By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Judges at the International Criminal Court have summoned the chief prosecutor for a first hearing next week on his request to charge Sudan’s president with genocide in Darfur, the prosecutor said.
In July, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo accused Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of launching a campaign in 2003 that has killed 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through starvation and disease and forced 2.5 million from their homes. Sudan says 10,000 died.
The African Union, Arab League and other alliances have urged the U.N. Security Council to block moves to indict Bashir to avoid shattering the fragile peace process.
It is unclear when the judges will make a decision on Moreno-Ocampo’s application, which he said was the ICC’s biggest and most complex case to date. However, they invited him to an initial hearing to explain the case next Wednesday.
“They called us for the first hearing on Oct. 1,” Moreno-Ocampo told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. “Normally in the past they call for hearings to request clarifications, some other documents, to (ask) questions about the case.”
U.N. diplomats following the case have said the judges might not make a decision until November.
Earlier this week French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that Paris could support a suspension of the investigation if Khartoum ended the killings and removed a minister indicted by the ICC.
Moreno-Ocampo declined comment, saying his job was to uncover and present the facts.
Under Article 16 of the ICC statute, the U.N. Security Council can suspend investigations and indictments for up to one year at a time.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have issued strong statements against intervening in the Bashir probe, saying that doing so would give him impunity.
Although the bulk of the deaths in Darfur may have taken place years ago, the prosecutor said his investigation shows people are still being killed.
“It’s a more subtle genocide, but it’s ongoing. And because it’s more subtle, we are (accustomed) to being used to it,” he said. “The weapons of the genocide are not machetes, not gas chambers, but hunger and rape.”
“That’s what we have to stop,” he said.
A joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force has only some 10,000 of the 26,000 soldiers and police in Darfur that were promised in a Security Council resolution from July 2007.
Meanwhile, rebels accuse Sudanese government forces of stepping up attacks on civilians and villages. Khartoum says it is restoring law and order to rebel enclaves in Darfur.
(Editing by Alan Elsner )