News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

'Come to Africa to see real election rigging, Mr Trump'

Posted: 21 Oct 2016 03:15 AM PDT

If Donald Trump is interested in rigged elections, Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti says he could teach him a thing or two.

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Johannesburg - If Donald Trump is interested in rigged elections, Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti says he could teach him a thing or two.

Biti was arrested for treason and detained for a month after daring to suggest his party had defeated President Robert Mugabe in a vote in 2008.

“They denied me food. They beat me up. They put me in leg irons. They beat me in the private parts,” says Biti, a lawyer who later served as finance minister in an eventual unity government. “That's real election rigging.”

To opposition figures in Africa, and in other parts of the world that lack the 240-year US history of peaceful transitions of power, Trump's assertion that November's US presidential election will be “rigged”, and his declaration that he may not accept the outcome, are dangerous words.

“Donald Trump is a gift to all tin-pot dictators on the African continent. He is giving currency and legitimacy to rigging because if it can exist in America, it can exist anywhere,” Biti said.

“He has no idea what he's talking about, absolutely no idea,” said Biti, who speaks from the experience of three election defeats to Mugabe, a 92-year-old ex-guerrilla who has run Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. “It makes us cross because in Africa there's real election rigging.”

Long-serving rulers who have faced US criticism in the past are already using Trump's remarks to counter Washington's pro-democracy message.

When Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in power for 30 years, won re-election to his seventh term in February, US officials accused his government of arresting opposition figures, harassing their supporters and intimidating the media.

Trump's comments, said Museveni's spokesman Don Wanyama, “should be an eye-opener to them. As they sit down to lecture other countries, they should realise that it's not easy. Democracy is a process and it really takes time.”

Trump refused during a debate on Wednesday to say whether he would respect the result of the November 8 poll. That sent a chill down the spine of Musikari Kombo, a former local government minister in Kenya, where 1 500 people were killed in a wave of ethnic bloodletting unleashed by disputes over the result of a 2007 election.

“I was shocked. I was horrified,” Kombo said. “People in Africa who have always challenged elections will say: 'You see, we are vindicated. Even in the Mother of all Democracies, the presidential candidate is not willing to accept because there is rigging.”

US officials, including state governors from Trump's own Republican Party, say there is no serious vote fraud problem in the United States and the election will be clean.

Nevertheless, Trump and some allies have alleged anomalies in the voter roll in cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago that could allow the votes of dead people to be counted on behalf of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It is hard to think what they would have made of this year's election in Gabon, where opposition leader Jean Ping cried foul after narrowly losing to President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the oil-producing former French colony for half a century.

The focus of Ping's concern was the province of Haut-Ogooue, where results showed 95.46 percent of voters backed Bongo on a turnout of 99.9 percent, more than double anywhere else.

Gabon's constitutional court - led by the long-time mistress of Bongo's father, Omar - upheld the result.

“I would say to Mr Trump 'Come to Gabon to see what a fake democracy looks like, to see what a stolen election looks like,'“ said Alexandre Barro Chambrier, a senior Ping adviser.

“There is no democracy here. There is the rule of one family and one man imposing a dictatorial regime,” he added. “Mr Trump is not serious.”

Reuters

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SA’s decision to withdraw from ICC slammed

Posted: 21 Oct 2016 02:19 AM PDT

Civil society has been urged to bring a legal challenge to the government's decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court.

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Johannesburg - Civil society has been urged to bring a legal challenge to the South African government’s decision this week to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Africa had shown “a startling disregard for justice,” by its decision, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, said on Thursday.

On Wednesday Pretoria informed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that it was withdrawing from the controversial Hague-based court which tries the gravest crimes: genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The withdrawal of South Africa from a court which it helped found, will come into effect a year from Wednesday (October 19, 2017).

In a letter delivered to Ban, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said that South Africa’s membership of the ICC was interfering with its peace mediation efforts in Africa.

This was an apparent reference to the ICC indictment of Sudanese President Omar al Bashir for alleged atrocities in Darfur.

The South African government has been found by South Africa’s own Supreme Court of Appeal to have failed to uphold South African law by not arresting him when he visited South Africa in June last year.

Also read: SA to quit ICC: What it means

Justice Minister Michael Masutha on Friday confirmed that South Africa was pulling out of the International Criminal Court because its obligations are inconsistent with laws giving sitting leaders diplomatic immunity.

"The Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act, 2002, is in conflict and inconsistent with the provisions of the Diplomatic Immunities and Privileges Act, 2001," Masutha told a media conference in the capital Pretoria.

However, on Thursday Anton du Plessis, managing director of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria, said he believed that the South African government had acted illegally in withdrawing from the ICC Treaty this week.

This could only be done with parliamentary approval, he said, and not by the executive acting on its own.

The decision to withdraw had been taken by the Cabinet on Wednesday, an official has said.

Du Plessis said civil society should launch a legal challenge to the decision to withdraw and this should happen immediately.

Du Plessis also questioned why Pretoria had decided to pull out of the ICC only a few weeks before it was due to attend the meeting of the Assembly of States Parties of the Rome Statute which governs the ICC.

He recalled that the government had said before that it wished to seek amendments to parts of the Rome Statute in the Assembly and would only withdraw from it if it failed to do so.

“So why has it decided now to pre-empt the outcome of the Assembly deliberations?” he asked.

Du Plessis said he believed the reason was to try to politically neutralise the effect of the decision which the Constitutional Court is scheduled to start hearing the case on November 22 on whether or not it agreed with the Appeal Court decision on Al-Bashir.

Du Plessis said he believed the Zuma administration was looking for political cover in case the Constitutional Court upheld the Appeal Court decision that Pretoria had acted unlawfully in failing to arrest Al-Bashir.

He said he believed that if that happened, the government wanted to be able to say “well it doesn’t matter anyway as we have already decided to pull out of the ICC.”

Du Plessis said the government shouldn’t be allowed to get away with such “smoke and mirrors” political manouevering as the courts’ decisions on the Al-Bashir case still stood regardless of whether or not South Africa pulled out of the ICC next year.

He noted that South Africa had incorporated the ICC Rome Statute into South African domestic law so it had breached its own law, not just an international treaty, by failing to arrest Al-Bashir.

Human Rights Watch said: “South Africa’s proposed withdrawal from the International Criminal Court shows startling disregard for justice from a country long seen as a global leader on accountability for victims of the gravest crimes.

“Questions remain about whether the government even acted in line with its own laws for leaving the court. It’s important both for South Africa and the region that this runaway train be slowed down and South Africa’s hard-won legacy of standing with victims of mass atrocities be restored.”

African News Agency and Reuters

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I'll go home on foot if I have to - S Sudan leader

Posted: 21 Oct 2016 01:09 AM PDT

South Sudan rebel leader Riek Machar says he could return to the country as early as next month, even if he has to do it the way he left.

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Johannesburg - South Sudan rebel leader Riek Machar says he could return to the turbulent country as early as next month, even if he has to enter the way he fled - on foot.

He has begun speaking out again after a long silence, during which he trekked 40 days through the bush into neighbouring Congo as South Sudan's capital erupted in renewed fighting.

In an interview on Thursday with The Associated Press in South Africa, Machar said his country's peace deal had "collapsed" and a new political process is needed to revive it.

But he did not commit to rejoining the peace deal on the same terms. Under the agreement signed in 2015 that sought to end a bloody two-year civil war, he had been vice-president in a fragile national unity government under his rival, President Salva Kiir.

Machar says he has the right to be president, and that he has enough forces to "liberate" the capital, Juba.

He called for his supporters to "wage a popular armed resistance against the authoritarian and racist regime" in his first public comments in exile last month. On Thursday he backed away from that call to arms, saying his statement was "resisting the war being forced on us."

Machar fled South Sudan in July when fighting erupted among security forces, and he last spoke with Kiir on July 15, less than a week after the gunfire began. The government quickly replaced him as vice-president. Fighting has continued in several parts of South Sudan since then.

In one of his first interviews in exile, Machar on Thursday warned of coming atrocities by South Sudan's government, including possible genocide. On Wednesday, Kiir announced that tribalism had become a growing factor in the conflict and that the army supporting him was mostly his fellow Dinka.

"What is that going to do?" asked Machar, an ethnic Nuer.

He said he is afraid South Sudan will see more attacks like the one by South Sudanese soldiers in July on the Terrain compound popular with foreigners, where Americans were singled out and aid workers and others were raped, forced to watch a local journalist be shot dead and subjected to mock executions.

If South Sudan's government can do that to foreigners from powerful countries, Machar asked, what does the world think it will do to its own people?

Machar also described how he fled the country in July in a 804-kilometre march through the bush into Congo. There, he said, the United Nations peacekeeping force extracted him, even as South Sudanese helicopter gunships continued to target him beyond their border.

"I went through an ordeal," Machar said, describing an epic, zig-zagging hike in which he and supporters were reduced to eating wild fruit and snails. Five of his soldiers died, he said, likely from poisoning after eating raw cassava.

Now Machar is in a hit-and-miss pursuit of world leaders for talks on how to revive South Sudan's peace deal.

After a stay in Sudan, where he failed to meet President Omar Bashir, he now hopes to meet South African President Jacob Zuma.

During his time in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, Machar said Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni requested a meeting to discuss a political process. Museveni asked if Machar would participate in a dialogue. "I said I would," the rebel leader said.

South Sudan's government has given contradictory statements over whether it would allow Machar back or negotiate with him. On Thursday, government spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said he would not be allowed in South Sudan "as a political leader," saying he has lost support among some in the opposition.

Analysts say some diplomats have tried to get Machar to accept exile, but he rejected the idea - "Why would I?" - saying he had a responsibility to return home.

And Machar said he would support a UN-imposed arms embargo on South Sudan, saying that "it is the government that is buying arms." He would not say whether his forces are getting arms from outside.

AP

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