It was a rare success for international courts struggling to resist a rising tide of official lawlessness. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, a leader of the notorious, government-backed Janjaweed militia that committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region from 2003 to 2005, was jailed for 20 years last week by the international criminal court (ICC). He had been found guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Although hundreds of militia were involved, Abd-al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, is the first person to be convicted of atrocities in Darfur, now again the scene of terrible violence in Sudan’s civil war. The ICC has charged Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president at the time, with genocide and war crimes. Ahmad Harun, a former minister, faces similar charges. But both men have evaded arrest.

When I interviewed Bashir in Khartoum in 2011 – he was overthrown in a popular uprising in 2019, after which the army seized power and the civil war erupted – he scoffed at the genocide allegations. His government and its Arab militia allies had fought insurgents, not Darfur’s people, Bashir said. The west was imposing a double standard. He insisted he had done nothing wrong.

Speaking in 2008, Harun, whose non-ironic job title was “minister for humanitarian affairs”, said much the same thing. “I have no regrets,” he told me, rejecting an ICC arrest warrant alleging his complicity in up to 200,000 deaths in Darfur as politically........

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