ISTANBUL – Sudan’s indicted president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, will not attend an Islamic summit in Istanbul as planned, Turkish government officials said yesterday, after the EU raised objections to his visit.
Mr Bashir, against whom the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity in Sudan’s Darfur region, had announced plans to attend a meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) today.
“We have learned that he is not coming,” a Turkish government official said on condition of anonymity, without elaborating. Other Turkish officials, visibly relieved at the news, also confirmed that Mr Bashir was not attending.
Earlier, in comments reported by state-run news agency Anatolian, Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan had denied Mr Bashir was responsible for genocide in Darfur and said he would be more comfortable talking to the Sudanese president than to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
“I wouldn’t be able to speak with Netanyahu so comfortably but I would speak comfortably with Bashir. I say comfortably, ‘what you’ve done is wrong’. And I would say it to his face. Why? Because a Muslim couldn’t do such things. A Muslim could not commit genocide,” Anatolian reported Mr Erdogan as saying.
The ICC indicted Mr Bashir in March on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but stopped short of including a charge of genocide. The UN says as many as 300,000 people have been killed since conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003, although Sudan rejects that figure.
Mr Erdogan’s comments could further damage Turkey’s already fraught ties with Israel, which have deteriorated since Israel’s offensive earlier this year in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.
Turkey, which has deepened economic ties with Sudan, has not ratified the statute that established the ICC and had said it had no plans to arrest Mr Bashir.
The mainly Muslim country, which is seeking EU membership, had come under pressure from Brussels and international human rights groups to drop Mr Bashir from the guest list.
Campaigning group Human Rights Watch had said that Nato member Turkey’s international image would “plummet” if Ankara did not bar Mr Bashir’s entry.
Mr Bashir has travelled to African countries since his arrest warrant was issued by the ICC in March.
Iran’s anti-American president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country is engaged in a standoff with the West over Tehran’s nuclear programme, arrived in Istanbul yesterday to attend the one- day OIC meeting.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai, in his first trip abroad since his recent re-election following a fraud-marred ballot, also arrived earlier yesterday and held bilateral talks with Turkish president Abdullah Gul. – (Reuters)