Insert thoughtful response to Zimbabwe power-sharing deal and Sudanese ICC indictments here

I have received several celebratory emails from student organizations at the LSE praising the recent issuance of ICC indictments in Sudan. These emails have described the court's exertion of its juridical might as a necessary step towards eradicating impunity. These emails struck me as overly simplistic for several reasons:

1. The ICC is a highly politicized legal mechanism -- its administration of justice is selective and self-serving. As Tim Allen explains in his book, Trial Justice -- The International Criminal Court and the Lord's Resistance Army, "perhaps not surprisingly, the waters are being tested in parts of the world that are politically and economically of limited significance for the major powers. All the ICC's ongoing investigations are in Central Africa" (Allen, 2). Western "Super Powers" are exempted from the ICC's far reaching, juridical power. As Professor Gerry Simpson notes in Law, War & Crime, "the ICC may have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity but this is certainly not universal jurisdiction (universal jurisdiction was specifically rejected by the delegates at Rome). Any US soldiers suspected of committing crimes against humanity in Afghanistan would not be subject to it, and Russian Special Forces accused of murdering civilians in Chechnya are not subject to it." As a result, most "alleged war criminals in most places, most of the time, will not fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC" (Simpson, 47).

2. The organization's focus on collective rather than individual guilt is misplaced. Genocide is mass participatory -- deflecting attention from the abuses suffered at the hands of many, in favor of those committed by political elites, ignores the totality of the conflict's destructive power. It might also have the unintended effect of legitimating and making martyr's out of the accused (Simpson, 21).

3. Issuing indictments in the midst of a volatile, ethnic conflict could foment further violence and disrupt tenuous cease-fire agreements (as in Northern Uganda). Professor Simpson claims that "organizations like the ICC become the enemy of politics -- calling for punishment instead of negotiation, individual guilt and blame in the face of collective responsibility, and trial instead of immunity" (Simpson, 22).

4. African countries may not be receptive to what is often perceived as a Western, adversarial mode of justice. Okechukwu Oko argues in "The Challenges of International Criminal Prosecutions in Africa," that African citizens “deride international criminal prosecutions as judicial colonialism, imperial condescension, or worse, as ersatz efforts by the West to imbricate its failure to prevent tu quoque violence that continues to disfigure Africa.” The adversarial model is viewed this way because the “elaborate substantive and procedural rules [employed] are virtually incomprehensible to the local inhabitants,” and the type of justice pursued in these geographically distant tribunals is identified as “foreign” (Oko, 366).

On the Subject of the Collapsed Zimbabwean Negotiations...

1. Robert Mugabe has rewritten electoral laws to stay in power, has violently re-appropriated land, silenced and abused the opposition. Deception and manipulation is his political forte. Why are people surprised he's done it again? Giving such a skilled dictator even a "symbolic" governmental position was a mistake.

2. Robert Mugabe's rallying cry has been and always will be "us versus them." He hasn't moved past the injustices of apartheid and skillfully invokes these memories to draw continued support from his comrades (including Thabo Mbeki).

3. CRONYISM. Robert Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki have an unsettling, historically convoluted but deeply personal relationship. Mbeki has come under fire in the past for his policy of "quiet diplomacy" in Zimbabwe. Why rely on his powers of persuasion now with Robert Mugabe for a crisis with such severe sociopolitical and regional implications?