Editor, Reference is made to the article, “Sudan leader Bashir flies out of South Africa” (The New Times, June 15). The seizure of a visiting head of state by a host nation, even the threat of such apprehension, would be tantamount to a declaration of war. How ridiculous can Pretoria get that it would allow its courts to run amok to the point where they were recently running their foreign relations all the way up to rupture of diplomatic relations with a fellow member of the African Union? You do not offer to host a summit if you do not believe that you can guarantee to receive all the visiting African heads of state without putting them and yourself through this kind of diplomatic incident set off by people and institutions that are not members of the organization whose summit you were so eager to host. And the rest of Africa itself has egg all over its face. Having seen and heard a mere few months back what the South Africans think of the rest of Africa north of the River Limpopo, why did you agree to maintain the AU Summit there? As we say in Kinyarwanda, “Uwigize agatebo ayozwa ivu” (if you accept to be stumbled upon, do not be offended when your abuser persists in treating you as such). And one need not hold any brief for President Omar al-Bashir or his government’s shabby and often murderous treatment of Sudan’s minorities, whether in Darfur, Khordofan, or the Nuba Mountains, or the Hadedawas of Eastern Sudan, to still be shocked at how Africans continue to allow their dignity to be used as a doormat by a foreign controlled ICC hell-bent on keeping us under the west’s thumb through pseudo judicial lynching. Mwene Kalinda
