[LETTERS] ICC has never been about justice delivery

Editor, RE: “Bashir is our guest and can’t be arrested here, Mushikiwabo says” (The New Times, July 15). This is less about Omar al-Bashir and more about putting a wedge between African states, setting them against each other and destroying the possibility of African countries working closely together to defend and/or promote their collective interests against western encroachment. Justice, forget it! They have been using us against each other since they first erupted on our lands; dividing, egging on some and stirring the pot from time to time to ensure we never stop and pause to see how we are being manipulated in other people’s interests, and then sit down together to consider how we might cut the puppet strings attached to our backs. Al-Bashir may indeed be guilty as charged, but the number of westerners guilty of even worse crimes – including many senior French officials with the blood of Rwandan Tutsi on their hands – who have never and will never be troubled by the so-called ‘international’ justice is legion. Even today, a lot of evidence exists of war crimes, including sexual abuse and bestiality against Central African children by many French soldiers of the Sangari Operation in that country. There has been no consequence for those soldiers or their superiors – both military and civilian – in the chain of command. You can be sure there won’t be any. And yet, let us remind ourselves of the supposed grounds for the ICC condemning and giving a lengthy sentence to Jean-Pierre Bemba: his supposed chain of command responsibility for the crimes of his MLC soldiers he had sent to the Central African Republic to support the then president of that country, Ange-Felix Patasse, at the CAR president’s request and to operate under his wishes. So, Bemba gets handed a long prison sentence for his supposed chain-of-command responsibility for the violent acts of his troops in CAR (where they operated under the authority of the then President of that country, Patasse, who the ICC has not bothered at all), but no French official in the line of command is troubled at all by the ICC for failure to control their military in the same Central African Republic, where their crimes are such that I hesitate to even mention them here. Justice? No! Politics rather. And we have no business lending ourselves to their use of make-believe justice to continue to be kept in line to dance to their neo-colonial tune. Mwene Kalinda

Opinions

[LETTERS] ICC has never been about justice delivery