Sudan Calls Costa Rica "Banana
Republic"
Sudan's U.N. envoy on Thursday blasted Costa Rica as a "banana
republic" after its ambassador said there was no justification for
suspending any war crimes indictment of the Sudanese president over
Darfur.
"The issue here is bigger than the small minds ... of some
ambassador who talked with you just some minutes ago," Sudanese
Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem told reporters after a meeting
of the U.N. Security Council on Sudan.
He said the Costa Rican envoy was trying "to inflame and inflict
damage" on the stalled Darfur peace process.
Speaking afterward to Reuters about Costa Rica, Abdalhaleem said,
"It is a banana republic."
His Costa Rican counterpart, Jorge Urbina, who is in his second year
as an elected member of the 15-nation council, told reporters he saw
no justification for Security Council intervention to suspend any
indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for suspected
war crimes in Darfur.
The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The
Hague, Luis Moreno Ocampo, asked the court's judges last year to
issue an arrest warrant for Bashir on suspicion of orchestrating a
campaign of genocide in Darfur.
U.N. diplomats say the judges will most likely decide in favor of
indicting Bashir and expect the decision to be announced later this
month. If Bashir is indicted, Sudan has urged the council to use its
power to suspend the prosecution in the interest of getting a
lasting peace deal for Darfur.
Urbina said the idea that peace and justice might be incompatible
was "absolutely false." He compared the discussion of Bashir and
Darfur to the war in the former Yugoslavia when some argued against
indicting suspected war criminals.
"At that time, very often politicians, diplomats and analysts were
arguing that justice was interfering in the path to peace," he said.
"We learned that it was different." |
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