Bassem Abo Alabass Mohammed

26 Nov 2015 14:1

SUDANESE President Omar al-Bashir won’t attend a summit in South Africa next week, about six months after he left that country amid a dispute between the government and judiciary, which had ordered he be detained until it reviewed his indictment for alleged war crimes.

Vice President Bakri Hassan Saleh will represent the North African nation at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation on Dec. 4-5 in Johannesburg, State Information Minister Yasser Youssef said Thursday by phone from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, without giving further details.

The African News Agency cited Sudanese embassy official Saif Ahmed as saying that al-Bashir is busy with “highly important domestic issues,” including discussions with opposition parties and peace talks with rebels.

The South African and Chinese governments had asked al-Bashir not to attend, the agency said, citing officials it didn’t identify.

South Africa’s government failed to detain al-Bashir, who has been indicted twice for war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court, when he visited Johannesburg on June 15 for an African Union summit.

The government also defied an order from South Africa’s High Court that al-Bashir couldn’t leave the country while it reviewed the case.

While South Africa is a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, the government argued that it couldn’t detain al-Bashir because he was in the country for an event that fell under the AU’s jurisdiction.

Al-Bashir has ruled Sudan for a quarter century since taking power in a military coup.

The ICC indicted him in 2009 and 2010 for his alleged role in atrocities in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where insurgents took up arms in 2003. As many as 300,000 people have died in the conflict, mainly from illness and starvation, according to the United Nations.