American evangelist and relief organisation head Franklin Graham says he would prefer it if the Sudanese president – who is facing an international arrest for crimes against humanity – remained in power.
Despite his egregious involvement in the Darfur genocide and attacks on Southern Sudanese, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has displayed some willingness to cooperate and work towards peace, Graham argues in his opinion piece posted in the New York Times on Tuesday.
During their three face-to-face meetings, Graham recalled he had confronted Bashir about attacks on Sudanese civilians and humanitarian relief agencies. The Sudanese president “has demonstrated that he is able to cooperate”, Graham writes, noting that “on several occasions he has complied with my requests”.
In 2001, Graham recalls, a hospital operated by his relief organisation Samaritan’s Purse in southern Sudan was bombed nine times by Bashir’s forces. After Graham confronted Bashir about the hospital bombings during their first meeting in 2003, the attacks subsequently stopped.
“Mr Bashir is rightly accused of great cruelty and destruction,” Graham writes. “But I have been able to deal with him.”
The op-ed was posted just one day before the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Bashir for the violence in Darfur. Bashir is charged with seven counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape, according to CNN.
Violence broke out in the western region of Darfur five years ago when ethnically African Darfurians rebelled against the central Arab-dominated Khartoum government. The government, in turn, is accused of unleashing Arab nomads called janjaweed militias on Darfur civilians, resulting in more than 200,000 deaths and the displacement of 2.5 million civilians since 2003.
News of the arrest warrant for Bashir have been met with cheers from human rights groups that have long sought for greater international intervention regarding the Darfur genocide.
Save Darfur Coalition president Jerry Fowler commended the ICC for issuing the arrest warrant and called the act a “game changing moment”.
“It will now be much harder for Sudan's allies in the UN Security Council, as well as other leaders of Sudan's National Congress Party, to stand arm in arm with a wanted war criminal,” Fowler said in a statement on Wednesday.
Fowler urged the Obama administration to quickly appoint a full-time US envoy for peace in Sudan in the wake of the arrest warrant to help facilitate the peace process.
