Sudan/Egypt

Al-Beshir defies ICC with Egypt visit

Article published on the 2009-03-25 Latest update 2009-03-25 16:24 TU

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak (R) meets with Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Cairo March 25, 2009.
(Photo: Reuters)

Sudanese president Omar al-Beshir arrived in Egypt today on an official visit, in continued defiance of an international arrest warrant. He is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in the Sudanese state of Darfur.

This is Beshir's second trip abroad since the warrant issued. On monday he visited Eritrea.

An arson attack destroyed 600 shelters at the Abuzar camp close to the West Darfur capital El-Geneina on Tuesday, an anonymous government official told the AFp news agency.

Abuzar houses 12,000 out of the estimated 2.7 million internally displaced people in the country.

Earlier this month the Sudanese government expelled 13 foreign aid agencies in reaction to the ICC arrest warrant for al-Beshir. A joint UN-Sudanese assessment released on Tuesday says that four of those agencies gave aid to around 1.1 million people.

In Darfur 4.7 million people rely on aid to survive.

The UN’s World Food Programme has been left without several important aid distributors and has been forced to deliver food itself with the help of local committees. The assessment summary claims that this situation is unsustainable.

“By the beginning of May, as the hunger gap approaches, the World Food Programme requires new and experienced partners to carry out food distributions for over a million people in need in Darfur,” the summary says.

UN humanitarian chief John Holmes says that the expulsion of aid organisations in Sudan “seemed to us a reckless act.”

He was responding to claims from Sudan’s UN envoy Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem that Sudanese groups are able to fill the gap left by the expelled organisations.

“If you read the report itself, it demonstrates that there are indeed gaps, and this is an agreed assessment," he said. "So I think the Sudanese government are agreeing that those gaps are there.”

The United Nations runs its largest aid programme in the world in Darfur.