Word: moreno
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...Moreno-Ocampo tells it, his pursuit of al-Bashir over the past three years has come in the face of diplomatic obstruction and political accommodation. It was, in his eyes, predictable that the Sudanese would withhold visas, deny access to crime scenes and establish bogus trials in an effort to obviate the need for the ICC. But what he found surprising and dispiriting was that high-ranking international diplomats ignored, and even seemed to discourage, his efforts. The U.N. instead tried to negotiate the deployment of additional peacekeepers to Darfur as a solution to the crisis. But Sudan rejected...
Back in 2005, when the notion of "regime change" was still in fashion, Luis Moreno-Ocampo recalls that Western countries pressed him to charge President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan with genocide in the country's Darfur region. Three years later, on July 14, Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), did just that. But by then diplomats were up in arms, as it sank in that Moreno-Ocampo actually meant to go through with it. In private meetings and public statements, they told Moreno-Ocampo that he would be responsible for a bloodbath. "My answer...
...Moreno-Ocampo's "arsonists" was Ahmed Haroun, who in 2003 and 2004, as Sudan's Minister of the Interior, allegedly organized the janjaweed militia to murder and destroy villages in Darfur. In February 2007, Moreno-Ocampo indicted Haroun and one of his henchmen, Ali Koshayb, a janjaweed leader. The indictment threw the Sudanese into a panic, Moreno-Ocampo says, and they dispatched an ambassador with a question: "Suppose Haroun comes to the Hague and says he was only following instruction - do you have to investigate the person who gave the instructions?" Moreno-Ocampo believes the inquiry was about President...
...Moreno-Ocampo expected diplomats to exploit Sudan's panic as a negotiating tool. Instead, he says, the U.N. and the U.S. tried to assuage al-Bashir and his men, telling the Khartoum government, "Don't worry about the prosecutor. Just accept the peacekeepers and nothing will happen." Moreno-Ocampo says the big powers feared that the ICC's obsession with Darfur would get in the way of a peace deal between the politically dominant north and the oil-rich south that ended two decades of civil war in Sudan. The Sudanese took their cue and decided to reject notification...
...Moreno-Ocampo was desperate to get the warrants delivered. Finally, around May 2007, he solicited the help of an Arab ambassador who came up with a face-saving solution for the Sudanese government in this diplomatic game of tag. Khartoum officials received a DHL envelope with the warrants, signed the receipt and returned it unopened. Haroun has still not been taken into custody...