His mere crime was that he had given this newspaper an interview in which he said Kenya's president-elect, Uhuru Kenyatta, would not be welcome in Botswana "if" he did not cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) before which he and three others face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges are borne out of the 2007 post-election violence that claimed over a thousand lives in the East African country and displaced thousands more. In all honesty, it is our view that Skelemani said nothing wrong.
If Uhuru chooses to disregard the ICC because he is a head of state now, he should be treated in the same way as Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, for there is no difference between the two men, especially in the eyes of international law. The statement issued by Minister Skelemani yesterday has left us confused as to whether by it he means that even if Uhuru failed to cooperate with the ICC, he would still be welcome in Botswana. Perhaps Skelemani was under pressure from elsewhere. Whatever the case it may, this is an opportunity for the minister to sit down and draft a comprehensive Foreign Policy for Botswana that should make impossible what now looks like a massive diplomatic faux pas. At the moment, all indications are that we have no foreign policy document, and it is difficult to say whether it is the dictum of international law that we follow or we proceed from plain common sense. And if it is international law, which institutions take supremacy - the African Union, the Commonwealth or the Non-Aligned Movement which, we are told, still exists? If plain common sense it is, how do we explain the insufferable contradictions of arresting fellow African felons while we give sanctuary to American war criminals? If we proceed from common sense, how do we clarify - to ourselves, even - how we denigrate Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe today and then dispatch the Commander of the BDF on a mission of entente to the same bogeyman? Or reconcile our distinctly two-timing position in the Middle East in which we train our spies with vicious Zionists while professing undying commitment to the Palestinian cause? The lack of policy - both in the from of a guiding document and in assuming a disciplined line of action - has proved troublous in the Uhuru affair by demonstrating the folly of proceeding without guidance.
