Al-Bashir Response Paper

Sociological research has studied the implementation and effects of transitional justice mechanisms on societies recovering from mass atrocities like genocide, but little is known about the attitudes of victims before the transitional justice mechanisms are implemented. This article analyzes over 1,500 interview responses from Darfuri genocide victims living in refugee camps in eastern Chad to assess the relationship between their exposure to violence and their punitive attitudes towards perpetrators. I find that respondents with both familial and/or personal exposures to violence have higher odds of favoring the death penalty for Sudanese government officials and army commanders but that they have lower odds of choosing the same fate for …show more content…
Savelsberg (2015) emphasizes that classifying the mass atrocity in Darfur as genocide is monumentally important, as it criminalizes the violence and dictates the ways international bodies like the International Criminal Court responds. In fact, the ICC opened an investigation which resulted in the indictment of three Sudanese government officials , including the sitting president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. Al-Bashir—charged with multiple counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide—is the first sitting head of state indicted by the ICC. In late 2014, Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (2014) decided to table the investigation, citing the United Nations Security Council’s inaction and the ICC’s limited resources as causes for tabling all active investigations. The ICC’s inaction has allowed President Omar al-Bashir’s regime to continue the violence, marking thirteen years of destruction to the Darfuri