Just as Trump finally took a saunter down the perp trail Tuesday, so Putin may eventually take his own perp walk. But grabbing Putin will be much harder than indicting Trump; bringing Putin to the bar of justice as a named war criminal may depend on other countries turning him in. South Africa may be the first to have such an opportunity to do good.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) took the first step last month, accusing Putin of being responsible for the numerous atrocities inflicted on Ukrainian civilians since the start of the war. The ICC particularly focused on the forcible transfer of more than 16,000 children, some orphaned, some simply stolen. It cited the many assaults on civilians in and the civilian infrastructure of Ukraine. There is much more, too, that the ICC’s chief prosecutor attributed to Putin’s invasion and his leadership of the attempt to pulverize Ukraine and Ukrainians, as well as his illegal seizure of the Donbas and Crimea.
South Africa hosts the next meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in South Africa in August. BRICS is a relatively new international grouping that was formed early in this century as a counter to the big power G7 (from which Putin’s Russia was excluded after his earlier invasion of Ukraine in 2014). If Putin were to show himself at the BRICS conclave, it would be incumbent on South Africa to arrest Putin and turn him over to the ICC tribunal in The Hague.
But please don’t hold your breath. First, even Putin would be foolhardy to attend. And even if he did, South Africa’s record of conforming to ICC requests is not strong. In 2015, when then President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan flew to Johannesburg to attend a summit of the African Union, he had been on the ICC’s wanted list for five years, ever since being accused of crimes against humanity in Darfur, Sudan’s most western province. Three million civilians from Darfur’s African peoples were victimized, with more than 80,000 and as many as 400,000 killed by Sudanese troops and militia taking orders from Bashir. Beginning in 2003, nine years after Rwanda’s horrific genocide, when 800,000 were murdered, human rights observers and the ICC had placed Bashir at the center of the chain of command that perpetrated the many massacres.
Bashir traveled to Johannesburg and attended most of the African Union sessions. President Jacob Zuma’s government not only welcomed Bashir. It also helped him escape back to the Sudan from a South African military airbase just as the country’s Constitutional Court was ruling that South Africa was obliged by its signing of the ICC protocols to arrest and hold Bashir for the ICC.
Those obligations still exist. And Zuma is on trial once more in South Africa, charged with multiple counts of corruption and influence peddling. President Cyril Ramaphosa, his successor, is much more a democrat, and much more aware of South Africa’s responsibilities to international bodies like the ICC. But South Africa is also determined to be the best judge of its own conduct.
South Africa has also refused, so far, to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or to shun Russia and Putin’s minions when they visit South Africa. Furthermore, South Africa willingly participated recently in naval exercises with Russia and China off its southeastern coast.
Zuma and many other high level current operatives of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) were funded and trained in the Soviet Union during apartheid. Unlike Zimbabwe’s dominant Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front party in Zimbabwe, backed in its chimurenga struggle against whites (1972-1979) by China, the ANC was a Soviet disciple. Hence, the ANC’s loyalty to Putin as a Soviet replacement and its reluctance to criticize Russia. An ANC parliamentary delegation visited Moscow last week. Moreover, Russia is selling discounted petroleum to a South Africa that is short of electrical power and Russian oligarchs are investing in base metal mining and smelting projects in South Africa. There may be multiple payoffs, too.
Ramaphosa, however, was never trained in the Soviet Union. He and many of his United Democratic Front colleagues (now in the ANC) battled apartheid from within South Africa. They came not from Soviet guerrilla training camps in Tanzania and Zambia, nor from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Ramaphosa, never a Communist comrade, thus has little affection for Putin except transactionally in terms of how Ramaphosa is attempting to hold the old and new wings of the ANC together, and how winning battles on the home front largely depends on remaining legitimate both within the party and the nation before next year’s national election. (Paradoxically, opinion polls in South Africa report that 65 percent of South Africans condemn Putin’s invasion, back Ukraine, and would likely favor arresting Putin if he set foot in South Africa.)
At home, Ramaphosa faces soaring safety and security issues: crime numbers, criminal gang killings, robberies, and xenophobic attacks on non-South African immigrants are all increasing in frequency. Moreover, South Africa has an acute shortage of readily accessible electrical power; load shedding episodes are constant thanks to the mismanagement, maintenance failures, and corruption that have together crippled the state’s utility provider. Yesterday, Eskom, the state utility, forecast that major power outages would occur “every day” in the forthcoming year. Ramaphosa can hardly cement his control over the country or his ruling party without conquering those real complaints. Arresting Putin could be a step too far.
Even so, Putin is a man of bravado and a great risk taker, as his invasion of Ukraine demonstrates. Perhaps he will try to flaunt world order in August by showing himself in Johannesburg. If so there could at least be a chance to start him on a perp walk like his good friend Trump.