Two Sides

There are two sides to every story.

Today, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. It represents the first arrest warrant for a sitting leader of a country. Many have heralded the move as a great thing because of the crimes against humanity that al-Bashir is accused of in Darfur. It could set a precedent to other dictators and perpetrators of mass injustice against their own citizens.

But I am not necessarily celebrating like many others are. Why? It is not because I believe al-Bashir is innocent. By all means, I think he is a ruthless dictator that embodies evil for the intentional slaughter of his own people in Darfur. So why am I not exuberant? It is because the ICC has no mechanism to forcibly arrest al-Bashir unless he were to step out of the country and be caught by international forces. The arrest warrant is simply a powerless political tool to convey a message without teeth to enforce it. However, it gets worse. The arrest warrant has provoked al-Bashir to action; he has kicked out humanitarian NGOs that provided a bulk of the administration of humanitarian aid to the Sudanese in retaliation against his perceived adversaries. So while the issuance of an arrest warrant is a great symbollic gesture, it has led to a negative side effect of kicking out organizations helping the needy in Sudan, making the humanitarian situation in Sudan even worse than before.

This is one of the fundamental problems of international human rights advocacy. States have limited power to affect another state's human rights record without considering military actions, which most states will never consider for a humanitarian need after the U.S. debacle in Somalia in 1993. I do not mean to rain on the idealists and champions of human rights all over the world. I do wish, alongside them, that human rights will be promoted from the gulags of North Korea to the plains of Darfur. But the more I study, the more I'm beginning to see that change must come from people's convictions and not governments' actions. It is the concept of the power of one person that will tidal wave into a movement to create external (and sometimes internal) change. It is by no means easy, and often does demand blood,sweat, and tears (and very much likely sacrifice of lives in the case of repressive governments like al-Bashir's). But I'm convinced that the will of the people will triumph and grassroots movements is the only viable means to see that systematic genocide will cease to be a state's political goal.