Omar Hassan al-Bashir

On June 30, 1989, Lieut. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a military leader in Sudan, seized power in a bloodless coup backed by Islamists. He assumed the presidency in 1993.

He has been accused of genocide by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and has been vilified throughout the world as an incorrigible mass murderer bent on slaughtering his own people in the conflict-riddled region of Darfur.

He has stayed in power, appealing to national pride and causing deep-seated fears that the nation could tumble into Somalia-like chaos if he were removed.

In February 2009, judges at the International Criminal Court approved a warrant for his arrest. According to court lawyers and diplomats, the judges rejected diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in Darfur.

The criminal court judges took more than seven months to examine the evidence on Mr. Bashir before charging him, on March 4, 2009, with five counts of crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape. The two counts of war crimes were for attacks against a civilian population and for pillaging. In their statement, the judges said the court did not recognize immunity for a head of state and called for the cooperation of all countries - not just the 108 nations that are members of the court - to bring Mr. Bashir to justice.

The question of whether genocide was being committed in Darfur has been divisive, and was so among the judges, who said 2-to-1 that the prosecutor had not provided sufficient evidence of the government's intent, the key issue in determining genocide. The Bush administration and other governments, as well as some human rights activists, have called the attacks on civilians government's actions genocide. The United Nations has stopped short of doing so.

It is the first time the court has sought to detain a sitting head of state, and it could further complicate the tense, international debate over how to solve the Darfur crisis.

In announcing his request for a warrant, the prosecutor in the case, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said that Mr. Bashir had "masterminded and implemented" a plan to destroy three main ethnic groups in Darfur, the Fur, the Masalit and the Zaghawa. The prosecutor said that the president, responding to attacks by rebel groups seeking greater autonomy, had used government soldiers and Arab militias and had "purposefully targeted civilians" belonging to these groups, killing 35,000 people "outright" in attacks on towns and villages.

Although there has been sporadic fighting in Darfur for decades, the conflict significantly intensified in 2003, when the rebel groups attacked Sudanese forces. The Arab-led government responded with a ferocious counterinsurgency campaign, which the prosecutor called a genocidal strategy against Darfur's black African ethnic groups.

The Sudanese forces and government-sponsored militias swept the countryside. They burned down villages, raped countless women and drove hundreds of thousands of people off their land, all part of an effort to put down the rebellion. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo has accused Mr. Bashir of being the mastermind of this strategy, the one with "absolute control."

There is broad concern that removing Mr. Bashir from power could threaten a landmark peace treaty between the Sudanese government and other rebels in the southern part of the country. The treaty was signed in 2005 to end a civil war in which 2.2 million people died, far more than in Darfur.

Source: New York Times