Dear Michael,

I was flattered to see that the Christian Science Monitor identified me as a Sudanese. I think the editorial process may also have truncated my remarks or placed them out of context.

In the early days of his investigations, Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo commented that he obtained information from the reports of human rights NGOs. Last December he also implied that Sudanese human rights activists were among his witnesses. But if he has ever said that he obtained evidence from international humanitarian NGOs working in the field in Darfur, I am not aware of it. To the contrary, I know that offered to issue a public statement that he was not cooperating with the NGOs. In retrospect, it might have been better if he had done so (though I doubt if it would have assuaged the suspicions of the Sudanese security services). And in the debate leading up to the arrest warrant, it was the advocacy NGOs and not the humanitarians who argued publicly against an Article 16 deferral by the Security Council.

The Sudan Government likes to conflate different types of NGOs. And indeed at times the mandates of humanitarian and advocacy agencies have become blurred. While I have at times argued strongly in favour of treating starvation as a criminal act, or famine as an act of political culpability, I have also argued (in The Lancet, last November) that it would be impossible for operational NGOs to square their immediate humanitarian obligations with doing the job of criminal investigations, and argued that they should leave justice for others, later.

In the publicity around the expulsion of the international NGOs, few have paid attention to the suppression of Sudanese NGOs and the security clampdown on Sudanese civil society, which is to my mind at least as worrying.

Alex

On March 8th, 2009, a spokesman for the SLA/M Abdel Wahid Office in Israel, Issa Ibrahim Suleiman, published a statement,on sudaneseonline, Arabic Page,thanking and commending the NGOs in the camps for their services, including the information and evidence they collected and which helped in the case before the ICC. See sudaneseonline.com, 8th March 2009.
How can one read this? If this information was not intended for the ICC. So far the ICC did not deny what the statement of the SLA/M Office in Israel said

There is also the article ofChristophe Fournier( international Herald Tribune 28/29 March 09)in which he confirms that the ICC prosecutor has indeedsaid in 05 that he would count on cooperation from NGOs and others.Some NGOs, according to the writer,calimed they could be an important sourse of information. Dr Fournier is president of the Council of Doctors Without Borders.He also unveils other aspects of L.M.Ocampo’s “economy with the truth.”