Libyans celebrate in the Benghazi courthouse on Monday after hearing news of an arrest warrant against Moammar Gadhafi.
The embattled Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Gadhafi's grim choice of "fight or flight" just got more complicated. Holed up in Tripoli, Col. Gadhafi is now an indicted war criminal, following arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Unless Col. Gadhafi turns himself in, the arrest warrants seem unlikely to be served any time soon.
After 41 years of ruthless and often bizarrely unpredictable rule, Col. Gadhafi has shown no interest in quitting or seeking sanctuary in the handful of countries that still might be willing to offer him safe haven, despite the increasingly shrill calls from U.S. President Barack Obama and other Western leaders that it is past time for him to step down. The ICC warrants, also issued for Col. Gadhafi's son Saif and Abdullah Senussi, the feared chief of military intelligence, should strip the Libyan despot of various bolt holes.
Still, the handful of countries befriended by Col. Gadhafi that might offer him refuge is small. Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, another rogue state ruled by an international pariah, has been touted as a possible retirement spot. So is Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez has extolled Col. Gadhafi as a great leader and traded honours with him.
"The reality is some tin pot dictator of like calibre will give him refuge and the ICC warrants won't change that," said Stuart Hendin, a leading Canadian expert on the court. However, even seemingly safe havens can change. After more than a decade of not-so-secret hiding, Serbia handed former general Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide, over to an international tribunal last month.
For NATO, currently waging an air war aimed at destroying Col. Gadhafi's capacity to repress his own citizens and defeat the ill-trained rebels seeking to oust him, the ICC warrants add another level of complexity to a bombing campaign that marked its 100th day Monday. They "reinforce the reason for NATO's mission to protect the Libyan people from Gadhafi's forces," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, adding "NATO is more determined than ever to keep up the pressure."
But regime change isn't part of NATO's mandate and Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander of coalition forces, has said he would be happy to see Col. Gadhafi leave. NATO routinely allows flights - with delegations of diplomats, for instance - in and out of Tripoli and has control of Libyan airspace. So NATO could either allow - and thus ignore ICC warrants - or permit Col. Gadhafi to flee, putting the governments of its member nations, including Canada, in a quandary. Letting Col. Gadhafi escape might shorten the war and reduce the bloodshed, but it would also mean flouting ICC warrants.
Few expect the Libyan leader to pay any attention to the warrants. Others, notably Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the ICC on genocide charges linked to a decade of brutal killings and repression in Darfur, is due to visit China this week. Beijing, a major investor in Sudan's oil as part of China's big trading play in Africa, ignores ICC warrants because it isn't a party to the treaty creating the court. Col. Gadhafi is only the second sitting head of state indicted by the ICC.
In Benghazi and other rebel-held areas in eastern Libya, the reaction to Col. Gadhafi's indictment was simpler. Joyful Libyans demonstrated, some with placards showing the dictator's neck in a noose.