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.

Australia and Xenophobia

In Australia, whenever a new leaky boat full of desperate asylum seekers shows up, it’s treated with hysteria in the media. If the government of the day doesn’t react with cruelty, it’s considered to be weak on border security. And every time the approach to dealing with asylum seekers wanders further from humanitarian norms, it’s lauded as a solution to he problem.

Well, is it? As former prime minister Malcolm Fraser put it:

no democratic Australia could ever impose penalties or hardships on refugees which could match the terror from which most of them flee

So even if deterrence could work, should Australia attempt that?

And, anyway, is the view that numbers spike when the policy softens and go down when it gets harsher valid?

Correlation isn’t causation. You have to look at the push factors as well, and those definitely are causation. More refugees at source = more arriving at destination. Nothing could be simpler.

Even with the latest increases the numbers are not that high by world standards. If you look at UNHCR stats, 2012 had the highest number of new refugees since 1999. Australian stats for boat arrivals peak in 1999-2000 when numbers at source previously peaked, and they shoot up again over the last year when the number of new refugees shot up.

Some refugee stats here show that Australia does not have a serious problem, and treating a relatively small number of arrivals as a huge crisis for national security is not warranted.

Why is it impossible for any party besides the Greens to be rational on this? Could it be because anything but xenophobic hysteria results in a media beat-up?

Here in South Africa, genuine illegal immigrants (mostly economic migrants from Zimbabwe) amount to 10% of the population, yet all sides of politics condemn xenophobia when it flares up. Australia only leads the world in one respect as far as refugees go: mainstreaming of xenophobia.

Anyway numbers don’t lie so let’s check them. The graph here shows the difference for each year between reported numbers for that year and the year before of refugees (I use the UNHCR’s refugee count, excluding categories like internally displaced persons and Palestinians who are less likely to arrive in a distant country) and boat arrivals in Australia. The UN numbers are for a calendar year, while the Australian reporting period is a financial year (1 July–30 June). This is not a bad thing however as a 6-month delay takes into account the time between a push factor and a boat arrival.

The graph illustrates that upticks in numbers arriving correspond closely to upticks in the number of refugees over the previous year. The green line is the difference between boat arrivals in Australia and the number the previous year, and the blue line is the difference between UNHCR reported numbers of refugees versus the previous year. The lines mostly correspond pretty well, with just the major uptick in refugees in 2006 failing to result in major change in boat arrivals. The 2006 increase may however have arisen from a reporting anomaly (see UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2006, Chapter 2, p  pp 25–26) rather than a major change in real refugee numbers.

Eyeballing data is risky: we should really do the stats. So let’s look at whether the data correlates. The correlation coefficient is statistically significant: r=0.56, and if we do a t-test for significance, the p-value is 0.006. So yes, this is a real correlation that explains the data well. And we can assign a cause to it, so we are not guilty of assigning causality to a coincidence.

So couldn’t the John Howard “Pacific Solution” actually be the cause of the decline in boat arrivals? That started in 2001 when the number of boat people hit a peak. So let’s mark that on the graph. The red arrow points to the 2001 data point where we can see that the push factors were already declining. And the number of boat arrivals also declined. Given that the correlation is also also strong before 2001 (0.60, though we don’t have enough data points for statistical significance, p=0.057), it is unlikely that being tough on asylum seekers actually had a significant chilling effect on boat arrivals. The only data point that lends comfort to xenophobia is the apparent 2006 increase in refugees but as we have seen that is not a real increase (mostly Iraqi refugees of the 2003 war in Syria and Jordan who had not previously been counted).

Anyway I present the data for you to make up your own mind. To me it looks pretty clear that being harsh on asylum seekers is nothing more than bad politics, dragging the political discourse down to the gutter. Mainstream politics, it seems is presented with no alternative but to go this route for fear of vilification by the commercial media. The Greens are the only party of significance that has resisted the politics of fear and xenophobia. Good on them. I hope they do well this election.

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Further Reading

The Guardian has some useful stats on refugees here.

The Angry African Response to Libyan Liberation

A group of 200 "prominent" South Africans have signed a letter objecting to the turn of events in Libya. This letter, titled "Libya, Africa And the New World Order - An Open Letter from Prominent Africans", is the most detailed apologia yet for the AU's position that there should be no outside intervention and only a "political" solution in Libya is acceptable

It's worth examining some of the claims in detail.

Our action to issue this letter is inspired by our desire, not to take sides, but to protect the sovereignty of Libya and the right of the Libyan people to choose their leaders and determine their own destiny.

Questionable. Failing to address the very real problems of the Gaddafi regime -- its total suppression of civil society, its lack of popular legitimacy and the extravagant lifestyle of the ruling elite who treated the country as a personal fiefdom -- is taking sides.

Libya is an African country.

That's clear. But it's also part of the Arab world, and the Arab League recognised this for what it was early on: a popular uprising being suppressed with brutal force.

When the UN Security Council adopted its Resolution 1973, it was aware of the AU decision which had been announced seven days earlier.

By deciding to ignore this fact, the Security Council further and consciously contributed to the subversion of international law as well as undermining the legitimacy of the UN in the eyes of the African people.

Or maybe the AU undermined its own legitimacy by failing to come up with an effective strategy. When this was all happening people were dying in large numbers, and there was absolutely no evidence that the regime was open to compromise. On the contrary, it repeatedly announced ceasefires and immediately violated them.

The Security Council allowed itself to be informed by what the International Crisis Group (ICG) in its June 6, 2011 Report on Libya characterises as the "more sensational reports that the regime was using its air force to slaughter demonstrators".

The letter writers conveniently ignore the next sentences in this report:

That said, the repression was real enough, and its brutality shocked even Libyans. It may also have backfired, prompting a growing number of people to take to the streets.

The ICG, while playing down some extreme claims of the violence against protesters, makes it clear that the Gaddafi regime was given to extreme brutality, totally suppressed civil society 

It [the UN] then proceeded to 'outsource' or 'sub-contract' the implementation of its resolutions to NATO, mandating this military alliance to act as a 'coalition of the willing'.

First, this kind of delegation is not without precedent. Much the same thing happened in Bosnia. Second, inserting the words "coalition of the willing" is a not-so-subtle attempt at invoking the memory of Iraq. The letter writers cannot directly make that connection of course because that would be dishonest, so why do so in a backhanded way? The Iraq war was was not authorised by the UN, and was launched on a pretext that turned out to be a lie.

Duly permitted by the Security Council, the two 'coalitions of the willing', NATO and the 'Contact Group', have effectively and practically rewritten Resolution 1973.

Since this is a Security Council resolution, why is it so offensive if the Security Council "permits" further steps to implement it? How does this square with the claim that the NATO action is not compliant with the resolution? Are we to assume that the major world powers on the Security Council, including Russia and China, are all dupes of the West?

The actions of its 'sub-contractors', NATO and the 'Contact Group', have positioned the UN as a partisan belligerent in the Libyan conflict, rather than a committed but neutral peacemaker standing equidistant from the Libyan armed factions.

When one of the parties in a conflict is in clear violation of international law and human rights, why should they expect equal treatment?

The George W. Bush war against Iraq began on March 20, 2003.

The following day, March 21, the UK newspaper, The Guardian, published an abbreviated article by the prominent US neo-conservative, Richard Perle, entitled "Thank God for the death of the UN".

Aha. The Iraq connection. But of course this happily ignores the fact that in Libya, the UN did mandate intervention.

Contrary to the provisions of the UN Charter, the UN Security Council authorised and has permitted the destruction and anarchy which has descended on the Libyan people.

Let's see now. The second point of the Preamble to the UN Charter says:

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and ...

How often has the UN failed to deliver on the "human rights" promise embedded in the charter? And that is where I take strong exception to the AU position. South African liberation movements, most notably the ANC, overturned the long-held position of non-interference in internal affairs of another country when human rights are violated. That reading of the UN Charter is not a popular one among world leaders, especially despots but also including those who have reason to truck with despots. South Africans should be at the forefront of promoting human rights-based foreign policy, yet "leading" South Africans are at the forefront of insisting on even-handed treatment of a military dictator.


Have we forgotten our own history so soon?

And then there are the issues quietly ignored in the letter. The defections of Libyan diplomats, some quite early in the uprising when it was by no means clear. The consistent message from Al Jazeera reporting, a news organisation that favours reform but cannot be called stooges of the West, that this was a genuine grass-roots uprising, met with brutal force. The recognition of the new ruling body by much of the rest of the world. And finally, we mustn't ignore the fact that the Libyan government had at its disposal the option to accept the AU roadmap unilaterally and implement a ceasefire when the opposition was weak. They didn't. And now they are history.


The real lesson in all this is that learning from history requires that you understand all of it, not just the bits you like, or that support your case. That this open letter campaign was led by a senior academic does him and his university no credit. If Africa is to rise from its current trashed position, we need leaders who engage with and understand the wider world, not inward-looking leaders who are threatened by any external challenge. And the old Pan-Africanist mindset where anything African was to be defended at all costs does no one but our enemies any good, because defending the indefensible does not build strength. It builds weakness.