THE HAGUE: Longtime fugitive militiaman Ali Kushayb has turned himself in to the International Criminal Court, where he is facing war crimes charges for his role in Sudan’s Darfur conflict, the ICC announced Tuesday.
Kushayb, around 63, also known as Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, is wanted on 50 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between 2002-2004 in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
“Ali Kushayb is in the custody of the ICC after surrendering himself voluntarily in the Central African Republic on account of an ICC arrest warrant issued on 27 April 2007,” the Hague-based court said in a statement.
ICC prosecutors say Kushayb was a senior commander in the notorious Janjaweed militia during the fighting, which erupted in 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against Khartoum’s then Arab-dominated government, lead by the now-ousted Omar Al-Bashir.
The rebels say they suffered racial discrimination, marginalization and exclusion in one of the country’s poorest regions.
But Khartoum responded by unleashing the Janjaweed, a group of mostly Arab raiding nomads, recruited and armed to create a militia of gunmen who often mounted horses or camels.
They have been accused of applying a scorched earth policy against ethnic groups suspected of supporting the rebels, raping, killing, looting and burning villages.
Their terror campaign saw the ICC issue arrest warrants against Kushayb in 2007 and Bashir in 2009 and 2010.
About 300,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in the conflict, the United Nations says.
Thousands of peacekeeping troops from a joint UN-African Union mission were deployed in 2007 to curb the conflict, but their numbers have been gradually reduced since mid-2018 as the conflict has subsided.
An independent tribunal, the ICC was set up in 2002 to deal with the world’s worst crimes which also includes genocide.
Darfur war crimes fugitive Ali Kushayb in ICC custody: court
https://arab.news/9tcw7
Darfur war crimes fugitive Ali Kushayb in ICC custody: court
- Kushayb is charged with 50 crimes against humanity and war crimes
- He surrendered to authorities in a remote corner of northern Central African Republic
Palestinian NGO condemns Israeli act of ‘revenge’ after prisoner abuse video
- A Palestinian NGO has denounced what it called an Israeli act of revenge after a video showed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir overseeing the abuse of detainees in a military prison
RAMALLAH: A Palestinian NGO has denounced what it called an Israeli act of revenge after a video showed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir overseeing the abuse of detainees in a military prison.
Just days before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Ben Gvir held a tour of Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s Channel 7 reported.
In footage filmed on Friday and broadcast by the channel, around 20 police officers are seen storming a hallway leading to prison cells, brandishing their weapons and firing stun grenades.
They then pull five detainees from their cells, their hands tied behind their backs, forcing them face-down onto the floor.
The operation took place as a bill proposing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism awaited a final vote in the Israeli parliament.
“This is all part of ongoing displays meant to take revenge on Palestinian detainees,” Abdallah al?Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, told AFP on Saturday.
“Everything Ben Gvir and the far?right government are doing affects not only the Palestinian people and prisoners in detention camps — it also impacts the global legal and human rights system,” he added.
Ben Gvir, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, is considered one of the most hard-line members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“It is simply a source of pride — arriving at a prison like this, a prison for terrorists, the vilest of the vile, seeing them like this,” Ben Gvir said in the video.
“I want one more thing: to execute them — the death penalty for terrorists,” he added.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Saturday said the remarks were “a new war crime and a blatant challenge to international humanitarian law regarding prisoners.”
International rights groups have repeatedly warned of alleged abuse and mistreatment inflicted in Israeli prisons since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
While the death penalty exists for a small number of crimes in Israel, it has become a de facto abolitionist country, with the Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann the last person to be executed in 1962.
