SA stands firm with journalists

AP

OFFENDED: Madagascan president Andry Rajoelina is furious that SA ambassador to Madagascar Gert Grobler, right, refuses to hand over journalists who have taken refuge in the South African embassy in the country.

In the bad old days of apartheid, it used to be opponents of the SA government who fled into foreign embassies on SA soil for protection against our charming government of the day.

Like Dutch ANC militant Klaas de Jonge who ducked into the Dutch embassy in Pretoria in 1985 or Murphy Morobe, Valli Moosa and Vusi Khanyile of the United Democratic Front (UDF) – the ANC’s internal front organisation – who took refuge in the US Johannesburg consulate in 1988 – or their six UDF comrades who had found themselves at an inhospitable UK consulate in Durban in 1984.

So it’s a sign of the better times we now live in, if nothing else, that the roles are now reversed and it is our government which is protecting fugitives from oppression in the SA embassy in Antananarivo, Madagascar.

Laliatana Rakotondrazafy and two of her colleagues from the radio station Free FM have been there since August 1.

They showed up at the embassy door after hiding for a week from security agents of the country’s leader Andry Rajoelina who shut down their station on July 22 and wanted to arrest them.

“So now we have our own Julian Assange saga” said one SA diplomat, referring to the WikiLeaks boss who has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid being extradited by the UK to Sweden.

PROTECTED: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the media outside the Ecuador embassy in west London. Ecuadors President Rafael Correa, below, has refused to hand Assange over to British authorities.

REUTERS

That’s true up to a point.

In both cases the protecting government is refusing to hand over the fugitives to the host government because it believes they will not receive justice. But the analogy ends about there.

Ecuador’s left-wing President Raphael Correa – a chum of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez – refuses to hand over Assange because he purports to believe that the charges of rape levelled against Assange in Sweden are just a trumped-up pretext for punishing him because of his leaking of hundreds of thousands of US embassy cables, many of them embarrassing to Washington.

Correa also purports to fear that Sweden will in turn hand him over to the US where he could face the death penalty.

The rest of us know that Sweden would not do that and that it is motivated solely by a typically Nordic punctiliousness about the rule of law and the rights of women.

No one has suggested that Sweden feels aggrieved by Assange’s leaked cables.

Some of his apologists have suggested Sweden’s legal definition of rape is excessively strict but it’s not alone in that and that’s the law. When in Sweden, obey Swedish laws.

Assange would get a fair trial in Sweden and that is where the matter would end.

One can’t imagine Sweden handing him over to the US – even if Britain had not already imposed as a condition of extradition that he should not be. Nor can one imagine the US executing him if Sweden did hand him over. Uncle Sam has his off days but that would not be one of them.

So Correa is essentially just grandstanding for his supporters and revelling in the gift of a soapbox from which to take on the entire West.

By contrast, it is extremely unlikely that Rakotondrazafy and Co would get a fair trial at the hands of Rajoelina’s government if they got a trial at all.

By all accounts radio Free FM is a little wild but it’s even-handed. It used to launch pretty spirited attacks against the former government of Rajoelina’s arch enemy Marc Ravalomanana.

And it continued in the same vein against Rajoelina’s government, exposing corruption, oppression and general misgovernance by both governments because both, generally speaking, deserved it.

Rakotondrazafy contends that Rajoelina closed her station and came after its journalists because of its sustained criticism of the government – rather than because of the incident which precipitated the raid on the station on July 22.

That was a live broadcast of remarks by one of a group of soldiers who had mutinied that day. Free FM’s reporter stuck a microphone under the soldier’s nose and asked him for live comment, she says. The soldier vowed that he and his fellow-mutineers intended to remove Rajoelina’s government and replace it with a military committee.

It was evidently not a call to arms, an incitement to revolt, just a statement of the group’s intention.

Perhaps that is a point that could be argued in a court of law.

The trouble is that it’s unlikely it would be fairly argued in a Madagascar court right now.

SA’s ambassador to Madagascar, Gert Grobler, evidently knows that.

And so does the SA government per se.

Which is why they have so far refused to hand over the journalists even though Rajoelina’s government is muttering darkly about SA undermining Malagasy justice.

Rajoelina’s government also accuses SA of undermining its role as the chief mediator in the country’s political crisis.

That is a worrying accusation at first glance as a mediator must of course remain neutral. But SA is rejoining that if it handed them over it would also be taking sides on behalf of the government.

By refusing to do so it is serving the principle of the freedom of the press which is one of the core values of the Southern African Development Community’s Roadmap out of the Madagascar crisis.

Which Rajoelina’s government has signed.

But it’s unlikely to guarantee their freedom as SA demands if it is to let them go.

De Jonge remained for 26 long and very inconvenient months in the Dutch embassy in Pretoria back then.

It seems Grobler is also bracing himself for quite. a long stay by his uninvited Malagasy guests.

But its surely worth it to demonstrate that we are so clearly on the right side of a human rights issue.