Africans and the International Criminal Court

Sudan president Omar al-Bashir apparently sneaked out of South Africa on 15 June 2015 as a a court was ordering his arrest on an international arrest warrant issued under auspices of the International Criminal Court.

His plane took off from the same Waterkloof military airfield as that which the Gupta family used as a private airstrip in 2013. Are we to understand from South African government disclaimers that they knew northing about his departure that Waterkloof remains a private airstrip, available to any who can afford to pay up?

It is interesting how so many are taking this as standing up to the West. True, ICC has yet to prosecute anyone outside Africa. True, the major powers, US, Russia and China, have neither not signed up for or refuse to ratify the Statute of Rome.

Africa is the one continent where countries with a serious history of human rights abuse have signed up. Most of South America and a large fraction of Asia today no longer has a major human rights problem; same for much of Eastern Europe.

The first map, showing worldwide risk of human rights violation, looks reasonably accurate. Compare it with the second map of parties to the Statute of Rome. Red on the first map (poor human rights) mostly overlaps red on the second map (non-signatories of the Statute of Rome). The biggest exception is in Africa, where a lot of countries with a high risk of human rights transgression are signatories (green on the second map).

World Human Rights (source: Maplecroft)

Signatories (or not: red; yellow=signed, not ratified) to Statute of Rome (source:WikiPedia )

So this explains why Africa has apparently been the main target of the ICC.

In the rest of the world countries with a poor record did not sign up. Why? I strongly suspect it is because aid has been linked to signing up for the ICC.

If Africans do not like this, they have to ask themselves: why are we so dependent on aid? Why do we have so many corrupt, abusive regimes on our continent? Why do we consistently place the “rights” of political leaders above those of ordinary people?

A lot of this arises from a misplaced attempt at recovering lost dignity from the colonial era. Because colonial powers could act with impunity and no regard for justice, our leaders should be able to do so too. That is a terrible reaction to colonialism: it excuses all manner of corrupt and abusive behaviour that would no be tolerable if Africa had never been colonized. How can that liberate us from colonialism? It cannot. And it will not.

What can we as Africans do about it? The answer up to now has been to whinge when outsiders do something. This is our home. About bloody time we fixed it ourselves.

End of Gaddafi

For someone who styled himself as the king of kings and called his opponents rats, this was hardly a fitting end: being flushed out of  a drain and dying in doubtful circumstances in captivity.

What troubles me about Gaddafi's death is that it is not the form of "justice" one should seek in democratic society. Whether he was deliberately killed or died in cross fire as claimed by the provisional government we may never know. He should have been put on trial, and been made to answer for his actions, convenient though it may be for some to get him out of the way so expeditiously.

His death also leaves many questions unanswered. Many in the West will want to know more about his role in the Lockerbie bombing and in supporting causes like the IRA.

His apologists on the other hand will be as happy as governments of the US and UK that he is not around to interrogate about his questionable role in the "war on terror", including "rendition" of suspects to countries like Libya, where torture was legal.

Why has there been so much hypocrisy around Gaddafi and his Libya?

From the West, there's been an ambivalence between the "mad dog" appellation offered up by Reagan, and the desire to have bought dictators in resource-intensive parts of the world. When Gaddafi seemed to be out of control and willing to bankroll any anti-Western interest including the IRA, the "mad dog" label and isolation were relatively cheap options. While he controlled a fair amount of oil, Libya is not one of the biggest oil producers (about 2% of world output), and his output still reached world markets.

On the other hand, liberation movements failed to understand that he was just a military dictator who wrapped himself in leftist rhetoric. To some extent the infatuation of the South African ruling ANC with him is understandable if showing lack of judgement, because he was one of few world leaders who backed their struggle when it started in the 1960s, at a time when the West was cosy with apartheid. A similar misplaced affection for Robert Mugabe applies; the ANC on the whole appears to have forgotten that its liberation struggle specifically attacked the notion that human rights was purely an internal affair. More broadly, those on the left who continued to back him conveniently forgot his role in the "war on terror", and his equally convenient reversion to anti-Western rhetoric when NATO backed the opposition.

Libya has a tough battle ahead to establish a civil society on top of a state where previously only one person had any say. All those who backed Gaddafi in any form are equally guilty of perpetuating this sorry situation. NATO at least has helped effect change. Those on the left who supported Gaddafi on the basis of the enemy of my enemy is my friend need to sit back and think hard about what they really stand for. This man ran a vicious police state that tortured on a mass scale, killed many opponents and was a stooge of the West when it suited him.

What happens now should be up to the Libyan people -- as indeed should have been what happened before.

Libya: is the AU relevant?

Back in March, I wrote about how the Arab world was seeking a new modernity. The African Union, it seems is not.

While the Arab league was fairly quick to expel Libya, the AU treated the conflict in Libya as if it was a political dispute to which there was a political solution. I followed events on the Al Jazeera web site as well as twitter in the early weeks of the revolution and these unfiltered sources made it clear that this was a genuine grassroots uprising. What's more a major driving force in the continuation of the uprising was the certain knowledge that to be identified as a "rebel" in the Gaddafi world view, where everyone loved him, was to set yourself up to be killed.

Let's be clear on how this thing started. In line with the broader "Arab Spring" movement, peaceful protests broke out in Libya, and the regime responded by shooting at protesters with heavy calibre weapons. Once it became clear that things would not die down despite this, talk escalated to exterminating all rebels, and Gaddafi deployed tanks to shoot at civilians. In the early days of the conflict, the opposition was vastly outgunned, and the courage to face such odds is rare. I remember talking to someone at this stage whose view was that anyone prepared to machine-gun crowds couldn't be overthrown, and these people were not stopping at machine guns. They were firing anti-aircraft guns into crowds, and shelling residential districts.

I've been listening to various "experts" pontificating on the matter on South African talk shows and many come from the starting point that the AU had the right approach and the NATO intervention was excessive and unjustified. But look at the AU's track record. Zimbabwe and Kenya both had disputed elections. Rather than insist on correcting the results, both countries had solutions imposed on them that rewarded electoral fraud.

In South Africa, in particular, many in leadership view Gaddafi with affection because he supported liberation when western powers saw the apartheid South Africa as a "good" authoritarian regime, stopping the advance of communism. That the major liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), was a largely social democratic alliance (with a small communist membership) that at the time saw the British Labour Party as its role model was hardly indicative of communist tendencies, but such was the global politics of the time. Either you were in the communist camp or your weren't. The Cold War is now over, and such neat divides no longer apply. The Soviet Union, far from a utopian example of "scientific socialism" today is understood to be a corrupt state favouring a small elite, using harsh police state practices to suppress opposition. The West, on the other hand, far from promoting democratic values, has a long history of promoting authoritarian regimes.

In this post-Cold-War era, we need to abandon ideological preconception and see things for what they are.

Gaddafi was a bloodthirsty military dictator, who wrapped himself in a cloak of Africanist liberation rhetoric. The AU, by attempting to prolong his rule, has shown itself to be a creature of a bygone era. NATO, on the other hand, has intervened in a relatively principled way, doing the minimum to give the revolution the upper hand. Whether the end result is a truly free country remains to be seen, but comparing this with Iraq, where the UK, US and a rag-tag coalition went in on the basis of a lie is ridiculous. Rather than question why Libya, I question why not Barhain as well? Had the vicious suppression of that uprising been stopped too, what are the chances that the hesitant steps to reform in Syria, preceding the ongoing vicious crackdown, would have continued?

The ANC radically transformed the whole space of foreign policy by tearing down the notion that national sovereignty precluded intervention in the internal affairs of a country by outsiders. The struggle against apartheid did more than anything else to put human rights on the global agenda. Why, then, is the ANC today at the forefront of coddling dictators like Gaddafi and Mugabe in its own foreign policy? I can only see it as misplaced loyalty to old comrades in arms.