INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT NAMES FIRST SUSPECTS FOR WAR CRIMES

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

-Blaise Pascal

It taken nearly two years, but the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor in The Hague has announced the first names of people allegedly responsible for atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region. The Economist (Britain) writes:

"More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2m others driven from their homes in Darfur since 2003. In the past month alone, some 46,000 more people have been forced to flee their villages to escape the bombing, pillaging, rape and slaughter by Sudanese forces and the pro-government Janjaweed militia. Millions of civilians, most of them in overcrowded and insalubrious camps, are now dependent on humanitarian aid for their survival. The violence is making it increasingly difficult for international aid organisations to reach them. Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, has repeatedly sworn that he will not hand over any Sudanese citizen indicted by the ICC.

He insists that his own government is perfectly 'able and willing' to try the perpetrators itself, and that the international court therefore has no jurisdiction. In 2005 Sudan set up a special criminal court to deal with human-rights crimes in Darfur; 14 people are now in prison awaiting trial. But after investigators visited the suspects in Khartoum earlier this month, Mr Moreno-Ocampo remains convinced that there will be no duplication with the ICC’s own proceedings. He is after the big fish, not the small fry."