Why African leaders are accomplices in crime

By the “man-bite-dog” criterion of news taught in our schools of journalism, what happened at the African Union summit the other day should have been but a snippet tucked far away in the rear pages of our newspapers. For there was absolutely nothing new in it.

It was nothing but a run-of-the-mill “dog-bite-man” story. It is what African and other Third World leaders routinely do.

They commit tyranny and robbery and murder all the time and then, when accosted either at home or in international councils — try to depict one another as archangels.

If it had been known in advance that the human rights issue would come before Their Excellencies, even a child would have predicted that they would vote to a man – not to mention the woman from Monrovia — to defend to the hilt the Man-on-Horseback in Khartoum.

No, it was not because they all love the Sudanese strongman.

It was only because none of the other heads of state and government may be innocent of the actions for which Omar al Bashir is wanted by Mr Ocampo in the historic Dutch city of international “justice.”

If Mr Bashir is arrested and taken to The Hague — if the International Criminal Court (ICC) finds him guilty of gross violations of human rights in Darfur — he will have opened a hideous can of worms for all the present and many former African and other Third World rulers.

Indeed, that precedent may prove extremely dangerous even for First World leaders.

The ICC itself has been accused of selective thirst for the blood of former and present tyrants.

It seems to go after Third World despots with much more gusto than it does after developed world leaders.

The Third World’s intelligentsia — including Africa’s — may be waking up slowly.

If Mr Bashir and certain former African leaders are found guilty and punished, the intelligentsia may begin to demand from Mr Ocampo a good explanation why America’s Gang of Five is at large.

Our civil society movements may want to know why George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin and Condoleeza Rice have not yet been mooted even for arrest for having ordered the murder of millions and millions of Iraqi and Afghan children and their parents.

The Spanish Daniel in The Hague may have to explain to humanity why Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw are still gallivanting all over the world as champions of freedom, democracy and human rights when they were central to the holocaust in the Middle East.

London, Washington, Paris, Rome and a city near The Hague may have to answer human rights questions about Latin America, Algeria, Korea, Kenya (during Mau Mau), Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Southern Africa and East Timor and other Portuguese colonies.