Not since the International Criminal Court issued an indictment for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in March 2009 has the world witnessed such intense global media commentary on the issue. This has followed a South African high court judgment ordering the government to prevent Bashir from leaving the country pending its consideration of an application for his arrest brought by a non-governmental organisation.The commentary has been divided between those demanding Bashir's arrest and the more circumspect, who call for a broader appraisal of the issues .For the latter group, there are many factors that would have made the arrest of Bashir on South African soil ill-advised and catastrophic, among them:We would have imperilled our bilateral relations with Sudan and many of its neighbours as well as the Muslim world;South Africa has 850 military and 42 police personnel serving under the UN African Union Mission in Darfur, Sudan. What might have befallen these gallant South Africans had we arrested Bashir? This touches on something that, regrettably, does not come naturally among sections of South African society: the national interest; andWe would have divided and weakened the continent and the AU. Bashir was in South Africa at the invitation of the AU, and arresting him would have transmuted our continental organisation into an instrument in the service of interests other than African, a matter most Africans would resent deeply.block_quotes_start The questions surrounding arresting Bashir are thus essentially political, not legal as the advocates of "international" justice have made out block_quotes_endThe US government does not arrest foreign heads of state , even when it has sanctions over them, when they attend the UN General Assembly in New York every September. It is obvious that, were it to do so, it would weaken the UN, and undermine its privilege of hosting that organisation on US soil.A South African arrest of Bashir would have exacerbated the precarious political situation in Sudan, which faces enormous political and social challenges. The AU-led processes to resolve Sudan's (and South Sudan's) political challenges would have been mortally damaged, deepening instability in East Africa.South Africa would thus have manufactured a foreign policy crisis of unprecedented proportions with far-reaching domestic and continental implications. We and the rest of the continent would have been left to pick up the pieces from the fall out while the agitators, as often happens, moved on to another issue elsewhere in the world.As Africans, we are the ones having to contend with the aftermath of Nato's 2011 regime-change scheme in Libya. Among other consequences, the proliferation of small arms has introduced new security threats in the Maghreb and the Sahel and exacerbated old ones. The Libyan state has totally collapsed, with socio-economic consequences not only for Libyans but for other African states.mini_story_image_hright1Today, the graphic representation of Nato's arrogant folly in Libya is the sight of Africans crammed on rickety boats, or drowning in the Mediterranean, in vain search of a better life in a resentful Europe. Those that bequeathed us this harvest of thorns appear to have been struck by muteness, without even a squeak of remorse.The questions surrounding arresting Bashir are thus essentially political and not legal as the advocates of "international" justice have made out. Because the issues are political, the AU has, on more than one occasion, requested the Security Council to defer the warrant of arrest against Bashir to enable the AU to engage with Sudan's political players to find a lasting political solution, which would necessarily have to address the issues of accountability as well as the fundamental issue of reconciliation.The Security Council has not deigned to respond to the AU.The school of thought that superordinates legal processes over all other factors overlooks the political contexts in which the law is applied.Consider the fact that the US, Russia and China are not even signatories to the Rome Statute of the ICC. Yet, as members of the Security Council, which is not representative of the vast majority of the world's population, they have the power to refer matters to the ICC.This is not a call for impunity: very few on the African continent would deny the vital need for accountability and justice in the context of Sudan's conflicts. But this insistence that all there is to the issue is ICC justice, an ICC to which Sudan is not a signatory, is a form of fundamentalism that has so far served to delay any real progress. The fallacy that the justice question is the sole issue, rather than one of many in need of resolution, is dangerous.This fundamentalism is a failure to concede the political and complex nature of Africa's conflicts, and a refusal to recognise the many yet-to-be-resolved socio-historical factors that operate on the continent, especially the enduring colonial social relations that continue to produce conflict in Africa.Given the value attached to the South African miracle, why is it impermissible to allow a similar approach to serve the resolution of conflicts beyond South Africa?story_article_left1The answer lies in "coloniality", which, alas, lives happily long after decolonisation. The casual assumption holds that the views of the Sudanese and the efforts of the AU are, by definition, inferior.In this world view, the notion that workable solutions could come out of Africa is inconceivable. They cannot imagine that African proposals contribute towards legal jurisprudence and knowledge, and thereby advance human civilisation.The new priests and priestesses of international justice appropriate human rights discourse and the law to achieve subtle and often not-so-subtle political ends. And this June in South Africa, their voices were at their shrillest.Recognising this effrontery, many in the developing South are beginning to think that the only thing that changed after the major events of 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall.For the wretched of the earth, the world has become rougher in the Hobbesian sense of life being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".Ratshitanga is an assistant to former president Thabo Mbeki..