NEW YORK - UN officials and diplomats said the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday charging Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur.
The court based in The Hague, Netherlands, said the prosecutor will present evidence of the war crimes in Darfur to judges Monday and one or more new suspects will be named. But court officials refused Friday to identify any of the potential new suspects.
The UN officials and diplomats said they expect lesser charges of helping orchestrate genocide and participating in crimes against humanity to be brought against Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Mohammed Taha. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
A spokesman for Sudan's president dismissed the investigation and said his government refuses to hand over any suspects.
The court's prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, has earlier clearly indicated he is aiming for the top of the Sudanese government, accusing them of sponsoring the janjaweed militias who have unleashed a reign of terror on Darfur.
He said last month that Sudan's "whole state apparatus" is implicated in crimes against humanity in the troubled Darfur region, where up to 300,000 people have died since the conflict began in early 2003.
The court in The Hague is the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. An indictment of al-Bashir would mark the first time the tribunal has charged a sitting head of state with war crimes.
But there is precedent: Other UN-created international war crime tribunals charged Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Liberian President Charles Taylor with war crimes while they were still in office.
Milosevic died in his cell in March 2006, shortly before the end of his genocide trial. Taylor is currently on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone.
They also could complicate matters for the United Nations in its attempt to bring peace to Darfur while also seeking justice for war crimes. The charges could bring a backlash from Sudan's government, which has already made it difficult for international aid workers and UN-African Union peacekeepers to do their work.
"If the procedure is going the way it seems it's going to go, of course we have to be aware of the effects it would have on the ground," France's UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert said Friday of the court's expected action.
Threats to the peacekeepers -- currently about 9,000 soldiers and police officers -- were underscored this week by an ambush that killed seven and injured 19, one of the deadliest attacks on UN forces in recent years.
But some court experts anticipating the charges against Sudan's leaders say the benefits outweigh the risks.
"If the prosecutor requests an arrest warrant against the president of Sudan for genocide or crimes against humanity or both, it will a huge step in limiting the impunity for horrific acts committed against innocent people in Dafur," said Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program for Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy group.
"It would send the message that no one is above the law for these kinds of crimes including a sitting president," he said.
Sudan does not recognize the court's authority and has for months refused to arrest and send for trial a government minister and rebel leader charged with atrocities by Moreno-Ocampo last year.
On Friday, a spokesman for the president, Mahjoub Fadul Badry, called the court's prosecutor a "terrorist" whose investigation is based on biased testimony from rebel leaders. Badry said the government would not hand over any suspects, even rebel leaders.
"Moreno-Ocampo's report depends on verbal testimony of rebel leaders and organizations that work under a humanitarian cover but in fact are branches of the intelligence apparatuses of other countries," Badry told The Associated Press.
"In the end, we don't really care what he says."
Sudan's ambassador to the UN, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed, warned that issuing an arrest warrant for senior government officials would threaten Sudan's relations with the UN
"That step would close the door of dialogue between Sudan and the United Nations," Mohamed was quoted as saying in Friday's Al-Sahafa newspaper.
Bringing charges against al-Bashir would likely turn him into a prisoner in his own country, but could also have dire consequences for hundreds of thousands of Darfur refugees and the ill-equipped peacekeeping force, analysts said Friday.
"Luis Moreno-Ocampo's report to the Security Council last month made it clear that the ICC prosecutor has evidence that Bashir is behind the janjaweed militia's continuing attacks against the Darfurian people," Michael Scharf, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, said e-mailed comments sent to the AP.
"An indictment of Bashir will make clear that those responsible for crimes against humanity in Darfur include highest government authorities, and not just a few rogue officials and militia in leaders," he added.
Though the U.S. is not a member of the court, and is not contributing troops to the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, the State Department in Washington appealed for calm on Friday in the run-up to the prosecutor's anticipated action and the indictment process that follows.
"Everyone should look at that process and not get ahead of the facts on the ground," spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. "It is our view that all parties involved, including Sudan, need to abide by their international obligations. In the case of Sudan this means their international obligations vis-a-vis the deployment of peacekeepers.
"We deplore any violence that takes place, whomever is responsible for that," he said.
