And while the Arab League closes ranks to defend al-Bashir, the organization and its members have been appealing for international intervention in Gaza. After the recent Israeli invasion there, the League sent in legal experts to search for evidence of war crimes. Saudi Arabia also asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to probe whether Israeli forces used depleted-uranium weapons.

“The Arab League, I think properly, has tried to fight impunity in Gaza,” says Kenneth Roth, managing director of Human Rights Watch. “But it’s hard to square that with its stance for impunity in Sudan – it’s that impunity that’s em-boldened al-Bashir to go on killing.”

So if Sudan’s embattled president attended the Qatar summit, he likely basked in public support from his peers. In private, however, that support may not hold. “It’s possible that behind closed doors, an option such as an honorable exile in Saudi Arabia or Egypt may be raised,” says Abdallah Schleifer, a veteran Middle East analyst based in Cairo.

Schleifer believes several things are behind the Arab League’s public solidarity with al-Bashir, including defensiveness over perceived meddling by Western countries in Arab affairs, and an obsession with resolving human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.

In the long run, however, Roth and Goldstone say that indictments by international courts tend to be deeply delegitimizing. “Exactly the same arguments and difficulties were raised when Milosevic was indicted. But he ended up being there,” Goldstone says. “If state cooperation doesn’t come now, there’s going to come a time, it seems to me, when al-Bashir will likely end up in The Hague.”

Meanwhile, the lives of more than a million displaced Sudanese are hanging in the balance, threatening to eclipse Khartoum’s past brutality.

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