20 Years later 1995 Remembered

Omar Bashir flew out of South Africa on June 15 as world powers and activists were urging the government to arrest him under a warrant from the global court on charges of masterminding genocide and other atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region. Bashir's plane was allowed to take off even though a Pretoria court had issued an order banning him from leaving until the end of a hearing on his case. "A democratic state based on the rule of law cannot exist or function if the government ignores its constitutional obligations and fails to abide by court orders," High Court Judge Dustan Mlambo said in a televised statement in court. Stephen Grootes says the ANC needs to respect the Constitution which it often likes to claim it gave us. It says something for the mixture of cynicism and pessimism in our political and legal circles, that once the Southern African Litigation Centre brought its application to have al-Bashir arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court, no one seriously thought that it would actually happen. Almost everyone who understood the issues knew that the courts would order his detention, but no one thought that this order would be carried out. It says something about our president, and the state of the ANC right now, that there was always only one way that this would end. 20 years ago was the celebration of 1995 Rugby World Cup final, it was a time when the South African president was an international statesman of the highest order. South Africa led the world with nuclear disarmament, we were a fledgling democracy talking about a progressive constitution that would take South Africa into the new millennium as a leader of equality and human rights.South Africa were a production line for Nobel peace laureates. South Africa's  name was synonymous with “miracle” and the leaders of the ANC oozed gravitas. South Africa  were the darlings of the world. Then, as if written in the stars, Nelson Mandela wore Francois Pienaar’s jersey and the Springboks beat the mighty All Blacks of New Zealand to win the World Cup.

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