THE HAGUE, March 4 – Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, for whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for war crimes in Darfur, has become the fourth serving head of state to be accused under international humanitarian law – and the first by the ICC.
Other cases:
CHARLES TAYLOR: Liberian president Charles Taylor was charged in March 2003 with war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the brutal 1991-2001 civil war in Sierra Leone in which some 120,000 people were killed.
Elected president in 1997, Taylor resigned in August 2003 and went into exile in Nigeria where he was arrested in March 2006.
His trial, which started in June 2007 before the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, is expected to conclude in 2009.
Taylor stands accused of arming, training and controlling Sierra Leone’s notorious Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels.
SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC: Elected president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in July 1997, Slobodan Milosevic was indicted in May 1999 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia between 1991 and 1999.
He resigned the presidency in October 2000 following an election defeat, and was arrested in April 2001.
A long-running trial was brought to a sudden end by Milosevic’s death in his cell in The Hague in March 2006.
MILAN MILUTINOVIC: The president of Serbia from December 1997 to December 2002, Milutinovic was indicted by the ICTY in May 1999 and surrendered to the tribunal in January 2003.
He was acquitted last week of war crimes committed in Kosovo following a trial that started in July 2006.
Milutinovic and five others, jailed for between 15 and 22 years, had been charged with the forced deportation of some 800,000 ethnic Albanians, and a "widespread or systematic campaign of terror and violence" in the 1998-99 Kosovo war.
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