African leaders are beaming with foolish pride today over the way they conspired to help Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir abscond from justice. They perpetrated this conspiracy during an African Union summit in South Africa last weekend.
Even though dismayed, I am not surprised. After all, I presaged this years ago in “Arresting Bashir? Even more of a Pipe Dream than Finding Bin Laden,” March 5, 2009:
Bashir became the first sitting head of state to have a warrant issued for his arrest. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued it [yesterday] pursuant to an indictment against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, all stemming from the atrocities Arab Muslims perpetrated against Black Africans over the past six years in the Darfur region of Sudan.
I am dismayed because, as yesterday’s edition of the UK Guardian recounts,this is the same Bashir who presided over the killing of 300,000 Black Africans and displacement of two million.
Given this, instead of aiding and abetting him, you’d think Black African leaders would want to tar and feather Bashir. Except that far too many of them have more in common with him than their own people. None more so than Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe—who has implemented policies and ordered brutal crackdowns that have killed and displaced as many, if not more Black Africans during his 35-year dictatorship.
Zimbabwean leader and African Union chairman Robert Mugabe on Tuesday harshly criticized the International Criminal Court after Sudan’s president dodged an international arrest order by leaving early from a meeting of the continent’s leaders in South Africa, a news agency reported…
The African News Agency, which is based in South Africa, quoted Mugabe as saying at the late-night close of an African Union summit in Johannesburg that the International Criminal Court is not wanted in Africa.
(U.S. News & World Report, June 15, 2015)
Frankly, it’s a wonder the ICC never piggybacked Western sanctions against Mugabe’s regime with an arrest warrant for the crimes against humanity he has presided over.
But the other leaders have some ‘splainin to do, especially Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya.
After all, despite fellow leaders urging him not to, Kenyatta appeared in The Hague voluntarily to answer charges stemming from post-election violence, which I commented on in several commentaries, including “Uhuru Kenyatta, Son of Kenya’s Founding Father, Indicted on War Crimes,” January 24, 2012.
And, even though taken by force, former President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire is currently on trial in The Hague on charges stemming from similar violence, which I commented on in several commentaries, including “Noose Tightens on Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire,” April 11, 2011.
By glaring contrast, Bashir is trying to avoid The Hague to answer charges stemming from violence that attended a sustained crusade of ethnic cleansing, which I commented, despairingly, on in several commentaries, including “ICC Charging Bashir of Sudan with Genocide Means Nothing,” July 15, 2008.
Yet, evidently, African leaders are willing to violate their own laws, as host president Jacob Zuma did, to abet him at every turn.
Incidentally, Kenyatta had time and resources to make conviction so unlikely that the ICC prosecutor eventually dropped all charges. Gbagbo had no time or resources at his disposal to do the same; therefore, he’ll likely be convicted and spend the rest of his life in prison.
Mind you, I’m on record – in such commentaries as “No (Equitable) Justice in ICC Prosecuting Kenya’s Kenyatta,” March 23, 2013 – sympathizing with their complaints about the ICC targeting African leaders for prosecution in The Hague. For example:
I have also questioned why ICC prosecutors appear to be racially profiling African leaders. After all, Africans are the only ones who have been indicted since this first-ever permanent international criminal court was established in 2002.
(“African Leaders Defy ICC to Defend Kenya’s Kenyatta,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 13, 2013)
Except that it amounts to unwitting complicity in Bashir’s genocide for these leaders to defend him with the same defiant spirit of comradeship with which they defended Kenyatta. And, given the enlightened example Kenyatta set, I am dumbfounded that he played along….
Still, African leaders have just cause to feel continentally profiled. After all, for more than a year now, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been presiding over the same kind of killing and displacement in the Donbass region of Ukraine that Bashir presided over in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Yet the ICC has not shown the unbiased balls to even issue a warrant for Putin’s arrest. And even if it did, you can bet your life that European leaders would be no more willing to enforce it against Putin than African leaders were to enforce its arrest warrant against Bashir. Hell, European leaders can’t even enforce their own sanctions against Putin – with many of them talking tough, while allowing their corporations to negotiate all kinds of sanctions-busting deals with Russian corporations.
Nonetheless, this does not excuse the willful and myopic way these Black African leaders abetted this Arab leader – who has the blood of so many innocent Black Africans still dripping from his hands. It shall redound to their eternal shame that none of them stood up for those lost souls of Darfur. Beyond this, the damning irony is that, of all the corrupt and genocidal despots on the continent of Africa, Bashir is the last one African leaders should have chosen as the poster boy for their newfound determination to boycott the ICC.
Ultimately, though, they have helped to vindicate my assertion that the United States would find Osama bin Laden before the ICC prosecutes Omar al-Bashir….
Related commentaries:
Arresting Bashir…
African leaders…
Kenyatta…
Gbagbo…
Bashir…
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