The ICC's al-Bashir decision and a naive sense of justice

The International Criminal Court's (ICC) issuing of an arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, holding him responsible for the massacres in Darfur, has naturally set off different debates and different reactions. That reactions differ and diversify on this matter is indeed very natural, because in fact, on the one hand, no one has data accurate enough to end all the debates, and on the other hand, the subject is very open to disinformation by circles that make full use of this confusion of data. This being so, people's emotions can very easily be stirred up with half-baked information.

Out of the blue, Darfur is put on the agenda as the place where the world's most important and most urgent human tragedy is taking place, and people are expected to make an urgent decision on the matter without being given the chance to understand what is going on. With the ICC's sensitivity on the matter, its interest in it and its decision presented as if absolutely correct, people are immediately put through a test of consistency. Above all, the haste does not go unnoticed to dilute the noble sensitivity just displayed over Gaza by accusing it of inaction over the Darfur issue, and to produce from this an accusation of double standards, inconsistency and Muslim nationalism for Muslims.

Yet neither is al-Bashir a Muslim hero, nor is there any consistency in equating what has happened in Darfur with what has happened in Gaza or on Palestinian lands for years.

The al-Bashir dictatorship is, first of all, a typical example of the overall tragedies of Muslim societies. The way it seized and holds on to power is, from the very beginning, a way that no Islamic political evaluation could approve. It is not possible to expect this dictatorship to have an overall healthy relationship not to mention with the minorities in its own country, even with its majority element.

How dictators who seized power by a coup later consolidate their positions through elections is unknown to no one. While it is a fact that not the slightest sympathy is felt toward any act of al-Bashir on the grounds that "he is a Muslim," it is not possible to regard as a good-faith assessment explaining a slight distance from the ICC's decision to arrest him as a reflex of Muslim solidarity.

A human rights organization with high Islamic sensitivity like Mazlum-Der, adopting the principle "on the side of the oppressed whoever they are, and against the oppressor whoever they are," that is, against the oppressors even if they are Muslim and on the side of the oppressed even if they are non-Muslim, has announced that a Muslim initiative itself should take up a fair investigation, and if necessary a trial process, against al-Bashir.

Truly, these aspects of the matter should not prevent us from seeing certain mechanisms that suddenly reflected what happened in Darfur in particular onto the world's agenda as the first-priority humanitarian problem. It should also not be passed over that a significant portion of the representatives of aid organizations currently operating in Darfur convey observations that what is happening there has been reflected to the outside world in a very exaggerated manner and that the civil-war conditions there are certainly no worse than what is happening in other African countries. Of course these observations do not diminish the importance of what is happening in Darfur, but they require us to give more priority to the question marks over its being made a priority problem.

Those who know, know that in the Darfur issue such a decision makes no contribution to the solution of the problem there; on the contrary, it has no function other than reviving a problem that had, for better or worse, entered a solution process. We know that at the latest meeting held in Qatar two weeks ago, an agreement was also made between Darfur's largest resistance organization and the Sudanese government. This situation has actually been an event that very well exemplifies all the ups and downs that the Darfur problem has gone through so far. Just like many examples of ours, whenever issues enter a path of solution between the real parties, they are reproduced by the intervention of external parties.

Furthermore, everyone who is more or less familiar with the subject also knows that Western countries, approaching the oil regions with a lustful appetite, have a determining role in what has happened in Darfur. One must have a dangerously naive sense of justice to swallow as a legal victory the decision taken on Darfur by the ICC, which for years has been unable to act, for one reason or another, over far graver tragedies in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya. When those who apply the law use it merely as a discourse of power, a sense of justice of this naivety can be dangerous. Because it is by nature superficial, and the more superficial and sensitive it is, the more open it is to manipulation.