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Details :
Category: Mass Murder
Location: Sudan
Date: 1989 - Present
Crime: In March 2009, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court(ICC) issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir on counts of cimes against humanity and war crimes. He has been accused of genocide, but the ICC has ruled that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute.
Biography: al-Bashir was born on January 1, 1944 in a small village called Hoshe Bannaga, located in what was then a part of the Kingdom of Egypt. He completed his primary and secondary education in Sudan and in 1960, joined the Sudanese Army. He studied in Cairo at the Egyptian Military Academy and graduated in 1966. His military career was marked by continuous promotions through the ranks to become a colonel. In 1989, he led a military coup against a failing Sudanese regime and assumed control. Once in office, he purged the upper ranks of the military and executed his detractors. Further, he banned political parties and independent newspapers and through journalists and opposition political leaders in prison. Much of his reign is marked by civil war northern and southern parts of his country, but as that conflict subsided, the western province of Darfur began to attract world-wide attention. Rather than a religious war, like that of the previous nineteen years in the north and south, Darfur is an ethnic cleansing against the non-Afro-Arab population. The death toll has reached close to 400,000 while al-Bashir's government denies its existence. The government is accused of suppressing information by killing witnesses and covering up mass graves to hide evidence. Since June of 2004, world leaders have tried to influence al-Bashir to end the conflict, with no success to date. President al-Bashir remains in office and in 2010, will be facing the first democratic election to be held with multiple political parties in over ten years. The arrest warrant from the ICC has been presented to the Sudanese government, but it is unlikely that anything will be done about it until al-Bashir is no longer in office.
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