Mick Hartley

The efforts of Simon Tisdall at portraying Sudan's Omar al-Bashir as a man of peace, unfairly demonised by right-wing Americans, has finally paid off. The Guardian journo and assistant editor has secured an exclusive interview with the great man. It's splashed all over the front page: Conflict in Darfur is my Responsibility.

As exclusives go, this doesn't even start. It's not, as you might have been excused for thinking on reading the headline, a mea culpa by Bashir. On the contrary, it's exactly what you'd expect him to say, and what he's been saying for years:

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has said for the first time that he accepts full personal responsibility for the conflict in Darfur that left tens of thousands of people dead.

But in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, his first with a western news organisation since he was charged with genocide by the international criminal court (ICC), Bashir accuses the UN-backed court of "double standards" and conducting a "campaign of lies".

Britain and other western countries were pursuing a politically motivated vendetta against him with the ultimate aim of forcing regime change in Sudan as well as in neighbouring Libya, he said.

"Of course, I am the president so I am responsible about everything happening in the country," Bashir said when asked about the conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, where fighting is continuing despite international peace efforts.

"Everything happening, it is a responsibility. But what happened in Darfur, first of all, it was a traditional conflict taking place from the colonial days.

"As a government we fought the ones who were carrying arms against the state, but also some of the insurgents attacked some tribes … so we had human losses. But it is not close to the numbers being mentioned in the western media, these numbers are in fact being exaggerated for a reason," he said. "It is a duty for the government to fight the insurgents, but we did not fight the people of Darfur."

The UN estimates up to 300,000 people died and about 2.7 million were internally displaced as a result of fighting between government forces and their Janjaweed militia allies and the separatist rebel groups in Darfur that peaked in 2003-4. Sudan's government says about 10,000 people died and about 70,000 were displaced.

So the exclusive story here is not, Bashir accepts responsibility for the Darfur slaughter, but Britain's leading liberal newspaper gives fawning interview to genocidal dictator and allows him to deny his well-documented atrocities all over its front page.