Will the ICC Come After Qaddafi?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenashots/5459794919/in/set-72157625965791015/">Messay Shoakena</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last Wednesday, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, told the UN Security Council that the results of the investigation he’d requested into Libya were in: Members of the Qaddafi government had allegedly perpetrated crimes against humanity. Further, he said he was going to request three arrest warrants from the court. For whom, he wouldn’t say. Even when I asked him after he’d had a Bellini at the end of that long day.

Last night, Al Arabiya reported that two of the three warrants would be for Muammar Qaddafi and his son Saif. If true, this wouldn’t be the first time the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for a head of state. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was slapped with one in 2009 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and got another for genocide last year. Those warrants led Bashir to throw a bunch of aid workers out of his country, and isolated him from some parts of the international community. (Shortly after the first warrant was issued, he canceled a trip to neighboring Uganda, an ICC member state.)

UN Dispatch‘s Mark Leon Goldberg posits that this time, though, indicting a head of state wouldn’t really make any difference. “Qaddafi is already a man in hiding,” he writes, “so it is hard to see how this impending arrest warrant will have any near-term consequences for the situation on the ground in Libya.”

Ocampo, for his part, still won’t say if Qaddafi’s on the shitlist. “Don’t trust rumors,” he said simply when I asked him via email about the Al Arabiya report. But he would say that he thinks the repercussions of the soon-to-be-unveiled case will be huge. Tonight, I’m headed back to Europe to witness the preparations for further announcements about the case on next Monday.

The speed of the Libya case already makes it stand out from the court’s nine-year history. In the case of Sudan, the conflict went on for years, and then the Security Council deliberated for three months before referring the case to the ICC. In Libya? “Ten days of conflict, two days of discussion,” Ocampo likes to say. The next thing he said is the only thing I heard him repeat more frequently during our interview in New York last week: “The world is changing.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate