Argument against ICC is sound, but President Kenyatta should oblige
What you need to know:
- How has this North Atlantic recently become, all of a sudden, the global apostle of “democracy” and “human rights”?
- It cannot be lost on us that nobody in the Hague has ever raised even a finger at George Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair and others
In your campaign for Uhuru Kenyatta against the ICC, you spring from a solid pedestal. What is wrong is only your persistence in doing it kienyeji. The President has every right to seek to throw out all the charges against him. But how can you ask him to commit contempt of court?
Yet I support your basic premise. The ICC is a First World tool against the Third World. It was not by happenstance that the Western powers initiated our world’s institutions of “justice” exactly at the same time as their colonial empires were crumbling.
For 500 years theretofore, the “West” had inflicted horrendous human rights atrocities throughout the world – the black slave trade, colonialism, “Our Manifest Destinity”, the liquidation of Tasmania, apartheid and, in Europe itself, the Inquisition, the Witch-hunt, the Khazari Holocaust.
How, then, has this North Atlantic recently become, all of a sudden, the global apostle of “democracy” and “human rights”? An answer I often see is that these same centuries of flaming carnivorous greed and worldwide barbarity are what have woken Euro-America’s sense to the “duty” of championing world “liberty”. Why doesn’t it convince me?
Because, ever since it claimed the same high moral ground as its only purpose in sponsoring Abolition, the same Western intelligentsia has committed exactly the same crimes in Afghanistan, Algeria, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Ireland, Kenya, Korea, Kosovo, Laos, Libya, Palestine, San Salvador, Somalia, South Africa, South America, Timor, Vietnam.
These are what raise suspicions about the UN’s conventions on age-groups, classes, genders, nations, races, religions and sects. Karl Liebknecht would have dismissed them all – as he did Otto von Bismarck’s political pretences – as the “figleaf of absolutism” (Feigenblatt des Absolutismus).
Like “aid”, the Rome Statute is one method by which the Gnomes of Zurich apply sop to our wounds so as – by silencing our Nassers and Nkrumahs – to legally maintain their Third World holdings – wealth looted through vilently in colonial times. For colonial looting is the taproot of all the yawning economic gaps and political hurlyburlies responsible for all of Africa’s human rights problems.
Not being a natural social class – being but a plastic class moulded in the colonial classroom through the most despotic methods – Africa’s elite has no idea how to conceal its absolutism in any psychedelic verbal garb of the kind that Euro-America’s ruling liberals are capable of.
PUNITIVE MEASURES
What Mr Kenyatta’s defenders are saying, then, is that the Rome Statute was among certain punitive measures by which the “withdrawing” colonial masters could legally insure their unjustly acquired holdings remaining in Africa and other Third World countries. Clearly, it is not a point you can dismiss with a wave of the hand.
If the Gnomes of Zurich – our “omniscient” and “omnibenevolent” moralists and “aid givers” – were serious about democracy and human rights, we would see them pursuing these with equal passion both intra-nationally (at home) and internationally.
But it cannot be lost on any African with a sprinkle of brain that a largely unknown Congolese is on trial in the Hague, while the associates of Mobutu Sese Seko and the Belgian, French, British and American individuals who sponsored Mobutu to murder millions while they looted the Congo into permanent writhing are as free as the birds in our skies.
It cannot be lost on us that nobody in the Hague has ever raised even a finger at George Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair and others who presided over the slaughter of millions of children and women in order to ingratiate themselves with Afghan and Iraqi crude.
Yet, despite our world’s colonially created injustices, we cannot opt out of it without paying a back-breaking price. Will our President ever know any peace if (as you propose) he simply ignores the ICC’s summons? Ask Mr Bashir if, for him – in Shakespeare’s words – sleep ever “…knits up the ravelled sleeve of care…”
