Russian President Vladimir Putin and Presidential Regiment officers during an awards ceremony at the Grand Kremlin Palace on June 12, 2023 in Moscow. Photo by Contributor/Getty Images
In the Crosswind is the title of a film about Stalin’s 1941 mass deportation of women, children and older people from the Soviet-occupied Baltic states to Siberia.
It is also a metaphor for South Africa’s difficulty in a global order reshaped by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and riven by heightened super-power rivalry.
The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin for the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia has made it almost impossible for the government to steer a course of non-alignment through the storm.
The threat of US sanctions has now become overt.
An inter-ministerial committee has concluded that there is no legal loophole that lets South Africa out of its obligation under the Rome Statute to arrest Putin if he arrives here in August to attend the Brics summit.
It has suggested three ways of approaching the problem, none of them ideal or easy to implement.
The first, and the preferred route of the realists in the committee, is to persuade another Brics member to host the three-day summit. China is the most obvious candidate because it maintains a “no limits” friendship with Russia and is not a member of the ICC, but it is understood that XI Jinping is resisting the idea. So are senior members of the ANC.
The second is to persuade Putin to skip the summit.
President Cyril Ramaphosa will attempt to do so when he travels to Saint Petersburg at the end of July for the Russia-Africa summit. But it will take exceptional diplomatic skill to convince a leader raging against the Western liberal order to recuse himself, or appear virtually, for the sake of appeasing a court that he believes represents it.
The committee noted the government could consult the ICC with regard to article 97 of the Rome Statute, which allows a member to explain that a request is complicated by a prior or competing undertaking. But it is a futile exercise because the warrant trumps routine immunity extended to visiting heads of state.
There is another, messy option which the ministers did not advise. Let Putin fly into the country for long enough to pose for photographs as a strongman unbowed, then claim there was no time to carry out an arrest before he suddenly returned to Moscow.
It would be a repeat of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir’s visit to South Africa in 2015. The high court, and the ICC, would again be outraged and Ramaphosa, unlike Jacob Zuma, cares to be seen to uphold the rule of law.
So he needs to bring Xi and Putin to reason in the coming weeks.
Beyond that he must find a way of combining principle and pragmatism to serve South Africa’s strategic interests as the world shifts. It’s a lonely line of flight because there are few sophisticates left in his party. But the economy demands it, and he knows the rand will dictate the ANC’s election fortunes.