SUDANESE PRESIDENT OMAR AL BASHIR, THE SANDTON AFRICAN UNION (AU) SUMMIT AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT: DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL LEGALITY – THE BLESSINGS AND BURDENS OF SOUTH AFRICA’S LEADERSHIP OF AFRICA.
“‘Speak, Mr. South Africa, speak’…Initially, it was nice being called Mr. South Africa, but after a while it, too, started to irritate me, the nudging in particular”. Sihle Khumalo, Fatherless Sudan – A Nation at War, from his travelogue ‘Dark Continent My Black Arse’, page 167, 2007.
INTRODUCTION.
It seems the whole world expects South Africans to speak out loud and clear on the recent controversial attendance by the Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir of the summit of the African Union (AU), which was held in Sandton, Johannesburg this month.
Initially, it was nice to see that South Africans were expected by the world community to pronounce clearly, one way or the other, on what has become post-apartheid South Africa’s most contentious and polarising diplomatic incident, namely, the recent visit of president Omar Al Bashir to South Africa, in defiance of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s arrest warrant for war crimes, but at the invitation of the African Union (AU).
Like Sihle Khumalo’s Ethiopian fellow-traveler in a boksie enroute to Khartoum, Sudan, it now feels and sounds like the world is badgering us and nudging:
“Speak, Mr. South Africa, speak”.
But now, after a while, it is becoming highly irritating, – this expectation for South Africans to outshout one another -, especially the nudging by some powerful elite sections of our society, as well as by many in the West, to uncritically parrot certain opinions on the controversy, especially the opinions and foreign policy positions of the USA State Department, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Office of the European Union (EU) High Representative on Foreign Affairs and Security.
In his monumental tome, Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, the former USA Secretary of State and veteran statesman, welcomes the fact that our modern period and its international order are characterised by, among other things, the reality that never before “…had statesmen ever been obliged to conduct diplomacy in an environment where events can be experienced instantaneously and simultaneously by leaders and their publics.” (1995, page 808).
This is a positive development which Kissinger remarked on.
However.
We can safely assert that the diplomatic debacle around president Al Bashir’s attendance of the Sandton AU Summit represents the first time South Africa’s increasingly strong and vocal publics on foreign policy have engaged in an open tussle with South Africa’s official diplomatic establishment, particularly regarding whether the latter faithfully and truly is representative of the core national interests of South Africa abroad, especially within our African continent.
In this sense, if for nothing else, this moment represents a critical, unprecedented watershed for South Africa’s diplomacy.
In my Politicsweb article ‘Economic diplomacy in Africa’, which appeared on 12 January 2012, I wrote:
“Most African States loath and fear the mass popular appeal of economic diplomacy in Africa. They often equate its manifestations in the public discourse and arena with the disruptive force of an internal political insurgency. These States often tremble at the sight of popular mass energies that are unleashed by broad-based citizen participation in domestic and international diplomatic issues.
“For these States are used to the traditional conceptualisation of diplomacy in general as an elitist, rarified and exclusionary State activity, to which the masses must be granted only a key-hole peek, if that”.
Do developments and debates unfolding in South Africa today around the visit of president Al Bashir to South Africa to attend the Sandton AU Summit affirm the veracity of my statement?
What cannot be disputed is that post-apartheid South Africa, a democratic and constitutional order, and a well-respected global citizen and influential stakeholder, is the most fascinating diplomatic theater for the unfolding of the debates about the ICC’s arrest warrant for president Al Bashir.
This is not only because democratic South Africa is a member state of the ICC.
It is not even that post-apartheid South Africa is a founding member and inaugural host of the AU.
It is least so the fact that our courts issued a judgment ordering the South African government to prevent president Al Bashir from departing from South Africa.
What makes this diplomatic incident involving president Al Bashir so fascinating is the apartheid history of South Africa.
In his book ‘The World’s Worst Atrocities’, Nigel Cawthorne included South Africa’s Sharpeville massacre, committed by the apartheid regime of white prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd on 21 March 1960, alongside such atrocities as the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, Massacre in Katyn Forest, My Lai, ‘Rwanda’s Heart of Darkness’, and the Bombing of Dresden.
Nigel Cawthorne wrote that in reaction to the Sharpeville massacre, “…the South African government was unrepentant, though.” (2005, page 148).
He further wrote that:
“Over the next few days, the South African government gave their account of what had happened at Sharpeville. On 22 March, the Prime Minister, Dr Verwoerd, said that the riots had nothing to do with pass books or apartheid. They were periodic outbursts that might happen anywhere. He praised the police for their courage; the government claimed that they had been attacked by 20, 000 demonstrators, many of whom were armed. The Johannesburg Star reported that 80 per cent of the injured and (sic) been wounded below the belt; and that the police had merely been trying to wound the demonstrators, not to kill them. The South African papers also reported that the demonstrators had been armed. The Bishop of Johannesburg and white liberal organisations challenged this, raising money for lawyers to take statements from the injured and defend the protestors the police had arrested and charged with public order offences.” (Ibid).
What this snippet of South Africa’s apartheid history must remind us about is how the truth becomes the first casualty of ideological contestations over arguments about large-scale State atrocities, such as the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, the Darfur war crimes and even the Marikana massacre in post-apartheid South Africa.
More importantly, this apartheid history is a cautionary tale about how the media and other communication outlets can easily become complicit in not only the cover-up, but also the propagation of untruths during times of intense societal discords about large-scale State atrocities.
This history lesson from the Sharpeville massacre is worth bearing in mind, especially when there are some amongst us who are today inclined to think that former apartheid architect and prime minister during the Sharpeville massacre, Hendrik Verwoerd, was “smart”, as Allister Sparks, the Business Day columnist, recently so erroneously alleged.
Do “smart” politicians dodge accountability for, telling the truth about and deny the fact of committing a massacre, war crimes and crimes against humanity?
There should never be a similar temptation amongst us today to think that president Al Bashir of Sudan, just like the apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd, is “smart”, just because he was in attendance at the Sandton AU Summit few weeks ago, or because he is alleged to have perpetrated what is now called by some section of our commercial mass media as “The Great Escape” to evade the ICC’s arrest warrant.
All sides to this heated and divisive national debate on the ICC, Al Bashir and the Sandton AU Summit should strive for a balanced perspective, so that history does not judge us as harshly as Nigel Cawthorne’s book has judged the white media, such as the Johannesburg Star, in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre.
Nigel Cawthorne quoted from the report of the Commission of Enquiry set up by Verwoerd’s regime, in response to intense international pressure resulting from the Sharpeville massacre, which, although making devastating findings against the apartheid police at the time, “failed to conclude that the system of apartheid was to blame for the atrocity.” (Page 150, Ibid).
CHAPTER ONE.
Given the enormous complexities of the Sudan conflict, the temptation to over-simplify its dynamics, to reduce them to quotable sound-bites, is almost irresistible.
I myself have in the past been a victim of such temptation follies on the Sudan conflict, despite the fact that I once visted Sudan in the early 2000s.
In my Pretoria News article under the heading ‘Freedom fighter has no home in Tibet, or SA’, which appeared on 11 October 2011, and in defence of the Tibetan Dalai Lama’s right to be issued with a visa to attend Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s 80th birthday, I mischaracterised the conflict in Sudan thus:
“There is also little doubt that South Sudanese refugees from the conflict with Arab and Muslim Northern Sudan became the West’s favourite group of African refugees, especially among the American evangelicals, who saw these South Sudanese Christian refugees as a ready fodder for their “clash of civilization” between the Christian West and Islamic fundamentalism.”
I labored under these erroneous categories until I read Guy Arnold’s opus Africa – A Modern History. In it, Arnold wrote:
“It is true that the war in Sudan is usually described in terms of a struggle between Islam and Christianity with the side effect, no doubt pleasing to Christians who see the struggle in this light, of suggesting that the southern Christians have no coherent religions of their own. Instead, they are referred to with depressing regularity as “Christian and animist” (or even “Christian animist”). “Animist” is an archaic term with little descriptive value. In its original sense it referred to a theory of the origin of primitive religion. It has since been adapted as a pseudo-scientific replacement for “pagan”, to avoid the latter’s pejorative overtones acquired from centuries of Christian propaganda”. (2005, page 652).
Arnold further disapprovingly quotes the eminent American sociologist, Samuel P. Huntington, who, in his book Clash of Civilisations, stated that:
“Cleft countries that territorially bestride the fault lines between civilisations face particular problems maintaining their unity. In Sudan, civil war has gone on for decades between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south” and that “the bloodiest Muslim-Christian war has been in Sudan, which has gone on for decades and produced hundreds of thousands of casualties;” (page 651, ibid).
There is, very likely, also a growing influence of such erroneous categorisations about the Sudan conflict, which are gaining traction in the ongoing debates about president Al Bashir, the ICC and the Sandton AU Summit in South Africa at the current juncture, and which are, to again quote Arnold, “…no doubt pleasing to Christians who see the struggle in this light…”
Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” interpretation of the long-running conflict in Sudan became the boilerplate for the numerous articles by the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has even undertaken a number of visits to the Horn of Africa region.
Mahmood Mamdani, in his brilliant London Review of Books article on the Sudan conflict, under the heading ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War and Insuegency’, which appeared on 08 March 2007, wrote:
“The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention”.
It is possible that there are many in the West, as in South Africa, who reckon that in the absence of ideal and conducive circumstances under which western military intervention would be less disastrous than such ill-fated and disastrous military interventions in Iraq and Libya in the past, the arrest warrant on president Al Bashir of Sudan issued by the ICC is the best next thing, and that any country, like South Africa, or any regional organization, like the AU, which stands in the way of this second best route to deal with the government of Sudan and its leader, president Al Bashir, must be opposed with all available media force and be named and shamed to the whole world.
Interestingly, and bearing in mind the appalling role white media under apartheid played in covering up the truth about the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, it is critical to remember what Mamdani wrote about the role of the media on the Darfur conflict.
Mamdani wrote:
“Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornographic violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome details and chronicling the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer”.
Earlier in the article, Mamdani blasted New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof for stating that:
“The killings are being orchestrated by ‘the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massaliet and Fur tribes'”
There is no doubt that Nicholas Kristof’s highly jaundiced Darfur ‘celebrity’ New York Times journalism, which purposively racialised Darfur’s conflict in a highly charged manner, has influenced much of the thinking of the western and South African mass commercial media, the intellectual elites and civil society’s understanding and interpretation of the conflict.
This context provided by Mamdani is not unimportant in understanding the debate currently happening in South Africa about the visit of Sudanese president Al Bashir to the Sandton AU summit.
CHAPTER TWO.
The impulse to over-simplify the debate about the ICC’s arrest warrant for president Al Bashir, and the alleged “failure” of our government to execute the arrest, and to reduce it to catchy newspaper headlines, harks back to the danger of over-romantisation, and consequent ideological choosing, of either side in the Darfur conflict.
To some extent, this is an understandable human impulse.
In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies – The Spell of Plato, Karl Popper, in an attempt to distil some of ancient Greek philosopher Socrates’ teachings, wrote:
“There is more in man, a divine spark, reason; and a love of truth, of kindness, humanness, a love of beauty and of goodness. It is these that make a man’s life worth while”. (2005, page 203).
Yet in his Political Theory And The Modern State, David Held, in an attempt to distil some of the meanings of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, wrote:
“In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes set out his argument in a highly systematic manner…Human beings, Hobbes contended, are moved by desires and aversions which generate a state of perpetual restlessness. Seeking always ‘more intense delight’, they are profoundly self-interested; a deep-rooted psychological egoism limits the possibilities for human cooperation. In order to fulfill their desires, human beings (although in different ways and degrees) seek power. And because the power gained by one ‘resisteth and hindreth the power of another’, conflicts of interest are inevitable: they are a fact of nature. The struggle for power, for no other reason than self-preservation and self-interest (however disguised by rationalization) defines the human condition”. (1989, page 15).
Thus Karl Popper’s “divine spark, reason” in man, which “make man’s life worth while”, clash with David Held’s “deep-rooted psychological egoism”, which “limits the possibilities for human cooperation”.
A Manichean world-view thus ensued.
I believe that South Africans’ varied reactions to the debacle over the ICC’s arrest warrant for president Al Bashir whilst he was attending the Sandton AU summit, is a victim of this Manichean view of the Darfur conflict, president Al Bashir’s role in it, as well as the ICC’s arrest warrant for president Al Bashir.
But it is interesting to note that one of the most influential foreign policy think-tanks in the West and the world, International Crisis Group (ICG) strongly, although implicitly, advised against this often very unhelpful binary, as well as bifurcated, view of the Darfur conflict and the complicity of Sudanese president Al Bashir in it.
In its Africa Report Number 211 of 27 January 2014, under the heading ‘Sudan’s Spreading Conflict (III): The Limits of Darfur’s Peace Process’, the ICG stated:
“The ruling National Congress Party (NCP), of course needs to be part of the process as well: President Omar al-Bashir is a key to how comprehensive and ultimately successful it might be. If they agree to radical reform, the international community can help by offering incentives, provided Bashir and the NCP meet specific, irreversible benchmarks, such as those Crisis Group set out as early as 2009, and verifiably continue the transition process.
“This might defer the legal process underway to determine whether Bashir is responsible for atrocity crimes, but would be necessary to end decades of chronic conflict – and perhaps save Sudan’s unity.
“It would, therefore, be the exceptional situation for which Article 16 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was devised”.
It is important to parse some of the seminal assertions of the International Crisis Group (ICG) in its Africa Report Number 211 quoted above.
To start with, the Rome Statute’s Article 16 the ICG refers to states the following:
“Article 16
Deferral of investigation or prosecution.
No investigation or prosecution may be commenced or proceeded with under this Statute for a period of 12 months after the Security Council, in a resolution adopted under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, has requested the Court to that effect; that request may be renewed by the Council under the same conditions”.
Secondly, it is worth while to note that the ICG describes president Omar al-Bashir as “a key to how comprehensive and ultimately successful” Darfur’s Peace Process “might be”.
Third, the ICG envisages a situation where, in the interest of doing everything “to save Sudan’s unity” and “to end decades of chronic conflict”, it might be necessary “to defer the legal process underway to determine whether Bashir is responsible for atrocity crimes”.
Fourth, the ICG envisages a situation happening in which the international community engages with president Al Bashir, his ruling NCP and his government to ensure that these agree “to radical reform”, and “meet specific, irreversible benchmarks”, and also “verifiably continue the transition process”.
And lastly, the ICG report contemplates a packet of measures that may be used to incentivize president Al Bashir, his ruling NCP and his government to cooperate with the international community regarding Darfur’s Peace Process.
It is really hard to fathom how leading countries in the West, especially the USA, – a modern-day Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes -, led by its first black, African American president, Barack Obama, and some elite sections of the South African society, have not engaged with and publicly rebutted these suggested approaches to president Al Bashit and Darfur conflict, as well as to the ICC’s arrest warrant for president Al Bashir, put forward by the ICG; yet they cannot accept a situation where South Africa and the AU embark on and pursue a path similar to the recommendations of the ICG, including inviting president Al Bashir to AU summits, for an example.
This patently smacks of neo-colonial tendecies and crude, colonial-era racism, quite frankly.
It is partly for this reason that in my Politicsweb article ‘Not Yet Uhuru: Uhuru Kenyatta, SA Diplomacy and International Legality’, which appered on 23 October 2013, I wrote that:
“And so, as SA and AU fight in the corner of Kenyan leaders against the ICC and the West, which I think and believe is in fact a very good and necessary fight – or more correctly, from the personal point of view, an imperative proxy fight against the West’s omnipresent neo-colonial agenda in Africa -, they should be mindful that there is a very difficult political discussion that the AU leaders still have to conduct with the leaders of Kenya about the political future of their country”.
Nothing exposes the “omnipresent neo-colonial agenda” in the current South African debate about the visit of president Al Bashit to our country more than the following facts:
First, both Sudanese president Al Bashir and USA Secretary of State, John Kerry, respectively, attended the recent inauguration of newly-elected Nigerian president Buhari in Lagos, Nigeria. Even some of Washington’s media covering the USA State Department questioned why the USA did not create the same diplomatic kerfufle about the need for Nigeria to arrest president Bashir and to transfer him to the ICC, in compliance with the ICC’s arrest warrant, as the USA did regarding president Al Bashir’s visit to South Africa.
Questioned about this startling fact at a USA State Department press briefing during the stay of president Al Bashir in South Africa to attend the Sandton AU summit, the spokesman of the State Department, the inimitable Jeff Rathke, just blabbered some unintelligent droll diplomatic speak meant to offer answers to follow-up questions from journalists covering the USA State Department. (See USA State Department website for a transcript of this hilarious and embarrassing USA diplomatic briefing to the media on president Al Bashir’s visit to South Africa to attend the Sandton AU summit).
But the moment president Al Bashir arrived in South Africa to attend the Sandton AU summit, all hell broke loose: The USA and other western countries mobilised international and South African public opinion to bring pressure to bear on the South African government to arrest president Al Bashir.
Why didn’t the USA Secretary of State call on the Nigerian government to execute the ICC’s arrest warrant on president Al Bashir whilst he was attending the inauguration of president Buhari, just few weeks before president Al Bashir came to South Africa to attend the Sandton AU summit?
Why didn’t the ICC and the international community put pressure on the Nigerian government to prevent president Al Bashir from leaving Nigeria, until he was transferred to the ICC, as per the ICC’s arrest warrant?
After all, Nigeria, like South Africa, is a signatory of the Rome Statute and a member state of the ICC.
Secondly, whilst the USA is determined to prevent South Africa and the AU collaborating with president Al Bashir, it is more than happy to collaborate with Sudan as a member of the USA-supported and Saudi Arabia-led military alliance pounding the Middle East’s poorest and least developed country, Yemen, and its Shia-aligned Houthi tribesmen and fighters.
This is how the Guardian, UK, article of 26 March 2015, under the heading ‘Saudi Arabia launches Yemen air strikes as alliance builds against Houthi rebels’ described this USA move:
“The US has confirmed its support for an extraordinary international military alliance that is emerging to counter Houthi rebel advances in Yemen…The US was providing ‘logistical and inteligence’ support to the Saudi-led forces attacking the rebels, the White House announced.
The Guardian article further stated:
“Al Arabiya also said planes from Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain were taking part in the operation”.
To make it abundantly clear: Here is a situation in which planes from Sudan, whose armed forces are commanded by president Al Bashir, take part in the USA-supported, – (by logistics and intelligence) -, and Saudi-led military alliance to bomb the day lights out of Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Yet the USA and other western countries, and their flunkies in South Africa, are up in arms over the fact that the South African government permitted the president of the same Sudan to undertake a visit to South Africa, not to connive and collaborate to bomb any poor and least developed country, but to attend an AU summit to discuss African women’s development and economic integration of SADC, the East African Community and COMESA.
For the USA and other western countries, this logic goes, it is fine for president Al Bashir to send his military planes to join a bombing campaign, unsanctioned by the UN, to pulverize the poor but heroic Arab country of Yemen; but it is out of question for Sudan’s president to be permitted to attend an AU summit in South Africa to discuss the advancement and promotion of universal human rights, peace, stability, security and development in Africa.
The sheer outrageousness and chicanery of this western thinking and double standards represent nothing but blatant neo-colonialism and racism towards post-apartheid South Africa, the rest of Africa and the AU.
It is totally sickening to the very core of one’s African humanism.
It is a neo-colonial approach to African countries, the AU and South Africa which should be rejected with the stale-dog’s-vomit-covered contempt it deserves.
For a second, just juxtaposition the Darfur conflict with the ongoing USA-supported and Saudi Arabia-led military campaign, involving a whole coalition of very rich countries, to pulverize poor Yemen.
The war crimes and crimes against humanity of the Omar Al Bashir government in Darfur conflict have rightly outraged the conscience of the whole world, including that of the ICC, the USA administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama, and of powerful elite and media sections in South Africa.
Hence the recent deafening clamor during the Sandton AU Summit this month to have the ICC’s arrest warrant executed by our government on president Al Bashir.
But where is the same outrage in the same circles, including in South Africa, about the ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the erasing of the UNESCO-proclaimed world heritage Old City in Sana’a, the Yemen capital, taking place now, and beamed around the world by cable news?
Is it because the carpet bombing of Yemen is done by the USA-supported and Saudi-led military alliance of some of the world’s richest and most powerful nations against one of the poorest and most hapless countries of the world?
Even more bizarrely, the New York Times of 17 June 2015, under the heading ‘US Lags in Efforts to Rein In Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Critics Say’ states that:
“…the United States now relies on Sudan for intelligence cooperation…Sudanese ministers have visited Washington in recent months, and in its latest report on counterterrorism, the State Department says that Mr. Bashir’s government has taken steps to restrain jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda, from using its territory as a logistics base”.
The most suitable term to describe this unreliable behavior by the USA is “crosstitution”, a South African parliamentary neologism that combines parliamentary floor crossing and a word denoting human kind’s oldest profession.
To compound an already intolerable situation, the USA signed onto the Rome Statute that set up the ICC, but at the last minute chickened and pulled out when it could not rail-road other ICC member states to grant its military personnel serving abroad the Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs), so that, in the event these American servicemen and women commit, lo and behold, war crimes and other atrocities abroad, they are not referred to the ICC for criminal prosecution.
So the USA leaders can make the bizarre call to South Africa to comply with the ICC’s request for the arrest of president Al Bashir, in line with South Africa’s international obligations as the ICC member state, yet neither president George W Bush, nor president Barack Obama, can, respectively, be held accountable before the ICC for war crimes and for other crimes against humanity committed during the USA occupation of Iraq, and during NATO’s illegal and rogue aerial bombardment of Libya to effect “regime change” intended to dislodge former Libyan leader Colonel Muamar Gaddafi.
Bear in mind that Sudan too, like the USA, China, Russia, (who are all UN Security Council veto-wielding permanent members who referred Sudan to the ICC) -, India, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba and others, is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, did not ratify them and thus is not ICC member state.
The USA uses this argument that it is a non-ICC member state to shield itself from the international legal writ of the ICC, yet sees nothing wrong in participating, like China and Russia, as a UN Security Council veto-wielding permanent member in the UN Security Council deliberations which consequently referred the head of state of Sudan, a non-Rome Statute signatory, to the ICC.
A viler and more dastardly Leviathanian abuse of global power, as conceived by Thomas Hobbes, is hard to imagine.
The USA is surely giving the ICC’s international legal standing a bad name, if not a middle finger, and undermines it, especially in Africa and within the AU, whilst it bizarrely provides the ICC, which it steadfastly refuses to join, with considerable dollar support.
No wonder there is such an intense wide-spread ill-feeling across Africa against the ICC, and against the USA’s nauseating international legal casuistry over Sudanese president Al Bashir’s indictment by the ICC.
The USA, other western countries and their flunkies in South Africa should rather favorably reconsider the sensible path recommended last year by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in its Africa Report Number 211.
CONCLUSION.
I concluded my Pretoria News article of 11 October 2011, under the heading ‘Freedom fighter has no home in Tibet, or SA’ by asking:
“When did our moral compass, courage and diplomatic consistency stop us dealing with historical facts as they are, without fear or favour?’
I am delighted to note that with regard to how the South African government of president Jacob Zuma extended diplomatic immunity to the African Union (AU) and all its member states’ heads of state and or government, including to Sudan’s president Omar Al Bashir, without fear or favour, this has enabled us to regain our moral compass, courage and diplomatic consistency, which we momentarily lost during the sordid diplomatic saga involving Tibet Dalai Lama’s putative but ultimately aborted and abandoned attempts to visit South Africa.
This is in light of the salutary fact that South Africa has long been a signatory to the 1961 Geneva Convention on Diplomatic Immunity and Privileges.
The fact of the matter is that South Africa became a signatory to the Geneva Convention on Diplomatic Immunity very long before the coming into being of the Rome Statute, which set up the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The granting of diplomatic immunity by states and multilateral, inter-state organisations, like the UN and the AU, is at the very core of our modern international system, globalization, worldwide interconnectedness and the ability of modern states to conduct and execute diplomatic exchanges, in peace and unmolested.
The simple truth is that even the ICC itself would not function properly and optimally, if that, in the world where states flout the Geneva Convention on Immunity and Privileges.
This Geneva Convention on Immunity is the bedrock on which the entire architecture of international jurisprudence, including the International Court of Justice and the ICC, both in The Hague, and both which interact with the world’s diplomats and embassies, including from South Africa and the rest of the African continent, is designed, thanks God.
I should know because I was previously South Africa’s diplomat based at the United Nations (UN) in New York and Geneva, and also attended the OAU meetings in Ethiopia, as well as being part of the South African delegation to the International Court of Justice on whether Israel’s Wall is an Apartheid Wall, during which time I took a tour of the newly-minted HQ of the International Criminal Court (ICC) nearby.
And so, as the rest of the world continues to nudge us and to say “speak Mr. South Africa, speak”, we should never cease to emphasise that Africa, the African Diaspora and the African Union (AU) remain, and will always remain, the very core of our world-view, our universe and the purpose of our existence as post-apartheid democratic South Africa founded by Nelson Mandela.
And with the AU rightfully asserting its pre-eminence over African affairs, including on the conflict in Sudan, is Sihle Khumalo still justified to refer to Sudan as “fatherless Sudan”?
We should all, as a united South African nation, never ever be intimidated by any temporal, worldly power, or any combination of such temporal powers, however mighty they fancy themselves to be, from asserting, reiterating and celebrating the eternal truism that Africa is the gravitational center of South Africa’s world-admired diplomacy.
We should not be apologetic about this immutable principle in our domestic and diplomatic interactions.
This is the best path towards South Africa’s contribution to universal peace, development, stability, and just, humane and fair international legality.
This is South Africa’s blessing in serving Africa.
This is the noblest legacy we can bequeath our future generations.
The criticism we face today in extending diplomatic immunity to the recent Sandton AU summit is one of the burdens of South Africa’s leadership of Africa we should carry with pride.
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22nd Cedia Blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
20 June 2015
Written by:
Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
SEDIA Research NOT FOR PROFIT COMPANY (NPC)
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