Human rights fundamentalism: 1
is a crime in itself. As Mamdani shows, simplistic (and inconsistent) responses to the problems of Darfur risk creating deeper crisis not only for the people of Sudan but for available instruments of international justice. As in the Nuremberg trials which placed the lens on Nazi atrocities without addressing the complicities of American and other Western capitalists, without whose collusion the Nazi project would not have advanced to the level it did, the powerful obscure their active role in genocide.
The US which has blatantly violated all conventions and protocols in its "war on terror", (including a brazen attack on the rights of its own people), remains above the attention of the ICC. The reputational risk to the ICC in its selective pursuance of some aggressors, is indeed great. Al Bashir must be made accountable for his actions and ommissions, but so too must the others whose hands in the Darfur conflict are not as invisible as they would prefer.