African leaders denounce international court

SIRTE, Libya — After bitter wrangling, Africa’s leaders agreed Friday to denounce the International Criminal Court and refuse to extradite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

The decision at the African Union summit says AU members “shall not cooperate” with the court in The Hague “in the arrest and transfer of President Omar al-Bashir of the Sudan to the ICC.”

Sudan welcomed the move, and other Africans said it was a signal to the West that it shouldn’t impose its ways on Africa. A human rights group said the decision was a gift to a dictator.

The 13th AU summit of heads of state, which concluded Friday in Sirte, Libya, also “expresses its preoccupation about the behavior of the ICC prosecutor” Luis Moreno Ocampo, whom African officials describe as too hard on Africans. The ICC has launched investigations into four cases since it was created seven years ago — all of them in Africa.

Sudan rejoiced at the AU’s rebuttal of the ICC. “It’s the confirmation of what we always said: The indictment is a political thing, not a legal thing,” Foreign Minister El Samany El Wasila told The Associated Press just after the decision was made public.

El Wasila declined to comment on whether al-Bashir would now feel free to travel to the 30 African countries that are party to the ICC. “We don’t even want to think about it anymore,” he said of the international court.

Some AU leaders said there was strong opposition to the summit’s decision. Benin Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Ehouzou said that Sudan’s neighbor and antagonist, Chad, objected to the wording.

Heads of state at AU summits reach their decisions behind closed doors and by consensus, not vote, and it was not clear how the new measure was approved.

“Consensus usually means unanimity, but in this case there was some dissent,” said Ehouzou, stating objections by Chad or others would likely be added as caveats at a later date in the final summit declaration.

Prime Minister Bernard Makuza of Rwanda conceded the resolution had been “a hot spot” in the leaders’ three-day summit, but that countries finally approved the Libyan-led decision because they don’t feel fairly treated by the ICC.

“We’re not promoting impunity, but we’re saying that Westerners who don’t understand anything about Africa should stop trying to import their solutions,” Makuza told the AP on the sidelines of the summit.

He and other leaders say the ICC indictment threatens Sudan’s fragile peace process and could create a power vacuum in the country.

The declaration was viewed nonetheless as a powerful blow to prosecuting African officials for atrocities committed on the continent.

The warrant against al-Bashir was issued in March on charges of masterminding violence that led to the death of some 300,000 people in Darfur since 2003.

Reed Brody, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch, said the declaration contradicts the obligations of countries party to the ICC and “basically orders them to flout their legal obligations.”

The resolution is “the result of unprecedented bullying by Libya and puts the AU on the side of a dictator accused of mass murder, rather than on the side of his victims,” he said.

The other major decision reached at the summit was a proposal to transform the African Union’s executive body, the commission, into an “authority” with greatly extended powers.

The push toward a federal government for the whole continent was driven by Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, who stormed out of a room on Thursday when his proposal wasn’t approved and later warned that nobody could go to bed before a final decision was accepted.

The document agreed upon after a 15-hour meeting ending early Friday would establish the new authority with coordinated powers over defense, diplomacy and international trade. But the changes must still be written into the AU’s constitution and approved by the parliaments of its 53 members.

Gadhafi hailed the achievement. “I am sure the founding fathers of Africa are smiling in their graves today,” he said his closing speech.