Is the International Criminal Court (ICC) a racist, neocolonialist, and anti-African institution? This question, together with the answer in the affirmative has reemerged after South Africa on Tuesday, April 25 announced plans to repeal its ICC membership. Should South Africa withdraw, it will become only the second country to do so after Burundi. Other African countries have threatened similar action. They contend that the court, whose formation Africa welcomed in 1998, has turned into an instrument for subjugating Africa.
This sentiment was best echoed by Uhuru Kenyatta in a speech at the AU summit in 2013:
The ICC stopped being the home of justice the day it became the toy of declining imperial powers
Uhuru Kenyatta, 2013 AU summit
Other African leaders have alluded to the same. Uganda’s Museveni, one of Africa’s most experienced statesmen has repeatedly branded the court “useless”. Rwanda’s Kagame called it a “fraudulent institution”, and “.. a court to try Africans, not people from across the world.”
The ICC is anti-African
The Rome Statute clearly states the global scope of ICC’s jurisdiction. However, ICC has since its inception been targeting only Africa in exercising its prosecutorial discretion. At the same time, it overlooks crimes perpetrated in other parts of the world, proving it is anti-African.
For example, Africans were the only ones that the court prosecuted in its first ten years. An African, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of DRC, was the first person the court convicted. Further, African presidents– Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta and Sudan’s Al Bashir – were the first sitting heads of state that the court indicted since its inception. Kenyatta was prosecuted together with Ruto, his Deputy then, and current President of Kenya. Not only that. By 2021, all the court’s 44 indictees were African.
So, either crime is only committed by Africans, making them exclusive candidates for ICC. Or ICC is inherently anti-African, racist, and neocolonialist. A comparative look at the West/Europe is all you need to arrive at the latter conclusion. Nearly every US leader in the last 30 years, except perhaps only Donald Trump, is an ICC candidate more than any African leader.
The court overlooks crimes outside Africa
For example, Bush/Blair manufactured the lie that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”. They used this lie to justify an American invasion that murdered a million Iraqis. The same war displaced 4.5 million and left 1-2 million war widows and 5 million orphans.
The heart-wrenching memory of the Haditha massacre, in which US Marines executed twenty-four Iraqis — including children, women, and a man in a wheelchair is still fresh, as is Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech that institutionalized anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiment, turning the Arab world into a war hub.
His successor, Obama droned children and other civilians in their sleep, in funerals, and in schools, resulting in as many as 5,160 deaths, according to TBIJ. Flaunting a messianic complex, he would later write a self-aggrandizing memoir, calling the innocent children he murdered “dangerous” and “cruel”, and ironically boasting:
I wanted somehow to save them – send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads.
Barack Obama (In: A Promised Land, memoir)
Today, Obama remains at large and still holds sway in US-led western Politics. At some point, there was talk of indicting Americans for Afghan crimes. However, the US, which is not a member of the ICC, threatened to arrest ICC judges!
Bush and Obama are of course just a few examples of the West’s club of war criminals, including the Clintons and Blairs. Their crimes, by comparison of viciousness and magnitude, make ICC-indicted African leaders look like chicken thieves. Yet somehow, these Western leaders walk free and are even afforded platforms to lecture the world about human rights, while ICC hunts “chicken thieves” in Africa.
These, and many other examples prove that the ICC is anti-African. Of course, Western apologetics are quick to argue otherwise by reminding us that ICC’s largest block of members—33 of its 122 states—is from Africa, the chief prosecutor is an African and Africans serve among the court’s judges and the prosecutor’s staff. This silly argument is not worth repudiating.
But it is enough to observe that whenever the West pursues a neo-colonial agenda, it props up black-faced stooges. Behind this lot, foreign handlers project racist and imperial aims. For example, to blackmail an African country’s human rights record, they front a black-faced investigator. To make their anti-Africa propaganda more believable, they deploy a black-faced news reporter. ICC is no different.
ICC is a neo-colonialist institution
In addition to being anti-African, the ICC doubly passes as a neo-colonialist institution that the West uses to peddle its agenda to control African politics through persecutory investigations and prosecutions.
It is neocolonialist in the sense, especially, that it disrespects the sovereignty of African states, as seen in the prosecution of Two African sitting heads of state, and its opposition to efforts by African governments to avoid ICC involvement in several situations.
The Court has proven over time to be in cohort with Western countries to keep a lease on progressive and independent-minded leaders of African countries. Countries such as Eritrea, which have rejected the West’s patronage and are pursuing self-reliance policies, are especially targeted.
So to answer the question: Is Now the time for African countries to withdraw from ICC? Yes. Africa’s 33 member countries should quickly repeal their membership of this anti-African, racist, and neocolonialist institution. Otherwise, continued membership legitimizes it, and promotes the West’s vile intentions to subjugate Africa.
