The crisis in Darfur no longer remains a simple problem of evil. It has now turned into a question of pragmatism. On July 14, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court asked for an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan, based on referrals from the United Nations security council. Mr al-Bashir is accused of turning a blind eye to the escalating war crimes in Darfur, where he “masterminded and implemented” an ethnic cleansing of three African tribes in 2003, using the State-sponsored Arab militia, Janjaweed. This campaign of genocide has killed thousands and forced 2.5 million Africans into refugee camps. Already, Mr al-Bashir has flouted the calls made by the ICC asking for the surrender of the two main architects of his reign of terror: Ahmed Haroun, who, ironically, is the minister for humanitarian affairs, and Ali Kushayb, the Janjaweed chief. His reasoning, however perverse, goes as follows: Sudan, like Russia and the United States of America, is not a party to the court, and hence is not obliged to accept the legitimacy of the ICC.

Sudan’s denial of the ICC is not the only reason why the court would find it difficult to take any action against Mr al-Bashir. An indictment might push the president, who is said to be a sensitive soul, to fly into a rage and halt UN aid, on which one in every three inhabitant of Darfur is dependent. Janjaweed has been supplied with state-of-the-art weapons to fire at the UN-African Union peacekeeping force. The indictment could also affect the 2009 elections, putting millions at the receiving end of the president’s wounded ego. If the ICC ruling is passed, its impact would go beyond Sudan’s national interests. It would widen the scope of international law, giving the ICC a lever to intervene in the sovereignty of free nations. After successive endeavours by the US to civilize Afghanistan and Iraq, attempts to legalize external intervention, ignoring local expediencies, could prove dangerous. Although the indictment of former presidents, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia, did end two corrupt regimes, the ICC would have to bring an impartial standard of justice to bear upon the entire Western world for Sudan to become a landmark.