Arab leaders snub al-Bashir warrant

30/03/2009| IslamWeb

Arab Leaders meeting in Doha, the Qatari capital, have rejected an international arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president accused of "war crimes" in Darfur.

In a draft communiqué issued at the end of the first day of the 21st Arab League summit on Monday, the leaders said they considered the warrant to be in violation of the Vienna agreement of 1961.

It stated that any efforts to address the situation in Darfur would need an agreement between all Sudanese factions, rather the trial of the president.

Ibrahim al-Faqir, the Sudanese ambassador in Doha, told Al Jazeera: "We are very pleased at the Arab support to President al-Bashir and we are hopeful to have the solidarity with the president in the final statement.

'Fight to the end'

"We are also hopeful that no Arab president will be let down. We are going to fight until the end."

Al-Bashir has been accused by the International Criminal Court in The Hague of war crimes in the country's western region of Darfur.

The communiqué also set conditions for the future direction of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

"They say that the Arab Peace Initiative is still there but it won't be there for long," Al Jazeera's Amr el-Kahky, reporting from the summit, said.

Prosecution sought

He said they set two conditions for the future of peace talks: that Israel halts settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and agrees to a time limit to fulfill its obligations towards peace.

The summit statement said Arab leaders had agreed to establish a legal committee to seek to prosecute Israeli leaders over Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza which ended in January, leaving more than 1,300 Palestinians dead.

"The communiqué condemns Israeli practices, is skeptical of its future policies, but at the same time commends the Obama administration on some of its declarations and the European Union on some of its steps," Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said.

 "In terms of their own peace initiative the language has not been as strong as expected ... it says they will still try to review it ... and try to lobby the international quartet ... about making sure that Israel would adopt it."

Earlier Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president, said that, while the Arab Peace Initiative was still on the table, the new incoming Israeli government under Benyamin Netanyahu was "not a peace partner".

"Israel sees its future in removing the Palestinians to an alternative homeland," he said. "Israeli society is becoming more extremist and aggressive."

Al Jazeera's Ahmed Janabi, reporting from the summit, said: "Arab leaders have stressed in their final statement that peace will not be achieved unless the Israeli occupation is gone from all occupied Arab lands including Syrian Golan and Palestinian West Bank."

Al-Bashir attended the summit in defiance of the warrant issued by ICC, but Qatar is not obliged to arrest al-Bashir as it is not a signatory to the ICC.

'Blind eye'

Al-Bashir criticized the UN Security Council, the body that mandated the ICC prosecutor to investigate the situation in Darfur, on Monday saying that its credibility was at stake with 'some countries having hegemony".

He called it an "undemocratic institution that ... applies double standards, targeted the weak and gave a blind eye to the criminals".

PHOTO CAPTION

Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir meets his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad (R) during the opening session of an Arab summit in Doha March 30, 2009.

Al-Jazeera