The government of Sudan is currently lobbying all famous and outspoken African leaders to assist in voicing the need to stall the indictments by the International Court of Justice (ICC) against its President, Omar al Bashir.

The Prosecutor of the ICC filed charges against Bashir on July 14 for crimes against humanity. Sudan immediately began fighting the move and started lobbying, and it was for this reason that Bashir’s Special Envoy, Bona Malwal, came to Rwanda.

Malwal arrived in the country last Friday to deliver a special message to President Paul Kagame from his Sudanese counterpart.

Sudan appealed to Rwanda to assist the country in its quest to halt the recent threats to indict Bashir.

He delivered the message through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rosemary Museminari, and also addressed the media about the current situation in Sudan particularly in the war-torn Darfur region.

Highlighting the hardships faced by Darfur currently, Malwal said that unlike Rwanda which has only three ethnic groups sharing one language, Darfur has 33 ethnic groups, of which some are directly involved in the violence and are backed by western countries. 

"The government of Sudan is hungry for peace and that is why we support the existence of peacekeepers in Darfur; Darfur is a global problem,” said Malwal. He took the opportunity to criticise the indictment of President Bashir as an insult to Africa and called on the Security Council of the African Union (AU), of which Rwanda is a member, to persistently oppose the indictment.

The recently concluded AU Security Council which represents all the 53 African countries issued a statement in which they said that the search for justice should be pursued in a way that does not impede or jeopardise efforts aimed at promoting lasting peace.

In a related development, Malwal questioned the credibility of the ICC saying that it was improper to indict a sitting president.

Malwal was accompanied by several Sudanese government officials and held lengthy talks with Minister Museminari at the Foreign Affairs ministry. Museminari said that Rwanda expressed its position in the recent AU Security Council meeting held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

She said that in her talks with the Sudanese official, Malwal expressed his worries that if the indictments are put in force, they might affect the operations of peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID). Rwanda has some 2,600 peacekeepers in the mission.

Malwal’s visit to Kigali came a day after President Kagame hit hard at the ICC during his monthly press conference held last Thursday at his office.

He said that Rwanda ‘will not be party to this new type of colonialism, slavery and imperialism.’

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