By John Owur | Aidsmap

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The roll-out of antiretroviral therapy has led to a decline of about 50% in adult AIDS deaths in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, over a period of five years, according the findings of a study published in the February 20th edition of the journal AIDS.

The effectiveness of antiretroviral roll-out in sub-Saharan Africa has been widely reported as encouraging despite persistent concerns about universal access and adherence. However, there are still only limited data on its effects at a population level on deaths.

In Ethiopia, antiretroviral treatment was made freely available in public hospitals from October 2005. The investigators carried out the current study to find out what effect the availability of antiretroviral treatment had had on AIDS-related mortality.

The researchers used data from burial surveillance records and ‘verbal autopsy’ interviews. Burial surveillance was implemented in all Addis Ababa cemeteries in 2001 and records about 20,000 deaths per year. The surveillance is undertaken by cemetery clerks who receive regular training. They record a lay report of the cause of death as narrated by close relatives or friends of the deceased and other demographic details.

Verbal autopsies are post-mortem interviews conducted by researchers with close relatives or caretakers, about the signs and symptoms they witnessed during the terminal illness of the deceased. Causes of death described in the interviews were then confirmed through physicians’ review.

Two different physicians reviewed the verbal autopsies to assign cause of death to the described symptoms. Whenever the assigned cause of death by two physicians did not match, a third physician was used to review the verbal autopsy questionnaire. The data used in the current study were derived from 413 cases involving individuals aged 20 to 64 years. Physicians assigned causes of death, classified as either AIDS or non-AIDS deaths.

Epidemiological modelling was used by the investigators to determine mortality trends in the study population.

The investigators then compared projected deaths with observed numbers from burial surveillance.

To determine possible averted AIDS-related deaths, the investigators compared the estimated with the implied numbers of AIDS deaths in population projections. They estimated HIV prevalence using UNAIDS estimation and projections package (EPP 2007).

Results showed that the ratio of observed over projected deaths in adults peaked in 2001. However, between 2001 and 2005 the ratios dropped by about 11% (from 1.92 to 1.71) for women and 20% for men (from 1.80 to 1.44).This was a period when patients part-paid for treatment. The researchers attributed this average AIDS mortality drop of about 15% to treatment effect and noted that the drop was higher in men than women partly because of sex imbalances in access to healthcare financing.

The results further showed that between 2005 and 2007, there was a decline of about 25% for women (from 1.71 to 1.28) and 21% for men (from 1.44 to 1.13). The investigators attributed this drop of over 40% to free treatment, suggesting that treatment cost is an important factor in the decline of AIDS deaths.

To confirm whether the trends noted above resulted from reduced AIDS mortality, the investigators turned to the findings from the lay reports. They found a decline from 8467 deaths in 2001 to 4230 in 2007 (about 50%). The study further found that the decline was greater between 2005 and 2007 when treatment was free.

The researchers noted that the decline observed took place during a period when mortality was supposed to be very high. HIV infections in Ethiopia peaked in the late 1990s, demonstrating the impact of treatment. Assuming that the burial surveillance coverage was 85%, the scientists estimated a reduction of about 56% in AIDS deaths by 2007.

The 56% decline compared favourably with findings from São Paulo in Brazil, which reported a decline in AIDS deaths of about 65% between 1995 and 2002, noted the investigators. They further compared their findings to a New York study which showed a higher decline (63% in two years).

The researchers said that their findings demonstrate the effectiveness of treatment coverage on averting deaths in early phases of HIV care (long-term impact is not yet known). For Ethiopia and similar settings, the researchers said that the immediate worry is about short-term mortality because treatment coverage is still at its infancy (only 2% of adult patients are on second-line regimens in Addis Ababa).

The researchers also noted that their findings raise questions about whether and how the decline in mortality can be sustained, and whether improvements in access to antiretrovirals alone can achieve this goal. More proactive attempts to diagnose people earlier and initiate treatment earlier may be necessary in order to reduce death rates further, given the continued high risk of death during the first year of antiretroviral treatment in those who start treatment at lower CD4 cell counts in sub-Saharan Africa.

The investigators acknowledged that, even though their study was based on epidemiological models, model-based and observational estimates can be very different. The findings might have been limited further by shortcomings of burial surveillance such as under-reporting, said the scientists.

However, for adaptability to similar settings, the investigators noted that burial surveillance is logistically simple to implement because it uses existing structures and is usable in settings with no population-based data.

Reference: Reniers G et al. Steep decline in population-level AIDS mortality following the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. AIDS, 23:511-518, 2009.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PANA) – The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Ethiopia has lambasted the human rights report issued by the US State Department on Ethiopia. In a statement released here Wednesday by the ministry, the Ethiopian government said the report was “a deliberately Jaundiced view about Ethiopia’s progress on human hights”.

This is the second recent statement by the ministry criticizing such reports.

The Ethiopian dictatorial regime has similarly mocked at accusations of the Human Rights Watch late last year after the rights group accused Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Human rights watchdog said late last year that Ethiopian troops burnt down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaig n against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007.

Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.

Ethiopia has now labeled the new report a carbon copy of the report by the HRW, describing its approach very similar to that of Human Rights Watch.

According to the report, the report is bizarre “and, the methodology appears equally flawed”.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour, in its 2008 country reports on Human Rights Practices issued on 27 February, accused Ethiopia of various human rights violations.

Few of the human rights abuses the Bureau highlighted include limitations on citizens’ right to change their government in local and by-elections; unlawful killings, torture, beating, abuse, and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, usually with impunity; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention, particularly of suspected sympathizers or members of opposition or insurgent groups.

The ministry expressed government’s dismay over the US State Department’s continued reports of allegations from opposition groups, which, it said, kept on misre presenting the human rights situation in Ethiopia.

“The report was no more than a collection of unsubstantiated accusations from groups seeking to undermine Ethiopia’s process of democratization,” read the statement.

Addis Ababa – 05/03/2009

SANA’A (SABA) – Yemeni police arrested 112 immigrants, among of them 15 women, who arrived to Khanfer coastline in Abyan province and Dhubab coastline in Taiz province.

122 Ethiopian emigrants, 76 Somali arrive in Yemen

The security bodies said that 79 Ethiopian emigrants arrived on an unknown ship carrying 150 persons to Khanfer coastline and escaped.

In the meantime the other 33 Ethiopian emigrants arrived to Dhubab coastline and sent them to take the investigation procedures for entering Yemen illegally.

The security bodies reported that 76 Somali refugees among of them 11 women and 5 children, one child passed away, arrived to Hadramout coastline and Dhubab coastline in Taiz province in three separated trips. It gathered them to main camp at Kharaz in Lahj province.

According to the Information Security Center, the number of Somali refugees
came to Yemen on February were 2559 refugees.

The number of African refugees, mostly Somalis, exceeding 800.000 refugees. They put more burden on the country’s fragile economy.

They usually arrive through the sea and sometimes die either as overcrowded boats capsize or as the refugees are enforced by smugglers to swim until they reach far Yemeni coasts.

Fiction that takes us from Ethiopia to the suburbs

‘Cutting for Stone’ By Abraham Verghese (Knopf, 560 pp., $26.95)

Abraham Verghese is a doctor, an accomplished memoirist (My Own Country) and, as he proves in Cutting for Stone, something of a magician as a novelist. This sprawling, 50-year epic begins with a touch of alchemy: the birth of conjoined twins to an Indian nun in an Ethiopian hospital in 1954. The likely father, a British surgeon, flees upon the mother’s death, and the (now separated) baby boys are adopted by a loving Indian couple who run the hospital. Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters — and opening a fascinating window onto the Third World —Cutting for Stone, while not perfect, is an underdog and a winner. Shades of Slumdog Millionaire. — Jocelyn McClurg | USA Today

‘Cutting for Stone’ by Abraham Verghese

Reviewed by ERICA WAGNER | The New York Times

“I will not cut for stone,” runs the text of the Hippocratic oath, “even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.”

Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese’s first novel, “Cutting for Stone,” and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone. Absent in body only: in spirit, Thomas’s disappearance after their birth haunts and drives this book.

Yet until the reader comes across the oath, well into the novel, the title may seem pleasing to the ear but puzzling to the mind: it tries to do too many jobs at once. It neither suggests the book’s action — as, say, “Digging to America” does — nor evokes its mood, as “Bleak House” does. Still, Verghese strives for the empathy of Anne Tyler and the scope of Dickens. If he doesn’t quite manage either, he is to be admired for his ambition.

Verghese is a physician and an already accomplished author. His two nonfiction books, “My Own Country,” about AIDS in rural Tennessee, and “The Tennis Partner,” a moving and honest memoir of a difficult, intimate friendship, are justly celebrated. His commitment to both his professions is admirable: currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But why mention qualifications? What do qualifications matter where fine writing is concerned? Not at all, is the correct answer, and yet qualifications like Verghese’s are tribute, at the very least, to his stalwart effort. This effort is both the making and the unmaking of “Cutting for Stone.”

The plot of this big, dense book is fairly straightforward. Marion and Shiva Stone are born one dramatic afternoon in 1954 in Addis Ababa, the same day their mother — a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise — dies of complications from her hidden pregnancy. The boys are conjoined at the skull, yet separated at birth; they are raised by Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, a forceful woman known as Hema, and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, both immigrants from Madras and both doctors at the hospital where the boys’ natural parents also worked. Missing Hospital, it’s called: “Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like ‘Missing.’ ” They grow up amid the political turmoil of Ethiopia (its actual chronology altered slightly by Verghese to suit his fictional purposes), and in 1979 Marion flees, first to Nairobi and finally to New York, where he qualifies as a surgeon. Shiva, too, goes into medicine, specializing in treating vaginal fistula, for which work he is acclaimed in this very newspaper, a sure sign of his renown. Almost supernaturally close as children, the brothers become more and more distant as the novel progresses; they are dramatically reunited at its end — through the mysterious agency of the long-vanished Thomas Stone.

As a novelist, Verghese looks to models like Salman Rushdie and John Irving: the novel is capacious, not to say baggy, in the way those writers’ novels can be, and it is tinged, albeit lightly, with a sense of magic, though one senses that Verghese in his soul is too much a realist ever to be quite convinced of his own attempts in this department. (The brothers’ being joined — but only briefly — at the head is an example of this slightly half-hearted effort.) Much more forceful are his vivid descriptions of surgery, vivid enough that those with weaker stomachs may find them disturbing. One would, I suppose, be ill advised to use this novel as a textbook for liver transplantation or bowel surgery, but it might almost be possible. The trouble is that for all the author’s passion, this kind of writing periodically stops the book in its tracks: “Hema smiled, as if to say, Very little escapes me, my dear man. And then she was thinking of . . . rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli.” Hema’s mind, as the author then says, is racing: but the reader’s goes into a stall.

The novel is crippled, too, by the use of back story. There is a feeling of Greek drama about the narrative: a lot of the real action happens offstage. We finally learn, toward the end of the novel, what made Thomas Stone the man he is, with all his strengths and deficits, yet by then the tale seems curiously belated and less than fully integrated into the novel. The same is true for the later events in the life of Genet, Marion’s childhood sweetheart, the daughter of his nanny, who joins a band of Eritrean guerrillas but reappears fleetingly in Marion’s life to devastating effect. Verghese’s weakness is the weakness of a writer with too much heart: it’s clear he loves his characters and he just wants to cram in every last fact about them, somehow. Great novels are not built merely on the agglomeration of detail.

This is a first novel that reveals the author’s willingness to show the souls, as well as the bodies, of his characters. In Verghese’s second profession, a great surgeon is called an editor. Here’s hoping that in the future the author finds stronger medicine in that line.

(Erica Wagner is the literary editor of The Times of London and the author, most recently, of the novel “Seizure.”)

‘Cutting for Stone’ by Abraham Verghese

Reviewed by Poornima Apte

More than a decade ago, in 1994, Dr. Abraham Verghese made headlines when he wrote of his struggles as a doctor in a small town in Tennessee, helping his patients fight back the growing AIDS epidemic. His nonfiction book, My Own Country, became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the story of medicine in small town America was one Dr. Verghese brought home beautifully with it. My Own Country was set in Johnson City, Tennessee and Dr. Verghese showed us how American doctors are often loath to practice in small towns like it—leaving the locals to the care of “foreign medical graduates.” Dr. Verghese, an immigrant with South Indian roots, born and brought up in Ethiopia before political unrest forced him to flee, was one such foreign medical graduate.

Now, years later, Dr. Verghese has written his debut fiction novel, Cutting for Stone, and in here, he uses one of fiction’s favorite axioms: Write what you know. The story in Cutting for Stone seems to be modeled after at least a few of Dr. Verghese’s own experiences. Quite like Dr. Verghese, Marion Praise Stone, the novel’s protagonist, is also a doctor with South Indian roots, born and brought up in Ethiopia, who eventually immigrates to the United States in the wake of political unrest. The novel is written in the voice of Marion who narrates a grand tale—one of his birth along with his twin brother, of life growing up in the shadow of a missionary hospital in Ethiopia, of gradually increasing political strife in the country and finally of the life of an expatriate American doctor.

In an interview, Verghese said that his ambition in writing this fiction debut was “to tell a great story, an old-fashioned, truth-telling story.” The scope of Cutting for Stone—set as it is, on three continents—and spanning at least a few decades—is as ambitious as it gets. As the novel opens, Sister Mary Joseph Praise is leaving India (just as the country gains independence) for Ethiopia. She is a nun chosen by her diocese to cater to the dying in Africa. In Missing (an Ethiopian corruption of “Mission”) hospital in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, an unlikely relationship develops between her and the hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone. The product of the relationship is twin boys—Marion and Shiva Praise Stone. The twins are born conjoined at the head and before Sister Praise can receive the proper medical care, she bleeds to death in childbirth. The father, Dr. Stone is so distraught by all these happenings, that he completely walks out of Missing—leaving his twins behind. This huge act of abandonment will stay with Marion till the very end until he finally makes a tentative peace with it.

The twins are adopted by two other doctors at Missing Hospital—Hema and Ghosh—who do their best to give them a normal, healthy life. When they become teenagers, a deep misunderstanding develops between the brothers that slowly simmers and threatens to permanently sour their relationship. Cutting for Stone is set against large political events in Ethiopia—the coup that deposed the country’s emperor and put an army official, Mengistu, in charge; and the rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front, an organization that eventually brought about independence for Eritrea. In the novel, one of Marion’s friends is charged by the authorities for subversive activities. The authorities determine Marion to be guilty by association, and soon he is forced to flee the country for the United States.

Dr. Verghese describes the everyday workings of Missing hospital and of life in Ethiopia beautifully. He has said that his goal in writing Cutting for Stone was to show how “entering medicine was a passionate quest, a romantic pursuit, a spiritual calling.” And his descriptions of Hema’s career at Missing and especially that of the adoptive father, Ghosh, certainly fit that bill. Yet many of the situations in the story feel overly melodramatic. Verghese’s writing is often punctuated with dramatic similes and metaphors. And while he uses his doctor’s expertise to good effect, sometimes it feels like one is reading extended versions of Gray’s Anatomy, as in here:

With the colon swollen to Hindenburg proportions it would be all too easy to nick the bowel and spill feces into the abdominal cavity. He made a middle incision, then deepened it carefully, like a sapper defusing a bomb. Just when panic was setting in because he felt he was going nowhere, the glistening surface of the peritoneum—that delicate membrane that lined the abdominal cavity—came into view. When he opened the peritoneum, straw-colored fluid came out. Inserting his finger into the hole and using it as a backstop, he cut the peritoneum along the length of the incision.”

One of the other challenges of Cutting for Stone is its uneven pacing. With numerous side trips and distractions, frustratingly enough, just one event that the book opens with—the twins’ birth—takes Verghese nearly 150 pages to narrate. Although the pace does quicken somewhat after this, it remains shaky till the end.

The reader will also be struck by just how many times the doctors resort to God as a healer. In a country like Ethiopia (or India) where medical resources are limited and where destiny is a frequent explanation for why things go awry, perhaps this is understandable. Yet, I found it unnerving to have it come up so often in conversation even among science professionals. For example, a doctor like Marion Stone chalks up an appearance by an individual at a particular place and time to “a disturbance in the universe.” While I personally found it hard to digest such lines of thought, perhaps this would not be as big a problem for other readers.

As in My Own Country, Dr. Verghese is best when he describes the failings of the American medical system especially when it comes to serving the poor. “The poorest in America are the sickest,” he writes, “Poor people can’t afford preventive care or insurance. The poor don’t see doctors. They show up at our doorsteps when things are advanced.”

Dr. Verghese also does a good job at character development—Marion, the gifted twin Shiva, Hema, Ghosh and even Missing’s chief operator, a woman named simply as Matron—are all beautifully portrayed in the book. All in all Cutting for Stone is a good first effort. It is grand in scope and creates characters the readers can empathize with. Had Dr. Verghese toned down the melodrama a fair amount and paced the story better, Cutting for Stone would have been an even better read. Lessons for the next one, perhaps?

The Al-Bashir indictment and its implication on Ethiopia and other countries

By Kadiro A. Elemo

The issuance of an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes committed in the conflict trodden Darfur is the political fever of this week. Right after the declaration of Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the most senior ICC prosecutor, the intention of the ICC to indict the Sudanese President on the war crimes committed in Darfur, a lot has been undergoing behind the curtain to avert the issuance of the arrest warrant primarily because there was a trepidation that this will further deteriorate the fragile peace process in the Sudan and looms a humanitarian crisis or even ignite a new conflict in the war torn nation. Secondly, it is feared that Sudan might not corporate on the adjudication or extradition of those individuals involved in the commissions of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Thirdly, some dictators who realized their grip on power by perpetration and perpetuation of similar crimes on their people fear that indicting an incumbent head of the state will set a bad precedent in the international law. Fourthly, some also doubt that it might be used by colonialists and neo-colonialists to execute their hidden agenda. We also saw U.S. A. quagmire since U.S.A. want to use the court in this very case against Sudan but they want to remain immune to the jurisdiction of the Court as they are not party to the Court.

An Old Era in the International Law

According to the positivist understanding of international law, the dominant doctrine of the international law, since international law is established on the common consent of individual states, as opposed to the consent of individual human beings, states are the “subjects” of the international law and private individuals are simply the “objects” of the international law. The legal implication of this position is states are the only bearers of rights and duties and unlike in the municipal laws; individual human beings do not have rights and obligations under international law. In the municipal laws, individuals enjoy the civil capacity to sue and being sued; and in case of breach of criminal law, they are susceptible to prosecution. As per the dictum of the positivist’s doctrine of international law, suing and being sued under the international plane is the prerogative and responsibility of the states. Oppenheim, renowned authority in international law, explains this position as follows:

Since the law of nations is based on the consent of the individual states, and not of the individuals human beings, states solely and exclusively are the subjects of the international law. This means that the law of nations is for the individual conducts of the states, and not of their citizens …and individual human beings… is never directly a subject of international law.”

Individual Criminal Responsibility under Contemporary International Law

The emerging trends in the international law show that individual is responsible for his/her activities under international law for crimes such as crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and piracy that give universal jurisdiction to any state on the globe to prosecute the person whose alleged crimes were committed outside the boundaries of the prosecuting state, regardless of his/her nationality, country of residence, or any other relation with the prosecuting country. The above-enumerated crimes are considered as a crime against all, which any state is authorized to punish or extradite since perpetrator is considered as an implacable enemy of all humankind: hostes humani generis. The idea of universal jurisdiction emanates from the cardinal principle of international law, which makes certain norms in international law erga omnes (owed to the entire world community).

The precedents for prosecuting individuals those crimes were set in Nuremburg and Tokyo Tribunals. The UN has established ad hoc international tribunal to try the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia) and Rwanda (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda). The UN has also established Hybrid Criminal Courts in different countries such as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and East Timor and rendered workable criminal justice system, as the trials were held in scene of the crime and in a fashion easy to obtain witness and evidences. However, the warrant issued for the Sudanese president, Oman Hassan Al Bashir, is the first of its kind issued for sitting head of state. Human Rights Watch says, “ICC issuance of an arrest warrant … signals that even those at the top may be held to account for mass murder, rape and torture.”

Double Standard: Who is next: Why Not Meles?

Various voices are accusing ICC for double standard. Jean Ping, the AU’s Commission chairman, said, “What we see is that international justice seems to be applying its fight against impunity only to Africa as if nothing were happening elsewhere, [such as] in Iraq, Gaza, Colombia or in the Caucasus.” This is a good start; however, ICC needs to be fair and give attention for crimes against humanity committed in different parties of the world. For instance, ICC needs to focus on Ethiopia where Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, created “a mini-Darfur “situation. An excerpt from my previous article:

The only difference between the Ethiopian Darfur and Sudanese Darfur is the fact that while Sudan is abhorred by the Western countries for its atrocious actions, Ethiopia is the key ally in security issues with the Western countries that offered human rights a sacrificial lamb. Besides this, Ethiopia receives substantial military and economic aids from Westerns that indirectly finance its egregious activities; and this not only reflects the recklessness of Westerns towards the atrocities but also shows their complicity otherwise they would have altered the political landscape and human rights situations in Ethiopia because of the tremendous leverages they have over considerably foreign aids dependent Ethiopia.”

Ethiopia is the second country after Sudan to reject the arrest warrant because they knew that Meles is on the same boat with Bashir on unleashing the same horrendous crimes on his peoples. If there is objectivity and fairness in ICC, Meles would be the next target. At any rate, attention for the war crimes committed on the voiceless peoples exonerates ICC from criticisms and increases its credibility.

What is the Significance of the Warrant?

Time will give answer to the question, “Will ICC succeed in getting Al Bashir”. However, the issuance of arrest warrant for him serves as a siren call for the sitting heads of states who commit those heinous crimes on their peoples since even there is “No Free Pass” for Presidents. Whether it is committed by Bashir or Bush, no crime goes unpunished. This is a lesson for Meles Zenawi.

(Kadiro Elemo is a human rights activist who uses his pen and tongue to fight against tyranny. He is a host and a producer of Voice of Oromia (www.voiceoforomia.com) that serves the voiceless, defends the dignity and fights for justice. He can be reached for comment, suggestion, or criticism at [email protected].)

ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopia’s dictatorial regime will disregard the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur, the government chief propagandist Bereket Simon said on Wednesday.

Bereket said his regime supported the African Union’s call to have proceedings against Bashir deferred.

“We have always upheld that position and we have promoted the decision of deferring this indictment from the start,” Bereket said.

The AU, headquartered in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, said the arrest warrant threatened peace efforts in Sudan.

Asked whether Ethiopia, Sudan’s southern neighbour, would ignore the warrant if Beshir visited, Bereket said: “Absolutely.”

AU opens emergency talks on Bashir warrant

ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – The African Union opened an emergency meeting over the arrest warrant on Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir which it says will hurt an ailing peace process in the troubled country.

The bloc’s Peace and Security Council members began the closed door meeting at its Addis Ababa headquarters a day after the International Criminal Court issued the warrants.

The 53-member body had called for the deferment of the court’s action against Beshir and on Wednesday expressed concern at the decision to issue the warrant.

In a statement, the AU Commission chief Jean Ping said he was “deeply concerned at the far-reaching consequences of this decision, which comes at a critical juncture in the process to promote lating peace… in the Sudan.”

Meanwhile in Khartoum Bashir joined a mass rally in protest at the international arrest warrant, an AFP correspondent said.

More than 5,000 people attended the rally in Khartoum’s Martyrs Square shouting support for Sudan’s veteran leader and denouncing ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

The rally followed a similar show of support on Wednesday for Beshir, who is accused by the International Criminal Court of masterminding a campaign of extermination, rape and pillage during the six-year conflict in Darfur.

Kharoum has vowed not to cooperate with court and received backing from its southern neighbour Ethiopia which said it would disregard the warrant.

China called Thursday for the case against Beshir to be suspended, as it expressed concern over the arrest warrant.

The reaction to the historic warrant issued on Wednesday for alleged war crimes was in line with China’s longtime support for Beshir’s government that has drawn much criticism in the West.

“China expresses its regretfulness and worry over the arrest warrant for the Sudan president issued by the International Criminal Court,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

Qin called on the UN Security Council to “respect calls by the African Union, Arab League and Non-Aligned Movement… and urged the International Criminal Court not to hear this case for the time being.”

Beshir, 65, became the first sitting president to be issued with an ICC arrest warrant and faces five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes.

The UN says up to 300,000 people have died and displaced some 2.5 million from their villages since the Darfur conflict broke out in February 2003. The Sudanese government puts the death toll at 10,000.