Contact: Loralei Coyle, 202-682-4131, 202-905-6852 cell, lcoyle@ird-renew.org; Radio Interviews: Jeff Walton, jwalton@ird-renew.org; both with The Institute on Religion and Democracy
WASHINGTON, July 14 /Christian Newswire/ -- Today the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, charged Sudan's president with plotting genocide in Darfur. The President, National Islamic Front Leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, is directly blamed for the killing of thousands of people and the flight of millions of refugees.
Moreno-Ocampo said on top of the thousands killed by Sudan's armed forces and the militia they support, 2.5 million others were subjected to a campaign of "rape, hunger and fear" in refugee camps where he said genocide continued "under our eyes."
"The decision to start the genocide was taken by Bashir personally," he told a news conference reported on by Reuters. "Bashir is executing this genocide without gas chambers, without bullets, without machetes. It is genocide by attrition."
IRD Director of Religious Liberty Programs Faith J.H. McDonnell commented,
"We are grateful for Luis Moreno-Ocampo's courage and moral clarity. The world has treated the regime in Khartoum and the victims of its genocidal jihad with moral equivalence for too long. Even advocates for Darfur have at times been nebulous about the source of genocide. At last the ICC's Chief Prosecutor has, in no uncertain terms, laid the blame at the feet where it belongs.
"Moreno-Ocampo has made a very clear case, charging that Bashir 'masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy the three main ethnic groups in Darfur, the Fur, the Masalit, and the Zaghawa.'
"We wish that Bashir would be held responsible for the (undeclared) genocide perpetrated in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountain region, as well. If Moreno-Ocampo had been investigating genocide and crimes against humanity in that region during the years in which over two million people were killed and over five million displaced, he would have reached similar conclusions. Even now, Bashir's regime targets the Beja in eastern Sudan and the Nubians in the north.
"When a thug regime gets away with one genocide, what is to stop the regime from continuing the pattern? We hope that being called out before the nations of the world by the ICC will help to put an end to Bashir's decades of atrocities. Indictment will also make it perfectly clear to the nations of the EU and others that they are doing business with a war criminal."
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