Following Wednesday’s indictment of Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir by the judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC), balancing the scale on Darfur’s current issue is tending towards a bequest of state loyalty or who weighs who.

When ICC issued that arrest warrant, charging Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity for a concerted government campaign against civilians.

The warrant marked the court’s first attempt to detain a sitting Head of State. An attempt to arrest a sitting head of state! This is not a light matter at all. Just look at the results!

The results are definitely undesirable. In response, Bashir has lashed back and expelled 13 of the largest aid groups that have been providing water, food and health supplies to the Darfuris.

Just imagine the magnitude of the all the innocent Darfuris who are suffering and are yet to suffer more. To be honest, all this bickering between the superpowers and those they think are inferior powers is tiring.

Why? No sooner had the Congo crisis simmered down, than Darfur was set ablaze.

Isn’t this a new form of taming a lion that seemingly broke free from captivity some centuries ago, tasted conditioned freedom and now realises that those conditions no longer apply?

Know it or not, this whole ICC and Bashir fight is just one of the many tales of the failed principles of Universal Jurisdiction. The question is ‘Who indicts who?’

When some superpowers launch an offensive on so called inferior powers, and millions of innocent people are killed, who justifies and condemns their actions? No one. 

Then who has the right to judge Africa or Middle East’s issue? Before the verdicts are placed, does the international community think of the consequences that follow or is it a matter of a, ‘I am superior, you are inferior’ situation? Possibly.

Yet in all these wrangles, the sufferers are the innocent civilians who are caught in between the crossfire- caught and stuck between this whole cycle of state sovereignty and superiority. Darfuris lives are at stake and no one cares.

If this continued bickering between judges and Heads of State does not stop, then who’s to blame if millions of lives that are lost?

The answer- whoever first poked, incensed and frustrated the free lion in the beginning. We are tired of wars, let peace reign!

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