France and SA skirt ICC fault-line
Presidents agree on need for action in CAR
FRANCE and SA were on the same page yesterday about the need for urgent action to prevent the Central African Republic (CAR) from sinking further into conflict and even religious war.
But on the first day of French President François Hollande’s state visit, the two countries’ leaders skirted around a new fault-line opening up between Europe and the African Union (AU) about how the International Criminal Court (ICC) should treat African leaders accused of crimes against humanity and other grave offences.
Fourteen African leaders backed Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and Sudan’s Omar alBashir at a special summit on Saturday of the 54-nation AU and said serving heads of state should be immune from prosecution.
Trade and economic ties will be paramount during most of the two-day visit. Annual trade between the two countries is less than R30bn, heavily weighted in France’s favour. President Jacob Zuma and Mr Hollande both said they were working with business groups to correct the imbalance. Mr Hollande arrived with eight of his ministers and one of his key objectives is to keep French firms in the running for South African nuclear power contracts.
But African conflicts and governance were bound to take centre-stage at the visit’s opening two-hander and they did; SA is the continent’s premier political and economic player and France is its dominant external military power, with more than 7,000 military personnel in Africa and bases dotted around its former colonies.
The next theatre for a spreading African war is looking likely to be the CAR, where the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) lost 14 men this year in a battle against Seleka rebels, who are now in shaky control of the impoverished country.
“In CAR there is a humanitarian emergency because there are daily exactions against the
population, there is a political emergency because there is no state and there is a regional emergency because there is the risk of a spillover,” Mr Hollande said at a joint news conference with Mr Zuma after an opening round of talks.
“There are fears we might witness religious conflicts in CAR,” he said, referring to analyses of Chadian and Sudanese Islamists stirring up tensions in the mostly Christian and animist country.
Mr Hollande pledged France’s full support for proposed AU and United Nations (UN) measures, including military ones, to end the growing chaos in the former French colony. France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, was sitting close to him in the Union Buildings, struggling to stay awake after an exhausting weekend.
Mr Fabius had flown to SA from Bangui where he promised more French troops after talks with President Michel Djotodia, the man who led the Seleka rebels. The condition was that free elections take place in 2015 as promised. Mr Fabius told reporters in Pretoria a strengthened AU-UN force would number 3,500 soldiers, drawn mostly from Cameroon, Chad, Gabon and Democratic Republic of Congo. It remains to be seen who will pay and when they are deployed, factors which have complicated the growing number of international military operations in Africa.
Mr Zuma has not pledged SANDF troops to a multilateral peacekeeping force in the CAR and will be very wary of doing so after the negative public reaction to the deaths of the 14 soldiers.
“Clearly the situation is getting worse. It is clear that the work towards elections cannot happen,” he said.
The team approach was in contrast with repeated diplomatic clashes between France and SA over African issues in recent years, whether about Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, the CAR or during the acrimonious campaigning last year for the AU Commission chairmanship won by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
Mr Hollande, visiting SA for the first time, was firm but polite about the AU summit at the weekend which seemed to offer greater protection to African leaders who are formally accused by the ICC of committing gross rights abuses.
“France is attached to the ICC and cannot accept any form of impunity,” Mr Hollande said, adding that this position did not rule out discussions about resolving “procedural” disputes. Mr Zuma responded by saying “we are all against impunity” and that the problems were caused by the ICC’s high-handed treatment of Mr Kenyatta and his co-accused, Deputy President William Ruto.