the same time of international outcry to prosecute Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir on the charge of committing similar crimes of genocide against the people of Darfur. Clearly the governments of weak and failed states, in particular, are finding it less and less easy to dodge being held accountable for the crimes they perpetrate against their own people. It is no longer acceptable in international convention to fall back on the principle of non- intervention in domestic affairs or to plead the rights of national sovereignty when it comes to such crimes. The international community has hampered access to such ruses with a hedge of reservations and conditions that give it the right to intervene when a state grievously violates the rights of sectors of its people on the basis of religious or ethnic affiliations, or fails to bring the perpetrators of such crimes to fair trial, all of which is precisely what has happened in Darfur. Perhaps this is the reason for the extremely awkward position in which the Arab League finds itself as it scrambles for a way out from the charges the International Criminal Court (ICC) has levelled against the Sudanese president. In an attempt to persuade the ICC to postpone its warrant, the Arab League secretariat has argued that the case would jeopardise the peace process in Sudan. Also to ward off the prospect of a warrant, the Arab League's secretary- general came up with several proposals intended to encourage Khartoum to bring local leaders suspected of perpetrating acts of genocide against civilians in Darfur to trial as soon as possible and to hasten the reconciliation process with local tribes. But Al-Bashir's government dragged its feet for so long on these proposals that it was almost inevitable that the axe would fall, as they say. Al-Bashir cannot go into hiding like Karadzic did when he was accused of committing genocide against Serbian Muslims. More than 8,000 men, women and children were killed in one massacre alone in the course of his campaign to establish a Serbian nation. Until this year, there had been no trace of Karadzic since 1996; unlike Al-Bashir who performed a defiant dance in response to the charges against him and had nothing to say about the ethnic cleansing that has plagued Darfur. Karadzic's fascist supporters helped him go into hiding and, after taking on a disguise, he continued to work as a psychiatrist in Belgrade. Now that he has been caught, his appearance before the ICC will probably lead to more intensive international pressures against Al-Bashir. Not all pressures will be motivated by the principle of international justice. International justice has become a part of a huge system with political and economic dimensions and is, therefore, difficult to apply as an absolute. Nevertheless, domestic considerations in Sudan, such as respect for human rights, democracy and plurality have an important part to play, which one would think Arab countries would have realised by now after the dozens of experiences they have had in being easy targets for revenge or other designs precisely because these values are conspicuously absent in their domestic conditions.
