20100724
reuters

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - President Omar Hassan al-Bashir returned to Sudan on Friday after defying indictment for genocide by visiting Chad, a party to the International Criminal Court and so in theory obliged to arrest him.

Chadian President Idriss Deby instead gave a red-carpet welcome to Bashir, who spent three days in N'Djamena scoring a propaganda coup and exposing the ICC's key weakness -- its lack of a mechanism to arrest war crimes suspects.

Bashir landed at Khartoum airport on Friday evening and he shook hands with around a dozen ministers.

Foreign Minister Ali Karti, returning from Chad with Bashir, blasted European nations -- key supporters of the court -- and Washington which, despite failing to join the ICC itself, has said Sudan should cooperate with The Hague-based institution.

"This court has become just a European court (formed) to judge Africans," Karti told reporters. "Now the Africans have strongly rejected it and that is what is important to us."

The African Union has told its member states not to cooperate with the ICC, accusing the court of targeting the continent.

Deby voiced support for the court during a proxy war with Sudan which began in 2003 but, after a rapprochement this year with Bashir, Sudanese officials said they were confident he would not hand him over to the ICC.

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Bashir in 2009 accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity during a counter-insurgency campaign in the western Darfur region which borders Chad. This month it added genocide to the charges.

Bashir ridicules the court and has wooed African and Arab support to defy the arrest warrant, the first the court has issued for a sitting head of state.