Monday, March 30, 2009

ICC CRITICISM


Arab League delegates are likely to be united in their condemnation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant.
Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, has arrived in Qatar on the eve of an Arab League summit, defying an arrest warrant issued against him for alleged war crimes in Darfur.
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst said: "The West generally tends to underestimate how much their interference in the Arab world tends to backfire to the advantage of leaders who then use it for populist nationalist sentiment in order to gather support for themselves. As a result, popular upheaval against al-Bashir is certainly not working."
Luis Moreno OCampo, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, told Al Jazeera: "In May, according to a report Sudan agreed with, one million people will have no food or water in Sudan. "I understand that the Arab League is like a family, but I hope they tell their brothers to stop the crimes.
"I think it’s a huge responsibility for the Arab leaders to solve these problems in Sudan now."
Arab governments have also been struggling to respond to Iran's growing political clout, which has greatly increased since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia say that Iran is key to the strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories - groups which refuse to renounce armed action in the historic Arab conflict with Israel.
"The Doha summit is still a battleground between the emerging de facto alliance between Qatar, Syria and Iran on one side, and the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians on the other," Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi opposition figure, said.
Iran and Syria back the populist view in the Arab world that the policies of Hezbollah and Hamas are legitimate responses to Israel, which rejects returning Arab lands it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Courtesy: Al Jazeera

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