Columnists
Courting disaster
Paul Vallely
Thin people look more evil than fat ones, to judge by Radovan Karadzic at any rate. There was a corpulent complacency about his appearance in the days when he was creating the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic and preaching race hatred against the Muslim Serbs whom he called 'the Turks'. His soft features belied the virulence of the rabid nationalism which started a war in which tens of thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes. Similarly when he was arrested recently in Belgrade he did not look, with his Gandalf beard and his roadie's ponytail, much like a homicidal maniac.
But then he appeared in court in The Hague and his bearded had been removed, and hair fastidiously quaffed, to reveal features that were chiselled and severe. Here was a face that fitted the headlines about 'The Butcher of Bosnia', for all those who felt that a trial was superfluous. Thin-lipped, he listened to the indictment which charged him with war crimes, complicity in genocide, extermination, murder, wilful killing, persecution, deportation, taking of hostages and other inhumane acts. Justice, onlookers felt, was about to be done.
Not long before that an indictment in similar terms had been framed against another politician, Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan. He, too, was charged with genocide, against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups in Dafur on the far western reaches of his country. But this was different because he was not charged after the event, in defeat, but as the first sitting head of state to be arraigned by International Criminal Court. Many rejoiced as they did when Karadzic was arrested. In the last five years over quarter of a million civilians have been killed and several million people made homeless in Darfur. The complicity of al-Bashir's government had been attested by virtually everyone who has been to the remote province.
And yet there is a difference between the two indictments. In the case of Karadzic his time of serious political influence was over. He is called to account at this point because the Serbian authorities, who were once his allies, have chosen to disown him. But al-Bashir is still in charge in Sudan and continues to blight Darfur. Issuing international warrants for his arrest may make Western governments feel better about their impotence over the sweeping massacres in the region but it doesn't do much to end the dying there.
Indeed there are those who argue it may make things worse, making Sudan more ready to hamper the work of UN peacekeeping troops and the aid workers feeding the millions living in displacement camps there - and making the Darfuri rebels even less likely to negotiate, provoking new outbreaks of violence from them. His status as a war crimes suspect seems only to have strengthened al-Bashir in his intransigence; he appeared in public the day after the indictment, dancing and punching the air in delight, shouting 'God is Great'. It has even won him some sympathy from a few fellow African leaders who accuse the West of selective morality.
The real danger is that things could yet get even worse in Darfur, drawing Sudan into a mire like that of Somalia, Rwanda before the genocide or the Congo - where those determined to keep power at all cost oversaw a war of widespread atrocities in which 5.4 million people were killed or died from disease and starvation. What would the advocates of the 'something must be done' school of foreign policy have to say if that happened? When something must be done it has to be the right thing.
What did for Karadzic in the end was something far less dramatic than gestures of moral indignation. The Bosnian Serb leader could not have been on the run for 13 years without the protection or connivance of the Serbian authorities. For the first two years he moved around freely in the region, openly crossing NATO and police checkpoints. He then went into hiding in an area filled with natural supporters - just last month a poll there showed that only 17 per cent of locals thought he was a criminal; 33 per cent said he was a hero and 42 per cent say he is neither. Even today one in three Serbs still vote for parties which voice support for Karadzic and hold that the international court in The Hague is biased against Serbs. Karadzic was protected by his people, and even perhaps, as he claimed in court, by a secret deal with the USA which promised he would not be pursued so long as he did not endanger the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war.
No, what did for Karadzic was that the new Serbian government inherited a busted economy and saw the only way forward as membership of the European Union to give Serbia open access to a huge new market. The price, they were told, was turning in Karadzic and his ilk.
To a tyrant danger comes, most often, not from his enemies but from those closest to him. In Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is now talking to Morgan Tsvangirai, not because the West harried him but because his henchmen in his inner circle told him to, after Thabo Mkebi let them know that the only way to save themselves was to persuade the Old Man to go.
The way to get rid of Omar al-Bashir is to persuade or provoke more moderate elements in the Khartoum regime to give him the push, which is what happened at the end of the last military regime in Sudan, that of General Suwar al Dahab in 1985. The West would do well to apply the same techniques in Khartoum that they exercised in Serbia. There are packages of aid and investment incentives which could apply the same pressure and realpolitik assurances which could be given to those around, but at one remove from, the Sudanese president. When he has been ousted there will be time enough to arraign him before the International Criminal Court.
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