How the
International Criminal Court is seeking to usurp our sovereignty and why
progressive Africa should reject it
Last week,
the African Union summit in Addis Ababa resolved to ask the UN Security Council
to defer the case against President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya at the ICC. It is
unprecedented to put a serving president of a sovereign nation on trial. If
Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto are convicted, ICC will have overturned the
freely expressed will of the Kenyan people.
Secondly,
even if these “saviors” were genuine, they lack the necessary knowledge to
appreciate the complexities, idiosyncrasies and nuances of our situation to
offer a meaningful and durable solution.
In their altruism,
Western “saviors” come to Africa armed with abstract notions of justice or
democracy that work well in their societies (because of specific historical
circumstances) but which, when transplanted unto our reality, turn out to be
utterly disastrous.
The main
problem is not that African countries signed the Rome Statute which created the
ICC. That is the small part. The bigger part is that the UN Security Council
can cause the indictment of leaders of nations that are not signatories. Sudan
is not a signatory to the Rome Statute but its president Omar El Bashir has
been indicted by the ICC and an arrest warrant issued against him.
Although the
UN Security Council has power to indict anyone, the ICC (like the UN) is not
organised along democratic principles. Of the five permanent members of the
Security Council who have power to veto any decision or decide whether someone
should be indicted or not and power to defer their trial every year ad
infinitum, only two (Britain and France) are signatories. The USA, Russia and
China are not. In other words we have nations enforcing an international
agreement they are not signatories to.
I am even
inclined to agree with many critics of our leaders in Africa. All too often,
they have let us down. They steal public resources to enrich themselves, they
kill innocent civilians whose only crime may be to express honest opinions,
they obstruct the will of the people through vote-rigging and they undermine
the independence of the courts. Of course the reality is much more nuanced. But
even if this was true, it is our responsibility to organise politically to
liberate ourselves.
In all this
discourse we are presented as helpless victims of bad leadership to be saved by
a kind international community (the West). We are not active participants in
the struggles to emancipate ourselves. Instead, we are presented as passive
spectators in the efforts to shape our destiny. We just sit by idly waiting for
international charity.
Sadly, in
supporting ICC and other such Western movements to liberate us, many African
elites accept this presentation. Confident and proud Africans need to reject
this presentation. Our problems may seem big but with our determination, we can
overcome them. We don’t need anyone to save us. That is our own task.
At its core,
the ICC seeks to undermine our sovereignty in the name of an abstract standard
of justice enforced by the West. A nation can have sovereignty without
democracy but it cannot have democracy without sovereignty. ICC’s founding
philosophy rests on the assumption that there are civilized nations (the West)
that enjoy a superior moral standing and are therefore entitled to enforce
standards of decent behavior on the uncivilized nations.
This claim is
not new. Colonialism was presented in exactly similar ways i.e. as aimed at our
own good – to bring Christianity and civilization, to end the tyranny of our
customs and the despotism of our chiefs, to stop slavery and slave trade i.e.
to liberate us from ourselves.
The
colonialists did not invent these ills. They were real. However, they exploited
them to divide us and to promote their own interests. Seventy years of colonial
rule did not introduce civilized government in Africa or economic prosperity or
broad based education.
Instead, by
1950 there were only two universities in Africa South of the Sahara and North
of the Limpopo – Makerere and Ibadan – with a total enrolment of less than 100
students studying for a degree in a sub-continent of 46 nations. Contrary to
popular assumptions, it is post independence Africa, with all its failures,
that has opened education opportunities for our people. Today, Africa is
building the most important resource any society can command – human capital.
The ICC is
largely a Western court. Its real role is to be an instrument of Western powers
to punish those leaders of poor countries who do not serve Western interests.
Any African president pursuing Western interests will remain immune to the ICC
regardless of crimes they commit against their people.
It is
possible most of these nations signed the Rome Statute out of naivety – just
like our chiefs and kings of old signed “protection” agreements with the
British and the French only to discover they had surrendered their independence
and sovereignty. The road to domination is often paved with good intentions and
its realisation comes by the creep, rather than the gallop.
This lesson
was best told by Lubengula, King of the Ndebele in modern day Zimbabwe after he
had been defeated by the British whom he had initially collaborated with and
signed an agreement of mutual assistance: “Have you ever seen a chameleon catch
a fly,” he said on his death-bed, “It moves slowly and motionlessly and when it
is in easy reach, it darts and the fly disappears.
I am the fly
and the British are the chameleon.” Kabaka Mwanga of Buganda, Jaja of Opobo –
literally every Africa king and chief who entered an agreement with Europeans
in the late 19th century discovered this treachery. That is why Africa should
be suspicious when the same people claim to love us more than we love
ourselves.
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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