EDITORIAL COMMENT: Kudos to SA over Al-Bashir arrest circus

WE commend the South African government for refusing to be used by the International Criminal Court to cause the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir while attending an African Union summit on its soil. President Al-Bashir flew back to Khartoum on Monday morning from the Waterkloof Airforce base in Pretoria after successfully completing his mission at the AU summit which was held at the Sandton Convention centre in Johannesburg.

This was despite spirited attempts by civil society elements in South Africa which had, at the weekend, sought to prevent the Sudanese leader from leaving the country by approaching the North Gauteng High Court seeking an order barring his exit. On Monday, the Pretoria High Court ordered the arrest and extradition of Al-Bashir to the ICC at The Hague, The Netherlands, but the Sudanese president was already airborne and on his way back to his country when the ruling was made.

The South African Litigation Centre filed the application for the arrest of Al-Bashir who has a six-year-old ICC arrest warrant hanging over his head. Although South Africa is a signatory to the ICC, it was not its place to cause the arrest of President Al-Bashir because he was in the country on AU business and as such enjoyed immunity from arrest.

The Sandton Convention Centre where the AU summit was held ceased to be South African territory for the duration of the meeting and effectively assumed the status of an AU sovereign and as such, South Africa correctly adhered to the statutes of the AU by providing safe passage to the Sudanese leader who was in the country at the invitation of the continental body. No foreign leader has been arrested while attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York even though most of them are on the ICC watch list because they enjoy immunity while there.

It would have been a disaster of monumental proportions had the government of President Jacob Zuma allowed itself to be used by right wing elements and the ICC to detain Al-Bashir as the move would have been interpreted as a declaration of war on the Sudanese people and Africans in general. The AU itself was in danger of being weakened and divided by the decision because most of its members are opposed to the ICC which has been targeting Africans for indictment at its court.

It does not help matters that the ICC is funded by the European Union and none of the Western leaders accused of crimes against humanity have been indicted at that court. The AU is seized with the Sudanese crisis and arresting Al-Bashir would have created an uncertain political situation in Sudan and exacerbated the country’s problems.

The AU has on many occasions requested the United Nations Security Council to defer the warrant of arrest against Al-Bashir to enable the body to engage with the various players in the Sudanese conflict to find a lasting solution to the country’s challenges.

However, their calls have fallen on deaf ears because the Security Council is made up of powerful countries that are not signatories to the ICC but are ironically happy to use it to further their own nefarious agendas. There is no doubt that the death of more than 300,000 people in Sudan’s Darfur region is a calamity and that country needs to go through a national reconciliation process.

There are vital issues of accountability and justice Sudanese people need to be assisted with and the AU is better placed to deal with them as the continental body with oversight over African conflicts. Kow towing to the whims and caprices of overzealous justice fundamentalists in the mould of outfits such as the Western-sponsored South African Litigation Centre can only worsen conflicts in Africa instead of resolving them.

We hail the brave decision by the South African government to allow President Al-Bashir to leave the country unmolested and hope the episode will alert the continent to the real danger of neo-colonialism rearing its ugly head. It is clear that the ICC is being used as a tool to target African leaders with a history of resisting Western machinations and from hereon, the continent needs to coalesce around the need to build strong institutions to resolve its own problems without the need to defer to outsiders.

Africa does not need the ICC and it is time its leaders made a firm decision on whether to remain signatories to a body that is being used as a weapon to fight them. They should also expedite the formation of an African Court of Justice which will resolve matters in a fair and just way. The circus around the arrest of President Al-Bashir should never have been allowed to play out on African soil.