More Misery for Sudan: Indictment as empty moral gesture.

Imagine a legal system that indicts a mass murderer but refuses to put a halt to the crimes for which he has been indicted. That sums up the arrest warrant issued this week by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for the slaughter in Darfur.
George Clooney and the rest of the help-Darfur community may feel good about bringing "justice" to Bashir. But the indictment is an empty moral gesture. The practical effect will be to increase the suffering of Darfurians. Sudan moved to kick out 10 foreign aid agencies hours after the warrant was issued. These groups assist some 2.7 million Darfur refugees and help in the reconstruction of south Sudan, where Khartoum recently ended a two-decade-long campaign against Christians and animists. Three more aid groups were expelled yesterday.
Far from putting pressure on Mr. Bashir to step down, as proponents of the ICC warrant claim, the indictment will only harden his resolve to stay. Since no rapid U.N. reaction force to arrest him is on the horizon, cutting a deal with Mr. Bashir and offering him some sort of exile and immunity from prosecution is probably the most promising way to stop Khartoum's war against its own people.
The indictment has now made such a deal more difficult, if not impossible. Under the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, the Security Council can suspend prosecution for only one year. Even though a deferral could be continuously renewed, Mr. Bashir is too smart to rely on such a promise to leave office.
If the Security Council was serious about removing Mr. Bashir, it could invoke its responsibilities for international peace and security -- which arguably supersede the Rome Statute -- to override the ICC's indictment. Yet the U.N. lacks the political will to do so. This is in keeping with its longstanding abandonment of responsibility on Darfur. For years the Security Council regularly emasculated U.S. sanction proposals, preferring instead to stand by as 300,000 Darfurians were killed and millions made refugees.
Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo assured reporters in The Hague Wednesday that Mr. Bashir will face "justice" just as Slobodan Milosevic did. But the Serbian dictator's trial took place only after NATO had put an end to his ethnic-cleansing campaign, and after a regime change in Belgrade. The new Serbian prime minister had Milosevic arrested and sent to The Hague. The Sudanese leader can avoid a trial simply by staying comfortably at home or visiting only those countries, such as China, that won't arrest him.
The Obama Administration welcomed the ICC indictment as a "helpful step." It reportedly is considering re-signing the ICC, in what would be a reversal of President Bush's reversal of President Clinton's signature. Mr. Bush feared the prosecution of U.S. officials and soldiers in a politicized court. The fact that the ICC in its indictment of Mr. Bashir is going after a real war criminal doesn't rule out that the court -- answerable to no one -- may still be misused for political agendas. Mr. Ocampo told the Times of London last month that he's exploring whether the court could follow Palestinian complaints and prosecute Israeli commanders over alleged war crimes in Gaza.
We'd like to see Mr. Bashir and his henchmen stand trial for their crimes. Even more, we'd like those crimes to stop. But the ICC's indictment serves neither justice nor the Darfurians.

The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629943823446641.html