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President Mugabe

Lovemore Ranga Mataire: Senior Writer
When the then AU chair President Mugabe called for the continent to pull out of the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) many in the right wing corridors dismissed his call as mere political grandstanding.However, in an interesting turn of events South Africa last week became the second country in a week to announce that its withdrawal from the ICC days after Burundi had taken the same move.

Far from being mere political grandstanding, President Mugabe’s reasoning for calling for a withdrawal was and is informed by the intransigent conduct of the international body in only targeting African leaders.

Speaking at the closing ceremony of the 24th AU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last year, President Mugabe made it clear that the continent needed to consider pulling out of the ICC which in his view was being used by the West as an instrument to malign African leaders.

President Mugabe at the time said; “My concern is on uplifting the life of our people, giving them something that will raise their standard of living. If Europe comes in the spirit of cooperation and not the spirit to control us and control our ways, they will be very welcome.”

The call by President Mugabe came on the heels of another initiative by AU member-states to establish an African Court of Justice and Human Rights. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta whose case was withdrawn by the ICC seemed to be the foremost advocate for such a court, which he said was fundamental in cementing the idea of finding African solutions to African problems.

Barely a year after Presidents Mugabe and Kenyatta had led the call for an independent home-grown body to deal with issues of human rights nature; South Africa has formally initiated its pull out from the ICC. Given South Africa’s geo-political influence, there is a likelihood of an exodus exit by other African countries who also feel hamstrung by a court that does not serve their interests.

Immediately after South Africa announced its formal request for pull out, News 24, quoted Allan Ngari, a researcher at the South African Institute of Security Studies, saying more African countries were likely to follow on the example of the Rainbow Nation.

Ngari said South Africa’s pulling out of the ICC was not surprising and would trigger an exit by other countries that feel maligned by the international body. However, Ngari’s view that pulling out of the ICC was a travesty of justice and would promote impunity among African leaders is nothing but self-serving amnesia for an employee of an organisation largely funded by Western donors.

International relations and labour law expert Rutendo Mudarikwa could not have put it any better when she said most people who supported Africa’s continued membership of the ICC tend to skirt around the idea that US, a county that prides itself as the paragon of democratic ideals was not part of the Rome Statues that gave birth to the international judicial institution.

In Mudarikwa’s assessment, “President Mugabe like all other African leaders, is informed by a conscious sense of history to take a stand against ICC’s selective application of justice targeting mainly African leaders while completely ignoring the brutality of leaders of European descent.”

Indeed, the ICC effectively came into being on March 11, 2003 as a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. It derives its origins from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that tried Nazi war criminals after World War 11.

The trials led to the UN proposal for a permanent successor court but the proposal was stalled in the 1950s partly because of the Cold War. The Trinidad and Tobago conferences resulted in the United Nations General Assembly convening the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of the Plenipotentiaries on the establishment of an International Criminal Court held in Rome in 1998.

It was this conference that drafted the treaty of the ICC, which received a vote of 120 to 7, with 21 countries abstaining while seven voted against the treaty. The seven were Iraq, Israel, Libya, China, Qatar, US and Yemen. Some critics highlight the fact that the treaty was pushed forward by non-governmental organisation activists who “bundled the key elements of the court into a package that became a take it-or- leave it proposal.”

Besides South Africa and Burundi, Kenya is also mooting pulling out in a move that clearly shows Africa’s growing lack of faith in the international justice institution. It is not an exaggeration that the court seems to be on a warpath against African leaders given its disproportionate target of the continent.

It surely cannot be just a coincidence that all but one of ICC’s investigations has been based in Africa with all five of the court’s substantive verdicts being against African suspects. Although some non-African cases are currently under preliminary examinations, the trend has always been to make the continent the hunting ground.

The push to pull out of the ICC seems to have been ignited by the indictment of Kenyan President Kenyatta in 2007 after being accused of having a hand in the deaths of 1 000 people in post-election violence. The case collapsed after it emerged that some witnesses had been harangued with bribes to implicate the Kenyan President. Most African leaders saw the Kenyan case as a typical example of international meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state given the targeting of a sitting head of state just voted into power.

That experience forced the African Union to request that ICC should not bring cases against incumbent leaders and that forcing individual countries to arrest incumbent leaders visiting a fellow African nation was tantamount to interference.

South Africa has been threatening pulling out of the ICC since the visit by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir created so many furores between itself and the court last year. While the ICC has warrant for President al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity, South Africa’s diplomatic law protected the Sudanese leader.

It seems there is a lot that Africa is not happy with about the ICC and much of it comes from the manner in which it came into being. Writing in the March issue of the New African magazine, Dr David Hoile the consensus-based approach of customary international law with a straight vote of nations cast a sore distortion in terms of fairness.

“Further, such a process takes no account of geographic representation, population base, or strategic considerations, but simply relies upon a one-nation-one-vote approach. The statute went into effect with fewer than half the nations of the world ratifying it, representing considerably less than half the population of the world. Strategic powers, including not only the US, but China, India, Japan and Russia were all absent while the total ratification number was padded with small states that traditionally playing little part in international affairs.”

Demographically, if the US, China, India, Japan and Russia are not signatories then it logically follows that more than 70 percent of the world’s population is not part to this charade. It evidently follows that the ICC is a minority project which must be discarded with the contempt it deserves. Why did the US, a self-proclaimed champion of human rights not ratify a treaty that makes it plausible to try all alleged human rights abusers?

This is a pertinent question that all Africans must wrestle with and realise the duplicity of the Americans when they talk about democracy, the rule of law and human rights issues.

Read the full article on www.herald.co.zw