The recent issuing of a warrant of arrest for Russian president, Vladimir Putin, must remind us, as Africans, of the tragedies of Côte D’Ivoire. Chinese President Xi Jinping
WESLEY SEALE
Soon we will mark the 12th anniversary of the essay, “What the World Got Wrong in Côte D’Ivoire”, written by former president and African Union meditator in Côte D’Ivoire, Thabo Mbeki.
Among others, Mbeki wrote at the time that “…the African Union understood that a lasting solution of the Ivorian crisis necessitated a negotiated agreement between the two belligerent Ivorian factions, focused on the interdependent issues of democracy, peace, national reconciliation and unity.”
Pointing out that the origin of the post-elections conflict in 2011 had started nearly nine years earlier, Mbeki identified several role players who had to take responsibility for the deaths of many Africans in that country.
In the end, the United Nations, United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom were quick to congratulate Alassane Ouattara on his election while his opponent Laurent Gbagbo was rushed to the International Criminal Court; further dividing the west African state.
Eventually, in April 2021, a decade after his arrest and after the deaths of over three thousand people, Laurent Gbagbo was acquitted by the ICC.
The recent issuing of a warrant of arrest for Russian president, Vladimir Putin, must remind us, as Africans, of the tragedies of Côte D’Ivoire.
As in 2011, the United States is quick to support the idea of President Putin’s arrest but this is a clear indication that it does not want a true and lasting solution to the crisis faced by Ukraine.
Never mind that the US has been involved in wars every year since the Second World War, has often acted as the aggressor in those wars and whose presidents really should be hauled before the ICC, the US continues to fail as an international leader in ensuring the lasting and sustainable peace of many countries around the globe.
Instead, as President Mbeki wrote in 2011, we should ask whether we understand that a lasting solution of the [Ukrainian] crisis necessitates a negotiated agreement between the two belligerent Ukrainian factions, focused on the interdependent issues of democracy, peace, national reconciliation and unity.
We must continue by asking, as President Mbeki did in the Ivorian crisis and with Gbagbo’s arrest, whether the warrant of arrest issued by the ICC for President Putin will really assist in ensuring this negotiated settlement between Russia and the Ukraine. It does not.
Yet if anything, the words of President Mbeki on the international system in that essay applies very well today than it did ten years ago.
To paraphrase him, one may articulate that “thus, in various ways, the events in Ukraine could serve as a defining moment in terms of the urgent need to reengineer the system of international relations.
They have exposed the reality of the balance and abuse of power in the post-Cold War era, and put paid to the fiction that the major powers respect the rule of law in the conduct of international relations, even as defined by the U.N. Charter, and that, as democrats, they respect the views of the peoples of the world.”
In the face of the Biden administration simply repeating US crimes, the introduction onto the world stage of, so-called, Xiplomacy must be welcomed.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has been at the forefront of pushing for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine and, as with the 2011 conflict in Côte D’Ivoire, he knows too well that the conflict in Ukraine did not commence in 2022 but did so in 2014 already.
Africans know more than they pretend. We have had our own Ukraine crisis so many times before and by now we know who the genuine partners are and who are not.
Fortunately, what the Ukrainian crisis has exposed is the growing isolation of the US and the fall of its role as a global leader.
Seale has a PhD in international relations.