ICC seeks sentences for Sudanese warlords

PROSECUTORS have called for a life sentence for a Sudanese militia leader convicted of committing crimes against humanity during the East African country’s previous civil war more than two decades ago.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) opened a sentencing hearing for Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (also known as Ali Kushayb) on Tuesday.

The previous day, prosecutor Julian Nicholls had demanded the maximum penalty for the “enthusiastic, energetic and effective perpetrator of abuses carried out in the western Darfur region”.

Prosecutors say that among his crimes, Abd-AlRahman killed two people with an axe.

“You literally have an axe murderer before you,” Nicholls told the judges in The Hague, as Abd-Al-Rahman looked on.

“Only a life sentence will serve the interest of retribution and deterrence.” Abd-Al-Rahman’s defence lawyers, who are asking for a seven-year jail term, will present their case during Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings.

Last month, Abd-AlRahman was convicted of 27 counts, including mass murders and rapes, for leading government-backed Janjaweed militia forces in the Darfur region in western Sudan on a campaign of killing and destruction from 2003 to 2004.

It was the first time the ICC had convicted a suspect of crimes in Darfur, a region that is once again seeing mass atrocities amid a vicious civil war.

Abd-Al-Rahman has consistently denied being a high-ranking official in the Janjaweed militia, a largely Arab paramilitary force armed by the Sudanese government to kill mainly Black African tribes in Darfur.

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He has insisted since the opening of his trial in April 2022 that he is “not Ali Kushayb” and that the court has got the wrong man – an argument rejected by the judges.

Abd-Al-Rahman fled to the Central African Republic in February 2020 when a new Sudanese government announced its intention to cooperate with the ICC’s investigation.

He said he then handed himself in because he was “desperate” and feared authorities would kill him.

Fighting broke out in Sudan’s Darfur region when non-Arab tribes, complaining of systematic discrimination, took up arms against the Arabdominated government.

Khartoum responded by unleashing the Janjaweed, a force now known as the Popular Defence Forces and drawn from among the region’s nomadic tribes.

The United Nations says 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million more were displaced in the Darfur conflict in the 2000s.