Darfur Killings Soften Bush's Opposition to International Court

The issue has come to a head in recent months, with the move in July by the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to seek a warrant for Bashir's arrest for orchestrating the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur.

Officials expect the ICC judges to consider the request by the end of this month, but Moreno-Ocampo's move has already spurred Sudan and others to seek a Security Council resolution deferring the prosecution. Sudan has mustered support from African, Arab and Islamic leaders.

Humanitarian groups are worried that Sudan could block relief workers from doing their jobs in Darfur, while some diplomats fear that an arrest warrant would end halting efforts to strike a peace deal for that region.

"The indictment of President Omar al-Bashir at this point in time will complicate the deployment of [peacekeepers] and the management of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur," said the African Union chairman, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, in a Sept. 23 speech before the U.N. General Assembly.

British and French officials have traveled to Khartoum to say they are willing to weigh deferment of the prosecution if Sudan meets several conditions. In an interview, Britain's top diplomat for Africa and the United Nations, Mark Malloch Brown, said Sudan would have to make a radical change in policy for the United Nations to even consider stepping in to stop the prosecution. "We're not going to offer them conditions. We're not going to bargain with them," he said. "We look at it as incumbent on them to do something. . . . That couldn't be just nice words. It would have to be a whole set of really bold actions."

U.S. diplomats have refused to say they are bargaining over the Bashir indictment, but the issue has come up in recent private conversations between senior U.S. officials and Sudanese leaders. In a meeting in New York, Sudanese Vice President Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha told Rice that "the move by the prosecutor is threatening" momentum toward peace, according to Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, Sudan's U.N. ambassador.

Rice demanded that Sudan hasten the deployment of international peacekeepers, expand access for humanitarian workers and speed up political reconciliation. "You have to show us you are serious," Mohamad quoted Rice as saying.

In an interview, Moreno-Ocampo declined to address efforts to strike a deal over Bashir's indictment. He said Bashir was the mastermind of an effort to eliminate more than 2.5 million people in Darfur by having them killed, starved or driven from their homes. "The status quo is not acceptable; this is an ongoing genocide," he said.

Lynch reported from the United Nations.