{President Museveni used the 52nd Independence day celebrations to urge African countries to review their membership of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which he accuses of being biased and an “instrument of post-colonial hegemony”.}
Museveni’s problem with the ICC is its insistence on prosecuting Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta for his alleged role in the post-2007 election violence that killed more than 1,000 people.
“The problems that occurred in Kenya in 2007 and those that happened in other African countries are, first and foremost, ideological. ICC to handle them as just legal matters is the highest level of shallowness,” Museveni said.
A former proponent of the court, Museveni has recently turned into its harshest critic, once calling it a group of “arrogant actors”.
Because European powers want to play the “big boy” role over Africa, Museveni says, it is the reason why a resolution by the African Union (AU) cushioning African presidents from being summoned by the ICC was ignored. The AU assembly of heads of state that sat in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa last year passed the resolution that was also tabled before the UN Security Council.
Because Africa has no permanent members at the Security Council, Museveni believes, it did not “see much merit in the collective wisdom of African leaders,” leading to the court’s summoning of Kenyatta.
“The pushers of the hegemonic agenda have been misusing the ICC, an institution we initially supported,” Museveni said.
“My view is that, at the next summit, African countries should review their membership of the ICC treaty. The ICC is turning out not to be the value-addition product that we had expected it to be. It is instead, a biased instrument of post-colonial hegemony,” Museveni added.
On Wednesday, Kenyatta appeared before the court sitting at The Hague, Netherlands, during its status conference. He returned home on Thursday morning and was received by massive crowds. He had been expected to join his colleagues Paul Kagame (Rwanda) Jakaya Kikwete (Tanzania) and Salva Kiir (South Sudan) at the Independence Day celebrations.
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Museveni also blamed Western powers for the conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East.
“These global players are always in cahoots with incapable puppets. It is that permutation that is, mainly, responsible for these tragedies of human haemorrhage, destruction of social and economic capital and loss of development time in those unfortunate lands,” Museveni said.
He paid tribute to the late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere.
“The strong capacity you see here of the UPDF, police and our party, the NRM, were strongly influenced by 28 cadres who Nyerere helped me to train in Mozambique,” Museveni said.
He named Kagame as one of the beneficiaries of Nyerere’s influence on the 28 cadres. Although some of the cadres abandoned him and turned into “bandits”, Museveni said, their impact had spread to also cause change in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Twenty-two people were awarded medals, some of which were supposed to have been received in 2012. These included Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala, and the only surviving delegates to the Lancaster conference that negotiated Uganda’s independence: Mbonye Byombi and Mbabi Katana.
Among the notable absentees was NRM Secretary General Amama Mbabazi, who was recently sacked as prime minister. Mbabazi, The Observer learnt, chose to mark the day in his home district of Kanungu.
One of the attention-grabbing individuals was a greying old woman who sauntered to where Museveni was seated and engaged the president in some conversation. Museveni left his seat to talk to the old woman, before handing her an envelope. The woman then walked away, visibly happy on this anniversary of Uganda’s independence
The Observer
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