Prosecutor accuses Sudanese state of Darfur crimes

The International Criminal Court prosecutor said on Thursday he would seek new indictments next month against top officials, accusing Sudan's "entire state apparatus" of involvement in crimes in Darfur.

Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo's address to the U.N. Security Council coincided with a visit by envoys to Darfur, scene of one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Khartoum has accused Moreno Ocampo of wrecking prospects for peace in Darfur, and Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir told a visiting U.N. Security Council delegation that certain groups were exploiting the crisis for their own ends.

Judges at the ICC, set up in 2002 in The Hague as the world's first permanent court to try individuals for war crimes, issued arrest warrants for two Sudanese suspects in April last year, but Khartoum has refused to hand them over.

Moreno Ocampo said Sudan was not cooperating with the ICC and was taking no action of its own against the two, government minister Ahmad Harun and militia commander Ali Kushayb.

Instead, he said, Sudanese officials had waged an "organized campaign ... to attack civilians" in Darfur.

International experts say at least 200,000 people have died there and 2.5 million been displaced since a rebellion erupted in 2003. Khartoum says 10,000 people have been killed.

"The evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus," Moreno Ocampo said.

The prosecutor said that in July he would present ICC judges with evidence against those who were "most responsible for the crimes described." He gave no names.

"OVER HIS DEAD BODY"

Sudan's U.N. ambassador on Wednesday said Moreno Ocampo was "destroying the peace process" for Darfur, where the United Nations and African Union are deploying peacekeepers.

Bashir, in a speech to a visiting U.N. Security Council delegation in Khartoum on Thursday, did not mention the ICC by name but complained of a "vicious campaign" against Sudan.

"My country has been subjected to an unfair and ill-intentioned campaign from some quarters that are bent on exploiting the crisis in Darfur to serve their agendas and designs," he said in Khartoum.

In a closed-door question-and-answer session with the council, Bashir said Sudan would cooperate with the ICC "over his dead body", a source inside the meeting said afterwards.

French ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert told reporters after the meeting that Paris might back "further steps" if Sudan refused to cooperate with the ICC.

UN Darfur special envoy Jan Eliasson and AU envoy Salim Ahmed Salim said the Darfur conflict could escalate if a peace deal between the Khartoum government and the South collapsed.

"In the absence of realistic negotiations (on Darfur) within a very short period of time on substantive issues, we have to make sure now that this conflict does not escalate. It is dangerous enough," Eliasson told reporters in Geneva.

Sudan's 2005 peace agreement ended a two-decade civil war between the Khartoum government in the mainly Muslim North and rebels in the largely Christian South.

British U.N. ambassador John Sawers told reporters the council raised in the meeting with Bashir the need to improve access by aid workers to hungry people in Darfur as well as tension between the north and south after clashes in the oil-rich Abyei region.

Sudan has been under pressure to allow quicker deployment of the peacekeeping force, which is to reach 26,000 troops and police at full strength. There are still only around 9,000 peacekeepers in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France.

On Thursday, the envoys visited North Darfur state, where the peacekeepers are based, met local elders and spoke with refugees at a camp for internally displaced people.

Staff from the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said they might have to cut rations for displaced people for the second time in two months because of worsening insecurity. The WFP halved deliveries of emergency food from May.

Fatima, a 35-year-old mother of eight children who has been at Zamzam Camp for four years, held up a sign calling for an end to the war. Some people in the camp begged reporters for food.