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Officials deny Turkey pressed Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir to cancel trip
Bashir canceled his visit at the last minute on Sunday evening, citing domestic issues that he needed to deal with. The decision appeared to relieve Turkey, amid Western concerns over his visit, which would have been the third in the last two years.
The Sudanese delegation attending the İstanbul meeting, speaking with the Anatolia news agency on Monday, made it clear that Turkey did not pose any “recommendation or suggestion” to Bashir to not attend the summit. The reason behind Bashir’s last-minute decision is “entirely about domestic matters, since he has been dealing with peace talks in Sudan,” officials from the Sudanese delegation told Anatolia. “Sudan has made the statement on this issue. This is completely their own decision,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told reporters later in the day.
Bashir, who in March became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, was among heads of state and government that İstanbul planned to host on Monday for an economic summit during the 25th session of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) of the OIC.
Early last week, Sudanese officials informed Ankara that Bashir would attend the conference in İstanbul. After Bashir’s intention to attend the summit was disclosed, the international community urged Turkey not to host Bashir, while the European Union on Thursday requested that Turkey reconsider its decision to invite Bashir. On Friday, refraining from criticizing Turkey for its willingness to allow Bashir to attend the OIC summit in İstanbul, Washington underlined the importance it attached to any messages given to Bashir by the Turkish leadership during the former’s visit.
Eventually, Bashir called President Abdullah Gül on Sunday evening and said he would not attend the summit in İstanbul, citing domestic problems in his country and a monthly strategic cooperation meeting between his country and Egypt scheduled to be held on Tuesday as reasons for his decision.
Sudan’s state news agency Suna, meanwhile, reported that Bashir had postponed his trip to return to Khartoum to discuss a deadlock over election laws with his coalition partners, the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.
In remarks indicating reluctance to host Bashir, Turkish officials underlined in the last few days that the invitation to Bashir was not sent by Turkey, but by the OIC, while also noting that Gül hadn’t sent any personal invitation to any particular head of state and government since it was an OIC event. Gül hadn’t planned any bilateral meeting with Bashir on the sidelines of the summit.
The ICC indicted Bashir in March on seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but stopped short of including a charge of genocide. The United Nations says as many as 300,000 people have been killed since conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003, although Sudan rejects that figure.
In remarks broadcast on Sunday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismissed accusations of genocide against Bashir, saying in controversial remarks that a Muslim cannot commit genocide. He also said the situation in Gaza, for which he has severely blamed Israel, was different from the situation in Darfur. On Monday, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the Turkish secretary-general of the OIC, said there was a humanitarian crisis in Darfur and that the Sudanese government had moral and legal responsibility, but added that it was wrong to talk about genocide.
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