SA silent on Bashir at AU

Jacoline Prinsloo

The writer says one can guess that South Africa stayed out of the fray over Malawis refusal to allow Omar al-Bashir into the country because the South African government wanted to |safeguard its campaign to get Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma elected as chair of the AU Commission.

Why did big South Africa remain silent while little Malawi fought a losing, but very significant, battle for criminal justice on the continent last week?

Malawi announced on Friday that it would not host next month’s African Union summit in Lilongwe.

It had earlier said it would not let Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir into the country because it is a signatory of the Rome Statute and therefore obliged to co-operate with the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Bashir for alleged genocide and war crimes in Darfur.

Khartoum complained that Malawi was violating the AU rules which oblige it to host all leaders in good standing with the union.

Malawi refused to budge until the AU Commission told it on Friday that if it did not admit Bashir, it would not be allowed to host the summit.

So it said it would not host the summit, which will now be held in Addis Ababa.

The South African government will have almost certainly perceived it as bad news that the summit has now been moved from Malawi.

International Relations and Co-operation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane had recently suggested that a Malawi summit would give South Africa and southern Africa some home-ground advantage in their campaign to get Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma elected as chairman of the AU Commission at the summit.

After Bingu wa Mutharika, Banda’s predecessor, died suddenly a few months ago, it seemed Malawi might not host the event, but after Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe visited Malawi and Banda visited South Africa, she decided to go ahead, apparently with South Africa’s support.

Record

And South Africa, at least judging by its past record, should also have been sympathetic to Malawi’s refusal to allow Bashir into the country, as South Africa had previously stated the same position about him coming to this country.

That being the case, South Africa should surely have joined Malawi in a fight for its right both to host the summit and yet to remain true to its ICC obligations by refusing to admit Bashir. But there is no indication Pretoria entered the fray, and one can guess why it almost certainly did not.

For it would probably have seen this as a bad moment, tactically, to go into battle with the AU over an ICC issue.

The AU leadership as a collective has twice decided at previous summits that its member countries should not co-operate with The Hague-based ICC, especially in the case of Bashir.

The AU believes the ICC is picking on Africa, as most of the suspects it has indicted so far are African.

And so a fight right now on that issue would have hurt Dlamini Zuma’s election campaign, which has become the government’s main foreign policy priority.

She will be taking on the incumbent, Jean Ping of Gabon, at the AU summit, having failed to dislodge him at the last summit in January.

The “home ground” advantage of having the election take place at a summit in a member country of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) – which has officially endorsed Dlamini Zuma as its candidate – would have been outweighed, in Pretoria’s eyes, by the acrimony it would have provoked among the many leaders whose votes it needs, if it had gone out to bat for the ICC.

President Banda and her government have not helped their cause in Africa by stating so clearly that they refused to host Bashir because Western governments, notably the US, had threatened to cut off lots of aid if they did so.

That argument was probably intended to mollify Malawians, who are very annoyed at losing the summit and the business opportunities that would have gone with it.

But elsewhere on the continent, that argument makes Malawi look as though it is merely kowtowing to Western powers, rather than taking a stand on the principle of justice and against impunity.

The principle has nonetheless been defended. And from South Africa’s perspective one has to ask; do we really want one of our citizens to be the chief bureaucrat who is obliged to carry out orders like this?