SUDANESE PRESIDENT OMAR AL BASHIR, THE SANDTON AFRICAN UNION (AU) SUMMIT AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT: DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL LEGALITY – THE BLESSINGS AND BURDENS OF SOUTH AFRICA’S LEADERSHIP OF AFRICA.
“‘Speak, Mr. South Africa, speak’…Initially, it was nice being called Mr. South Africa, but after a while it, too, started to irritate me, the nudging in particular”. Sihle Khumalo, Fatherless Sudan – A Nation at War, from his travelogue ‘Dark Continent My Black Arse’, page 167, 2007.
INTRODUCTION.
It seems the whole world expects South Africans to speak out loud and clear on the recent controversial attendance by the Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir of the summit of the African Union (AU), which was held in Sandton, Johannesburg this month.
Initially, it was nice to see that South Africans were expected by the world community to pronounce clearly, one way or the other, on what has become post-apartheid South Africa’s most contentious and polarising diplomatic incident, namely, the recent visit of president Omar Al Bashir to South Africa, in defiance of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s arrest warrant for war crimes, but at the invitation of the African Union (AU).
Like Sihle Khumalo’s Ethiopian fellow-traveler in a boksie enroute to Khartoum, Sudan, it now feels and sounds like the world is badgering us and nudging:
“Speak, Mr. South Africa, speak”.
But now, after a while, it is becoming highly irritating, – this expectation for South Africans to outshout one another -, especially the nudging by some powerful elite sections of our society, as well as by many in the West, to uncritically parrot certain opinions on the controversy, especially the opinions and foreign policy positions of the USA State Department, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Office of the European Union (EU) High Representative on Foreign Affairs and Security.
In his monumental tome, Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, the former USA Secretary of State and veteran statesman, welcomes the fact that our modern period and its international order are characterised by, among other things, the reality that never before “…had statesmen ever been obliged to conduct diplomacy in an environment where events can be experienced instantaneously and simultaneously by leaders and their publics.” (1995, page 808).
This is a positive development which Kissinger remarked on.
However.
We can safely assert that the diplomatic debacle around president Al Bashir’s attendance of the Sandton AU Summit represents the first time South Africa’s increasingly strong and vocal publics on foreign policy have engaged in an open tussle with South Africa’s official diplomatic establishment, particularly regarding whether the latter faithfully and truly is representative of the core national interests of South Africa abroad, especially within our African continent.
In this sense, if for nothing else, this moment represents a critical, unprecedented watershed for South Africa’s diplomacy.
In my Politicsweb article ‘Economic diplomacy in Africa’, which appeared on 12 January 2012, I wrote:
“Most African States loath and fear the mass popular appeal of economic diplomacy in Africa. They often equate its manifestations in the public discourse and arena with the disruptive force of an internal political insurgency. These States often tremble at the sight of popular mass energies that are unleashed by broad-based citizen participation in domestic and international diplomatic issues.
“For these States are used to the traditional conceptualisation of diplomacy in general as an elitist, rarified and exclusionary State activity, to which the masses must be granted only a key-hole peek, if that”.
Do developments and debates unfolding in South Africa today around the visit of president Al Bashir to South Africa to attend the Sandton AU Summit affirm the veracity of my statement?
What cannot be disputed is that post-apartheid South Africa, a democratic and constitutional order, and a well-respected global citizen and influential stakeholder, is the most fascinating diplomatic theater for the unfolding of the debates about the ICC’s arrest warrant for president Al Bashir.
This is not only because democratic South Africa is a member state of the ICC.
It is not even that post-apartheid South Africa is a founding member and inaugural host of the AU.
It is least so the fact that our courts issued a judgment ordering the South African government to prevent president Al Bashir from departing from South Africa.
What makes this diplomatic incident involving president Al Bashir so fascinating is the apartheid history of South Africa.
In his book ‘The World’s Worst Atrocities’, Nigel Cawthorne included South Africa’s Sharpeville massacre, committed by the apartheid regime of white prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd on 21 March 1960, alongside such atrocities as the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, Massacre in Katyn Forest, My Lai, ‘Rwanda’s Heart of Darkness’, and the Bombing of Dresden.
Nigel Cawthorne wrote that in reaction to the Sharpeville massacre, “…the South African government was unrepentant, though.” (2005, page 148).
He further wrote that:
“Over the next few days, the South African government gave their account of what had happened at Sharpeville. On 22 March, the Prime Minister, Dr Verwoerd, said that the riots had nothing to do with pass books or apartheid. They were periodic outbursts that might happen anywhere. He praised the police for their courage; the government claimed that they had been attacked by 20, 000 demonstrators, many of whom were armed. The Johannesburg Star reported that 80 per cent of the injured and (sic) been wounded below the belt; and that the police had merely been trying to wound the demonstrators, not to kill them. The South African papers also reported that the demonstrators had been armed. The Bishop of Johannesburg and white liberal organisations challenged this, raising money for lawyers to take statements from the injured and defend the protestors the police had arrested and charged with public order offences.” (Ibid).
What this snippet of South Africa’s apartheid history must remind us about is how the truth becomes the first casualty of ideological contestations over arguments about large-scale State atrocities, such as the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, the Darfur war crimes and even the Marikana massacre in post-apartheid South Africa.
More importantly, this apartheid history is a cautionary tale about how the media and other communication outlets can easily become complicit in not only the cover-up, but also the propagation of untruths during times of intense societal discords about large-scale State atrocities.
This history lesson from the Sharpeville massacre is worth bearing in mind, especially when there are some amongst us who are today inclined to think that former apartheid architect and prime minister during the Sharpeville massacre, Hendrik Verwoerd, was “smart”, as Allister Sparks, the Business Day columnist, recently so erroneously alleged.
Do “smart” politicians dodge accountability for, telling the truth about and deny the fact of committing a massacre, war crimes and crimes against humanity?
There should never be a similar temptation amongst us today to think that president Al Bashir of Sudan, just like the apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd, is “smart”, just because he was in attendance at the Sandton AU Summit few weeks ago, or because he is alleged to have perpetrated what is now called by some section of our commercial mass media as “The Great Escape” to evade the ICC’s arrest warrant.
All sides to this heated and divisive national debate on the ICC, Al Bashir and the Sandton AU Summit should strive for a balanced perspective, so that history does not judge us as harshly as Nigel Cawthorne’s book has judged the white media, such as the Johannesburg Star, in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre.
Nigel Cawthorne quoted from the report of the Commission of Enquiry set up by Verwoerd’s regime, in response to intense international pressure resulting from the Sharpeville massacre, which, although making devastating findings against the apartheid police at the time, “failed to conclude that the system of apartheid was to blame for the atrocity.” (Page 150, Ibid).
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