Governments around the world pronounced themselves stunned when Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese President, ordered foreign aid groups out of Darfur in protest at his indictment at the International Criminal Court.

They should not have been. For years now, Bashir has been harassing and blocking organisations from doing their work in Darfur, paranoid about what they would witness of army-backed atrocities there.

That aid, he will have calculated, is also helping sustain the very group fomenting a rebellion against his rule. Withdrawing it will weaken them further, but civilians will suffer the most. Hence the UN’s current investigation into whether Bashir’s expulsion order constitutes a war crime.

Denial of aid to civilians is a long-time dirty tactic of war, of the kind the Geneva Conventions were written to get rid of. What happens in areas more ostensibly at peace remains a greyer area, far harder to rule on or punish.

Since Bashir’s very public expulsion order, there have been other, less high-profile copycat orders, a creeping realisation that this is the last tool in the arsenal of the weak but defiant.

Nuclear-armed North Korea is certainly stronger than Sudan, but last year it caved to American offers of food aid and let in organisations like World Vision and Mercy Corps. Thousands more tonnes of American surplus grain go to the World Food Programme, the UN’s food agency, for distribution to the nine million North Koreans dependent on it for survival.

Pyongyang has also warned it will kick out WFP if the US does not drop a demand to include Korean speakers among its in-country staff. The move is part of a bid by the US and UN to ensure humanitarian food supplies are not siphoned off to the military.

This weekend, Taleban leaders in Pakistan’s Swat Valley told the UN’s news service, IRIN, that they too wanted the foreign non-governmental organisations out of their territory, citing cultural and religious beliefs. Islamabad recently bowed to the demands of Taleban insurgents to impose Sharia law in the area; now some of those insurgent leaders are arguing that non-Muslim aid is haram; forbidden under religious law.

Refusal of foreign aid is hardly unheard of. India refused it foreign aid in the aftermath of the tsunami on grounds of national pride, saying it could look after its own people. And aid is frequently given with political interests in mind – the Bush administration admitted as much in sketching out its own developmental agenda.

But conditions on the giving of life-saving humanitarian aid is widely considered unacceptable, as is refusing it when, like Sudan and North Korea, the government cannot fill the gaps itself. People will die because of these decisions, but their governments do not appear to care. They fear no censure at the ballot box and the starving make for poorer revolutionaries than the merely hungry.

In Darfur, Bashir’s enemies have now turned to the same game. In some of the more highly politicized camps, residents, corralled by Darfuri leaders, are protesting the government’s actions by refusing to accept help from the organisations that have not been expelled, like the UN.

The New York Times reported yesterday on a tense standoff brewing at Kalma, one of Darfur’s biggest and oldest camps, where water supplies are grinding to a halt because camp leaders will not allow fuel for the pumps to be delivered.

Four people have been reported dead in a meningitis outbreak, but camp leaders have barred government health workers from going into the camp to vaccinate. The Sudanese government called Kalma “an international red card over our government’s head” and reiterated that their move to expel more than a dozen aid groups is an “irreversible, sovereign” decision.

Darfuri rebels are about to get an international indictment of their own, for a deadly 2007 attack on UN peacekeepers. The court is keen to appear even-handed. Darfur has much of the world’s sympathy but if its leaders copy Bashir in denying their people aid, they deserve to lose it. There is no tactic more despicable. Going second does not excuse it.

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