8 July 2009
editorial
Johannesburg — BARELY two months in office and already President Jacob Zuma 's administration has, sadly, failed its first foreign policy test by meekly allowing the African Union (AU) summit last week to pass a resolution not to co-operate with a war crimes warrant against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
In doing so, the new government missed a golden opportunity to set a new tone for foreign policy, which the Thabo Mbeki administration had managed to pervert. What we need is a foreign policy based on the principles of respect for the rule of law and the restoration of human dignity.
The government should have unequivocally distanced itself from the AU's gangster approach towards the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court (ICC), to which SA is a signatory.
There was no pressing need at the AU summit to take such a defiant stand against the ICC, considering that the African body has already appealed to the United Nations Security Council to delay the case. It also mandated Mbeki in February to engage the UN on al-Bashir's behalf, on the grounds that the indictment would endanger the peace process in Sudan.
With the exception of Botswana, which refused to endorse a resolution that was not properly debated by the summit, the African heads of state consciously chose, however, to ignore a process that they started. Instead they resolved to dishonour a treaty obligation to fully co-operate with the ICC in the arrest and transfer of al-Bashir to the ICC. SA's silence on the AU's resolution implies that the government would be willing to host al-Bashir in this country.
The ICC was established specifically to end the impunity with which the perpetrators of serious crimes function. It was designed to prosecute those civil or military leaders suspected of committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Their victims are often the people of Africa.
The UN says that up to 300000 people have died in Darfur in Sudan and 2,7-million have fled their homes. Although Sudan says only 10000 have been killed, many nongovernmental organisations involved with the humanitarian situation in Darfur have presented independent proof of documented atrocities against the Darfurian people to the ICC. Only this court has the jurisdiction to test these allegations.
Since the ICC decision, Khartoum has pulled out of initiatives attended by British, Chinese, French, Russian and US envoys that were intended to pave the way for engaging all rebel groups and pro-government militias in the search for peace.
For Zuma, the shenanigans at the AU and SA's inability to take a stand for the downtrodden are a sad start to a term of office.
SA cannot have its cake and eat it too; it can either take a stand against the AU as a signatory to the ICC and fight for justice, or allow the AU to resort to the old ways of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity, which protected political despots and dictators.
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