Omar al-Bashir

So the toss pot dictator of Sudan is the world's first leader to be convicted by the ICC while still in office.

Firstly, the objective morality that relates to the guy who co-ordinates genocide `35,000 violent deaths` calls the arrest warrunt the first step towards a triumphant victory against tyranny and the typically This is Africa indifference to life and suffering at the expense of hypocritial `liberators`.

Since the West have had a conscious idea of morality and justice it has been serially apathetic towards the sufferings in Africa (indeed, one can't help but question whether the only reason this was reported at all was for the ramifications of the oil markets). From British Empire colonial impositions to S. African apartheid, to Rwandan genocide to Zimbabwen tyranny at the hands of Mugabe, to Sierra Leone, to Etheopian famine, Kenyan drought, civil war in Central African Repb., the AIDS epidemic in Swaziland, the current displacement camps in Chad... There's no end to the amount of inhumanity we, as aware Westerners, have to account for. I can therefore, only hope that this arrest warrent for al-Bashir will set a new precedent in deeming what we see as acecptible to go on in the world. A message to dictators everywhere that ethenic cleansing, forced mass migration, war crimes, assasinations, torture, multilation, systematic rape and all other attrocities will not be tolerated by those who hold a belief that crimes against humans are crimes against humanity.

But for all my ideology and deliberate rhetoric, I know this attitude is naive. The West will remain ambivolent to these crimes. Like the man who watches another get kicked to death by chavs, he knows it's appalling and turns his head knowing that the challenge to intervene is too heavy to burden alone and not having the courage to ralleigh support. But it's not fear of intervention that ails the superhero West this time, but a diplomatic faux pas from the ICC.

The Sudanese Government will call this arrest warrent a conspiracy by the West for oil, regurgetating the same spin the liberalists used against Bush's invasion of Iraq. They'll claim the West will try to usurp the president and in doing so, al-Bashir will denounce and discredit the ICC's ruling and live in a country convinced of their president's relative right to rule.

I think it's a shame Iraq has tarnished the moral image of the need to intervene in international `incidents`, as our militray is towards breaking point and the reputation of the UN Security Council to keep the peace is all but ruined. Should those efforts have been focused towards Mugabe's Zimbabwe (as I argued at the time!) one can't help but feel that intervening in places like Sudan might be a more viable option.

Instead the only option left to this bastion of human rights we call the West is the flacid ICC paying lip service to justice.