“Everything short of the presidency is on the table”

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has been accused by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of genocide and vilified the world over as an incorrigible mass murderer bent on slaughtering his own people in Darfur.  But inside Sudan, his grip on power seems, for the moment, to be surer than ever.

The good news is that Ahmad Harun and Ali Kushayb, the two key masterminds of the horrors of the genocide could potentially be given up by the Sudanese government in lieu of Bashir’s prosecution.  I guess peace and justice are not always possible simuntaneously.

One growing concern is that without Mr. Bashir, a peace treaty signed in 2005 between Sudan’s central government and southern rebels could fall apart. The treaty, which he fought hard-liners in his own party to approve, is widely seen as the glue that is holding this unwieldy and deeply divided country together.

Mr. Alor, the foreign minister, said the threat of an arrest warrant may prove to be a blessing in disguise. “Now we are seriously talking about the resolution of the problem of Darfur,” he said, adding that the government was also considering ways to cooperate with the peacekeeping force in Darfur that it long resisted.

Read the complete articles here.