Will SA show some leadership on Syria?
An opportunity for President Zuma to support a proposal that would take the ICC out of its African laager
LAST week Deputy Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Ebrahim Ebrahim said the world should wait for UN weapons inspectors to complete their investigation of the suspected August 21 chemical weapons attack on Ghouta outside Damascus before taking any action.
Ebrahim said even though the mandate of the inspectors was only to establish if chemical weapons had been used in that attack and not who had used them, the evidence they discovered might suggest who had been responsible anyway.
He was right, but perhaps not in the way he intended. On Monday the inspectors reported that the nerve gas sarin had been used in the Ghouta attack which killed about 1 400 people. But they went further by calculating the trajectory of the rockets based on evidence such as the impact damage.
They did not themselves draw conclusions, but Human Rights Watch did. It plotted the trajectories of the rockets back from the different impact points, and found they converged on a well-known military base of the Syrian government’s Republican Guard 104th Brigade.
Assad’s ally Russia – which claims it was his rebel enemies who fired the sarin to frame him and draw the US into the war – accused the weapons inspectors of political bias. The inspectors have not, though, totally exonerated the rebels. They have not yet investigated other earlier suspected chemical weapons attacks. Perhaps if they ever do, they will find the rebels perpetrated some of those.
Nevertheless their evidence pointing to Assad’s responsibility for the worst attack on August 21, has further underscored how lightly he has got off the hook by merely having to place his chemical weapons stockpile under international inspection. This is the deal the US and Russia struck to avoid a US military strike.
In the absence of military action to prevent and deter Assad from ever using chemical weapons again, the only chance of holding him – and perhaps the rebels – accountable for their actions is for the UN Security Council to refer the Syrian situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate possible war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This is the course of action now being advocated by Human Rights Watch.
“To lock up the chemical weapons and not prosecute those who used them is an affront to the civilians who died,” said Richard Dicker, the organisation’s international justice director.
He added that referring Syria to the ICC should not be an issue among the squabbling permanent five members of the Security Council because the resolution need not allocate blame to either side.
Nevertheless, it is very likely Russia would oppose that measure because Assad’s government seems likely to be indicted, whatever happens to the rebels.
And South Africa? From the start of the conflict it has tracked the position of its ally Russia. When South Africa was on the Security Council in 2011, it opposed even the mildest of resolutions condemning Assad for brutally suppressing what were then still peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations.
South Africa is no longer on the Security Council but it could still make its voice heard supporting an ICC probe into the chemical weapons attacks and other atrocities committed by both sides in Syria.
It could use its alliance with Russia and China in the Brics bloc to try to persuade them not to veto an ICC investigation. President Jacob Zuma could do that as early as next week when he attends the UN General Assembly in New York as his fellowBrics leaders no doubt will also.
South Africa is after all a founding signatory of the Rome Statute of the ICC and an advocate of international justice.
Furthermore it has joined other African governments in criticising the ICC for picking on Africa because all its cases so far have been against Africans.
Here is a perfect opportunity for South Africa to lend its weight to a proposal that would take the ICC out of its African laager and prove that it really is an international criminal court. pressure and intimidation from the SAJBD’s sister Zionist organisation, the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) on Justice Richard Goldstone. Goldstone headed a damning UN Human Rights Council enquiry that found the Israeli government guilty of warcrimes during Israel’s 2008-9 bombardment of the Gaza Strip, code-named Operation Cast Lead.
Goldstone wrote to Archbishop Tutu saying: “When the attacks started – they were vicious personal attacks on me… “
It is rather instructive that Ronnie Kasrils – one of the Jewish community’s greatest and most celebrated anti-apartheid Struggle stalwarts – recently reiterated at the Joburg launch of Why Israel? that the attacks and abuse that he received from the Zionist lobby in this country, including the SAJBD and SAZF, were far worse than anything he faced from the apartheid South African government.
Saks also seems to have ignored the core of the book which discusses Israel’s numerous violations, and its status as an apartheid state, in terms of international law.
We are not surprised that Saks’s entire piece did not even mention the comparisons between currentday Israel and apartheid South Africa, since the Zionist lobby in this country has a long history of evading debate on this issue. Saks’s own SAJBD recently refused to participate in a debate at Rhodes University on this very issue.
Rather than trying to discredit Why Israel? and the Media Review Network, Saks would be better off reading the sections in the book that examine Israel’s collaboration with apartheid South Africa, and the role of the SAJBD in aiding South African apartheid. This might help him reflect on how the SAJBD is again defending an apartheid state.
Dadoo and Osman are the authors of