Gibraltar was ceded to Britain in 1713.

“Spain’s foreign minister,” we are told, “met [in Gibraltar] Tuesday with his British counterpart and with the head of Gibraltar’s local administration in the first visit by a Spanish Cabinet official to the British colony.”

Hardly the top of the news, you say — but it reminds me of how crisis points in the world wax and wane in importance. Gibraltar was a strategic fortress for Britain and the Allies during World War II — and Britain vowed to hold onto it forever, or at least, according to legend, as long as the Barbary apes remain on station.

Gibraltar is an outcropping of rock, a British territory roughly 1,093 miles south of London, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and attached to Spain by a neck of land. It was ceded to Britain in 1713. Spain wants it back, but don’t hold your breath.

News Item 2: “The Rock of Gibraltar is echoing to gunfire for the first time since the Spanish attacked Britain’s Mediterranean toehold nearly 300 years ago.”

British soldiers are training in Gibraltar’s maze of underground caves to seek and destroy al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan, previously believed to be impervious.

Sky News quoted Captain Charles Bonfante, of the British Army’s Royal Gibraltar Regiment, on the subject. “As a training area, this is unique…I did a tour in Afghanistan, around Musa Qala. One of our battles was fought in underground tunnels, just like this.”

Interesting, and Sky News doesn’t have it quite right. Gibraltar has heard gunfire in modern times. It had complex, secret gun emplacements during World War II, ready to fight off any invasion by Hilter, if he decided to speed to the Mediterranean coast. Several years ago, I interviewed Jean-Francois Nothomb, a prominent underground leader who snuck in and out of Gibraltar during World War II. Nothomb was a protagonist in my book, Freedom Line, which detailed the rescue of Allied pilots from Nazi territory.

He recalled going for a stroll one day in Gibraltar on a promontory overlooking the harbor. “What appeared to be a stony mound suddenly gave way to a sliding pedestal and he could hear the sound of gears and motors. Suddenly a two-man gun emplacement rose out of the earth, with two helmeted British gunners at the controls. This was no ordinary field. What had appeared to be a natural landscape was actually a stage set for antiaircraft guns.”

Hilter was diverted from his designs on Gibraltar by his overriding passion to focus on an invasion of Russia to the north instead. German presence in Gibraltar would have created a dominant position at the entrance to the Mediterranean. British and American analysts at the time went as far as to say that Hitler could have won the war if he took Gibraltar.

Fascinating to me that 70 years after playing a strategic role in World War II, Gibraltar is now a training site for soldiers seeking a latter-day enemy, Osama bin Laden.

I wouldn’t argue for or against the notion that this is the time for Britain to give up this last relic of the empire. But it sure has a colorful history. I’ll take the democratic line: Here’s a vote for self-determination of the 30,000 people of Gibraltar.

- Peter Eisner

Photo courtesy of Flickr user cwgoodroe under a Creative Commons license.

The court said Bashir directed attacks that resulted in the murder, rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur. However, it also said there was not sufficient evidence to support charges of genocide.

The United Nations says that at least 300,000 have died in the conflict in Darfur and 2.5 million have been displaced.

On Tuesday, Bashir responded to the impending warrant by saying the ICC could “eat it.”

Amir Idris, a professor of African studies at Fordham University who grew up in Sudan, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the chances that Bashir will stand trial, how it will impact violence in Darfur and the U.S. position on Darfur and the ICC.

Journalist Rob Crilly in Sudan argues that while activists consider the ICC’s warrant a triumph, the Sudanese reaction is less than jubilant:

The Save Darfur movement and human rights campaigners will tell you that it’s all worth it. There need be no conflict between peace and justice, according to John Prendergast and Omer Ismail in today’s San Diego Tribune…

But I can’t help feeling that they’ve been speaking to different people from the ones I have met in five camps across North and South Darfur this past week. Few have time for this debate. Few have heard of the International Criminal Court. Those that have are worried the government will come down hard on anyone celebrating Bashir’s indictment. And most seem to think that going home is more important than anything else.

Forgive me for putting words in their mouths, but I’m interpreting that as putting peace ahead of justice.

Today I met families who fled the fighting in Muhajiriya (incidentally they may not actually have fled - but that’s a post for another day). Some 50,000 are on the move. About 26,000 have arrived in Zam Zam camp.

One of them was Mariam Ahmed Abu, who reckoned she was 60 but looked more like 80 and whose daughter had been shot by her side during the fighting for Muhajiriya. She had survived six years of war but left when she realised she no longer had any children left to care for her. She made the journey with a dozen or so other elderly women who had all run out of children. This is how she summed it all up when I asked her about seeking justice for the misery inflicted on her:

“This is what happened and now we have to live and to forget it.”

She hadn’t heard of the ICC until I asked her about it and I’m starting to think that taking Bashir to the Hague will be more of a victory for activists far away from Sudan than for the people stuck in this miserable war.

The “Fai Notizia” blog interviews a young Sudanese man, who states that the ICC’s actions have allowed Bashir to position himself as victim:

I really hated what International Criminal Court, they gave the Sudanese Government a golden opportunity to polish its image and it’s President Bashir’s. Sudanese People are mostly simple people, after the ICC’s request to arrest Al-Bashir, the government went on and on about how this is a targeting of Islam, and how it’s an insult to the Sudanese Pride and how if this happened the US will surly have it’s clutches around Sudan, blah, blah. It wasn’t more than propaganda and a pethatric attempt to make Al-Bashir worthy of the coming elections, because honestly, before this, nobody liked this idiot. But suddenly I hear people in the bus talking about supporting him against the ICC. He became a hero.

“Mimz,” another Sudanese blogger, writes that the warrant has Sudanese people scared, pleading for calm:

So please, Sudanese citizens, those of you living in Sudan… stop panicking! And stop packing your bags! I know so many people who are actually gone by now because they are afraid of what might happen if the warrant is issued. I’m telling you, Egypt doesn’t need any more people crowding it!

Nothing is going to happen, and no I am not in denial, I am just thinking of the most reasonable sequence of events. You will not be attacked in your own home, you will not lose all your valuable posessions and you will not find a loved one dead outside your house. Don’t be so overdramatic!

A blogger at “The Sudanese Thinker” writes that the arrest warrant may reshape U.S. policy towards Sudan:

[T]he ICC can’t do much on its own in terms of enforcing the arrest warrant (if it issues it at all) and the UN is a fangless paper tiger, but…

… given that we now have Susan Rice as the US Ambassador to the UN, Hillary as Secretary of State, and a Blue Donkey administration in charge of running things, US policies towards Sudan will gradually become starkly different than they were just a few months ago when Bush was still in power.

An ICC arrest warrant issued within this new context will now have more weight, and hence its potential issuance will probably be more useful as a tool for pressuring Omar al-Bashir to act in favor of peace in Darfur and implementing the CPA.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Several news organizations, including The New York Times and Reuters, have quoted diplomats and United Nations officials who say that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has decided to arrest and indict Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur.

However, the ICC has so far denied the media reports and said that judges have not made a decision about al-Bashir.

If an arrest warrant were to be issued by the international court, it would be the first such warrant against a sitting head of state.

Though the U.N. says that at least 300,000 have died in the conflict in Darfur and 2.5 million have been displaced, al-Bashir’s Sudanese government claims that only 10,000 people died and that it in no way constituted genocide. Sudan has denied all ties to the Janjaweed militias, who are blamed for much of the violence.

The U.K.-based human rights organization Aegis Trust recently released a short documentary featuring what it claims are former members of the Sudanese military and Janjaweed militia, who detail their alleged involvement in the Darfur conflict and discuss how the attacks were financed and carried out.

Read more about the film here.

Blogger “Michelle” wonders why the ICC and the media’s sources differ on the indictment decision:

Why the leak? I’m betting that the New York Times wouldn’t be likely to post such major news without a certain level of confidence in its sources…that is, enough confidence to allow it to weather the storm that could come from the ICC’s denials[...]

I think this might be an attempt, either by the UN or the ICC or both, to soften the political ground before the indictment is actually handed down. As I wrote previously, anxieties over Khartoum’s reaction to the arrest warrant, once it becomes official, are running quite high — by leaking the information in the days before the announcement, and then issuing an obligatory denial, someone out there might be trying to soften the blow, test the waters, or at least give a warning to the international community that this is finally coming.

The “For Sudan” blog also considers the ICC’s motives:

This could be a ploy by the ICC to keep the arrest warrant a secret, allowing them to arrest the President if he decides to go abroad and visit one of the member states of the Rome Statute, the agreement that created the court, without having publicly announced the arrest warrant. Or, they can simply still be in the process of working out the final details. Only time will tell.

Brett Schaefer of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty asks if the ICC is the proper forum for prosecuting Darfur’s war crimes:

Although supporters of the court have a noble purpose, there are a number of reasons to be cautious and concerned about the effect the ICC could have on national sovereignty and politically precarious situations the world over.

One of the most basic principles of international law is that a state cannot be bound by a treaty to which it is not a party. Further, long-standing international legal norms hold that a state cannot be bound to legal assertions that it has specifically rejected. The ICC, however, directly contravenes these norms and precedents of international law; it claims jurisdiction to prosecute and imprison citizens of countries that are not party to the Rome Statute and, more shockingly, over those who have specifically rejected the court’s jurisdiction.

[...]For these reasons and others, the United States has declined to join the ICC. It is not alone in its concerns as demonstrated by the many states that are not ICC parties. Major countries like China, India, and Russia have refused to ratify the Rome Statute out of concern that it unduly infringes on their foreign- and security-policy decisions — issues rightly reserved to sovereign governments.

In July, when the ICC chief prosecutor formally requested an arrest warrant for al-Bashir, blogger “Heba Aly” from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting wrote about the reaction in Sudan:

Endless opinion pieces in Sudanese newspapers have denounced the move. Daily, people who support the president have protested outside embassies who support the ICC, calling the decision “racist” and “unfair”.

They say the ICC is holding Sudan to a higher standard than say, the US, which they see as also responsible for their actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. It sounds much like the anti-US sentiment I have heard in other parts of the Arab world. One man called those American actions genocide too - I’m not sure he understood what the word means. Sometimes, I think these people have been given lines to rehearse and say to the media, and the extent to which they understand and believe in what they are saying is questionable.

But that’s not to say there is nothing real about the anger over this decision. I think the biggest issue for people here is the perceived violation of sovereignty. I talked to one taxi driver who said he wasn’t a fan of Bashir, “but even if the devil was our president, no one would approve of this ICC decision” because Sudan is a sovereign country and “we should be the ones to remove him.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user openDemocracy under a Creative Commons license.

Worldfocus correspondents Dave and Amy Marash traveled to Taiwan to learn more about the island and its progressing relations with mainland China.