The SACP has slammed the decision of the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The party said this decision showed it was biased and was the reason why some countries have chosen not to be part of the Rome Statute.
It said while the ICC has chosen to go after Putin, it has ignored to act against any US leader for the invasion of Iraq exactly 20 years ago.
It said that invasion was unjustified and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, but not a single leader from the US has been held to account.
The SACP said the ICC has been quick to jump on some of the cases, but decided to stay away from others. The US and its Western allies have been involved in invasions in other parts of the world, but none of their leaders have been issued any warrant of arrest.
When the US invaded Iraq in March 2003 it had used the argument that late leader Saddam Hussein was possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein was later captured and hanged after a trial, three years after the invasion.
The SACP said the ICC has also ignored other invasions across the world carried out by the US and other Western powers.
“Meanwhile, in a month that marks the 20th anniversary of the historical injustice of the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led imperialist forces, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, and Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of Russia, on allegations relating to the United States-dominated NATO-provoked war in Ukraine,” said the SACP.
“In Africa, the case of Laurent Gbagbo, Ivory Coast President from 2000 until his unjust arrest in April 2011 by politically biased forces supported by the imperialist French troops, and his unjust incarceration until 2019, will go down in history as part of the ICC’s legacy of bias underpinned primarily by imperialist interests in what appeared merely as a domestic conflict. Gbagbo’s arrest and incarceration for eight years under the auspices of the ICC occurred with no evidence. Ivory Coast’s former minister of youth development, Charles Blé Goudé, who was also arrested, faced the same injustice,” it said.
siyabonga.mkhwanazi@inl.co.za
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