IT LOOKS LIKE THE MOST SPECTACULAR DECISION in the history of international criminal law. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the fledgling International Criminal Court, last week indicted Sudan president Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide in the province of Darfur.

"I can no longer tolerate denial," said Moreno-Ocampo, a former Argentinian human rights lawyer, speaking to reporters last week at the headquarters of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

"The genocide is ongoing. Seventy-year-old women, six-year-old girls are raped.

"His al-Bashir's motives were largely political. His alibi was a counterinsurgency'. His intent was genocide."

If al-Bashir now sets foot in any one of the 106 states that have ratified the 1998 Treaty of Rome which established the ICC - the world's first permanent war crimes court, established by a United Nations Security Council resolution - it will be legally obliged to arrest and transport him to cells in the Dutch capital to be formally charged and tried.

The chief prosecutor's bold move, however, offers no quick relief to the well-documented pain and torment of the black African tribes of Darfur at the hands of the Sudan army and al-Bashir's Arab janjaweed Arabic for "evil spirits on horseback" militias. The ICC's wheels move at snail's pace.

Most immediately, the indictment has triggered an international diplomatic firestorm which, like the Zimbabwe crisis, is escalating into an almighty row in the UN Security Council.

China, al-Bashir's weapons supplier and most important economic partner, and Russia have already begun manoeuvring in the Security Council to prevent the prosecution.

In an emergency closed session in New York on Wednesday, the council began discussing the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes laid against al-Bashir.

Russian and Chinese delegates said they feared the prosecutor's request could jeopardise efforts to bring peace to Darfur, where an estimated 400,000 people in a population of 6.5 million have died in a five-year conflict and three million have become refugees, fleeing to camps within Darfur itself or across Sudan's western border into Chad.

Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Guangya, have apparently not been listening to General Martin Luther Agwai, the Nigerian Force Commander of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission (Unamid) in Darfur.

"I ask myself: where is the peace for us to keep?" he asked on Friday after seven of his men, from Rwanda, Ghana and Uganda, had been killed and 22 seriously wounded in a highly organised assault by 200 janjaweed gunmen on horseback and in 40 vehicles equipped with rifles, machine guns and an arsenal of heavy-calibre weaponry.

An angry Agwai added: "The unpalatable truth is that there is no peace in Darfur. This is a conflict that has now lasted as long as the second world war, with the prospects of a lasting settlement looking less likely than ever before."

The fragile Darfur Peace Agreement was in a coma almost from the moment it was signed on May 5, 2006. Tragically, violence against civilians intensified once all sides had put their signatures to the deal. For a few of the following months many voices across the world were raised in campaigns to "Save Darfur", which became a fashionable First World catchphrase before ennui set in while the Darfur killings and rapes continued.

Agwai's predicament mirrors the situation that confronted General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Unamir), in 1994. Anticipating Rwanda's Hutu government was about to embark upon mass killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, he appealed for international troop enforcements.

Both United States president Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan, then head of UN Peacekeeping Operations and later UN secretary-general, vetoed Dallaire's request.

In the following 100 days 800,000 unprotected Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered, along with some of Dallaire's handful of soldier peacekeepers from Ghana, Senegal, Uruguay and Belgium.

Agwai protested that so far he had been given only 7000 of the 26,000 soldiers and policemen he was promised. The force commander also said he has "none of the promised tactical helicopters that might have prevented the slaughter of our men. We remain desperately under-manned and poorly equipped".

He added: "Our long shopping list of missing equipment makes shameful reading. It should not take the loss of innocent lives to understand what is at stake here. We need to be reinforced urgently and given the proper equipment to enable us to complete our mission."

Moreno-Ocampo's move has been precipitated by the failure of the Darfur peace process, as spelled out by Agwai; by the world's impotent cries that "something must be done"; and by al-Bashir's refusal to hand over two men indicted by ICC 16 months ago in connection with atrocities in Darfur - janjaweed supreme commander Ali Kushyb and Sudan's deputy interior minister Ahmed Harun.

Al-Bashir responded by swearing "before Allah three times" that he would never extradite a Sudanese citizen to any foreign court, and then by promoting Harun to humanitarian affairs minister with special responsibility for humanitarian assistance to the people of Darfur.

A Security Council resolution in January this year, calling on al-Bashir to comply with the ICC by handing over Harun and Kushyb, had to be scrapped because of opposition from China and Russia, who both wield vetoes.

At the time, Moreno-Ocampo gave one example to Security Council ambassadors of a combined Sudan Army-janjaweed attack on October 8, 2007, on the small Darfur town of Muhajiriya in which 48 black African civilians praying in a mosque were rounded up and slaughtered.

Britain's UN ambassador, John Sawyers, blamed China for the blocking of that resolution, while Bushara Suleiman, justice spokesman of one of Darfur's rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, said the only thing that would stop the genocide would be the imposition of oil sanctions on Sudan.

"But China will never allow this," said Suleiman. "The Chinese have their veto and also have oil interests in Sudan."

In fact, China buys most of the 500,000 barrels of oil that Sudan produces each day and is al-Bashir's largest supplier of arms. Thousands of Chinese labourers have built three weapons factories near the Sudan capital, Khartoum, an oil refinery and a 950-mile pipeline that carries oil from the fields of central Sudan to a Red Sea terminal, where Chinese tankers queue to load the black gold.

The oil deal with China is worth nearly £5 billion a year to al-Bashir's government. China has also richly rewarded al-Bashir's armed forces with tanks, helicopters, fighter and bomber aircraft, howitzers, anti-personnel mines, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Holding people accountable for war crimes is not only the right thing to do morally, but it directly promotes peace and makes such future possible abuses less likely, argued John Prendergast, former senior adviser to the International Crisis Group but who now works for the Enough Project, which describes its mission as to "prevent genocide and mass atrocities by promoting peace, providing protection, and punishing the perpetrators".

Prendergast noted that Moreno-Ocampo's move against al-Bashir had set off "a chorus of hand-wringing among certain diplomats, academics and pundits who are now arguing that holding perpetrators of crimes against humanity accountable for their actions is unhelpful".

"It is baffling why anyone would think that acceding to the demands of war criminals is a sensible path to securing peace," said Prendergast. "But part of the reason Darfur has remained locked in crisis for years is that the international community has been slow to acknowledge what has always been painfully obvious: the janjaweed militias that have terrorised and decimated Darfur have been directed by the Sudanese government."

Elsewhere, especially in Khartoum, people argue that the indictment of al-Bashir will worsen the situation in Darfur, pull the rug from under the feet of Agwai's Unamid mission and endanger the lives of international humanitarian aid workers in Darfur.

Khartoum is making no secret of the fact it will put up the fight of its life. The counter-offensive will begin on the African Union and Arab League fronts - both of which scheduled emergency high-level meetings on the crisis at Sudan's request. Both are likely to back al-Bashir.

The 22-nation Arab League meeting began this weekend in Cairo. The league as a whole is loathe to see what it regards as the humiliation by the ICC of an Arab leader, although Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who are both fed up with al-Bashir for a host of reasons, have yet to make any firm commitment to support him following Moreno-Ocampo's announcement.

Many also question the ability of the fractious league to help al-Bashir in his confrontation with the ICC, especially since only three member countries are signatories to the court's founding treaty - Jordan, Djibouti and Comoros.

"All they can do is issue a statement of condemnation to console the Sudanese president," wrote Abdel-Rahman al-Rashid, a leading columnist for the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.

"We must remember the Arab League did not care about the extermination of 300,000 Darfuris. It even refused to stand for a moment's silence concerning the killings, displacements and burning."