The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) efforts to arrest the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir were foiled by the non-cooperation of the South African government.
Bashir has evaded arrest for alleged war crimes relating to the Darfur genocide by the ICC, an instrument of Western interests, for the past six years.
The South African government permitted Bashir to exit the country by plane shortly after a South African high court called for Bashir’s arrest.
Since its creation in 2002, the ICC has gained a reputation for singling out African heads of state for prosecution whenever they become inconvenient to the agenda of U.S. and European imperial hegemony.
Like AFRICOM, the U.S. military command center in Africa, the ICC ultimately exists to provide a legal cover for the criminal project of enforcing U.S. hegemony over Africa’s resources, especially in contention with the explosion of Chinese influence that threatens white power’s monopoly over the expropriation of wealth from the African continent.
In the past year the Chinese government has strengthened ties with oil-rich Sudan, with China building a new presidential palace for Bashir as recently as January of 2015.
Of the nine situations the court is officially investigating, all are in Africa. Every one of the 32 individuals indicted by the court so far are African.
The ICC was born out of a UN-sponsored conference in Rome in 1998 that developed the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the ICC.
The ICC was tasked with investigating and prosecuting “war crimes” committed on the territories of its member states or by their nationals, or whenever asked by the UN Security Council. The ICC became a reality after the 60th signatory to the Rome Statute ratified the treaty, in July 2002 in Darfur.
The U.S. government made sure that the referral stipulated that the nationals of states that have not ratified the Rome Statute do not fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Of course, white colonial settler states such as the United States of America and the Jewish State of Israel abstained from becoming member states to the ICC, placing them outside its jurisdiction.
Therefore, the ICC is incapable of putting any individuals on trial for the Israeli criminal siege on Gaza in 2014 that slaughtered over 2,200 Palestinians, hundreds of them children and babies.
The U.S. military campaign in Iraq, where chemical weapons and other vicious armaments of mass destruction were deployed against civilian populations, will not be scrutinized by the ICC.
Nor will the ICC issue an arrest of Obama, Clinton, Sarkozy, or any other figurehead of white imperialism involved in the brutal NATO bombing of Libya that culminated with the public torture and lynching of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi.
In fact, at the height of NATO’s mass murder campaign in Libya, the UN washed its hands of the bloody situation by referring it to the ICC. The ICC did nothing to halt the bloodshed.
The ICC is a farcical entity contrived by white power to legalize its policing of the world’s black and brown peoples.
This is not a statement in favor of the political character of forces like Bashir and other African politicians targeted by the ICC.
The reality is that meaningful justice will be only served to the criminals responsible for the mass impoverishment, colonial violence and pillage of Africa’s vast wealth and resources when African workers and peasants organize to defeat imperialism’s grip on our Africa and seize state power over own African lives.
Build the African Socialist International!
Uhuru!
