WASHINGTON--The message Barack Obama delivered to Africa’s leaders during his brief visit to Ghana last week came down to four words of tough love: Get your act together. That, in essence, is what this American president, whom the Ghanaian people greeted like royalty, said in his address to Ghana’s Parliament that was intended for leaders across the continent.
The son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, President Obama has the genetic license to say publicly what no other American president could utter with impunity.
“Africa is not the crude caricature of a continent at perpetual war,” President Obama said, “but, if we are honest, for far too many Africans, conflict is a part of life, as constant as the sun.
“That is why we must stand up to inhumanity in our midst. It is the ultimate mark of criminality and cowardice to condemn women to relentless and systematic rape.
“We must bear witness to the value of every child in Darfur and the dignity of every woman in the Congo.”
Africa’s future, President Obama said, is in the hands of Africans, and that, it seems, is a problem because just days before he arrived in Ghana, the African Union, an organization of 53 African countries, circled its wagons around Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir, the president of Sudan.
He is charged with five crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes in connection with the genocide of ethnic minorities in the Darfur section of Sudan.
Al-Bashir, the ICC said, is “criminally responsible” for acts of murder, torture, rape and pillage in the 6-year-old civil war that has taken the lives of 300,000 Sudanese.
Even so, President John Atta Mills of Ghana said he and other African leaders will refuse to help the ICC bring al-Bashir to justice while peace talks are underway.
“We need a lasting solution for Darfur, and the president of Sudan….is a major part of the solution.
So that is why we called for postponement,” President Mills said, the Voice of America reported.
The ICC, which began operation in 2002, is the court of last resort for war criminals and those who commit crimes against humanity when the suspect can’t be brought to justice in the country where the offenses took place.
The African Union’s objection to an arrest warrant for al-Bashir highlights the core conflict between people who are working for peace and those who clamor for justice.
The African Union believes that as president, al-Bashir can play a key role in its efforts to broker an end to that country’s long-running civil war.
But, after hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and brutalized by al-Bashir’s forces, the ICC thinks the world must move quickly to haul him before the international tribunal.
The world’s real-life struggle for peace and justice in Sudan and other places where massive crimes have been committed is the focus of a documentary that airs tonight on PBS.
“The Reckoning” is a riveting look at the ICC’s efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of some of the world’s worst crimes while those offenses are still taking place.
One of those places is Sudan, home to the continuing violence Obama called “genocide” in his Ghana speech. But the African Union, of which Sudan is a member, opposes treating al-Bashir like a war criminal in the hope that he will change his murderous ways.
And that is a troubling reminder of just how much Africa’s future is in the hands of Africans.
