By Ed Cropley
JOHANNESBURG – From the moment Omar al-Bashir touched down in South Africa, Pretoria had a choice: arrest the Sudanese president for alleged war crimes and face fury from the rest of the continent, or grant him safe passage home and take flak from the West.
The decision, confirmed by the departure of Bashir’s plane into the skies above the capital on Monday, spoke volumes about South Africa’s priorities – Africa comes first, and legal niceties such as the authority of domestic courts or international statutes a distant second.
It was a dramatic volte face from 2009 when, shortly after Bashir’s indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, his South African counterpart Jacob Zuma made clear he was not welcome.
Appearing on CNN, Zuma was asked if he would order Bashir’s arrest should he “ever set foot inside your country?”[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”70560”]
“That is correct,” he replied, confirming lingering remnants of the idealism that underpinned South Africa’s relations with the outside world in the early days of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ under Nelson Mandela.
Six years later, the Bashir episode has highlighted two dominant themes under Zuma: a nation with a split European-African personality for the last three centuries now sees its destiny firmly in Africa; and, with growing South African trade and investment in the rest of the continent, the idealism is dead.
“The moral foreign policy has all but gone,” one Western diplomat in Pretoria told Reuters. “The other thing apparent from the current administration is a very clear prioritisation of stability over values.”
(Reuters)
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