Editor, RE: “President Bashir to visit Uganda for talks on S. Sudan crisis” (The New Times, August 10). African states need to make it very clear that we shall no longer collaborate in our re-colonisation by recognising the legitimacy of a ‘court’ under the sway of those who finance it and set its agenda, which is less about justice and more a tool of control of the politics of African states through lawfare. The fact that three permanent members of the UN Security Council who refuse to recognise the ICC where their own nationals are concerned, but can consign Africans to it for trial is sufficiently telling about the political nature of this ‘court’. Which is not to say that I support President Bashir; I don’t. But neither do I accept that the ICC has any shred of legitimacy to judge him; or Jean-Pierre Bemba, or Bernard Ntaganda, or Laurent Gbagbo, and many other Africans that have been consigned to its gallows. Why doesn’t the ICC, for instance, arrest the self-confessed killers of Patrice E. Lumumba whose country has up to know refused to initiate any action against them, despite those confessions? Or the French accomplices in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, when, clearly, their government similarly has no intention of ever bringing them to trial for a crime humanity has designated as the most heinous? MK
