WHAT a pleasure to revisit the estate of Count André de la Roche in central France! There still remain many weeks before we return to the golden warmth of summer.

Spring here can be nippy but the murderous chill and somberness of winter days are gone. You may not always see it but the sun is there, blissfully high up in the sky, a silvery, luminous presence behind grey clouds.

The Sancerrois countryside is now a rolling, rollicking ocean of dark green leaves and flowers of all the colours you can imagine; and if you are having an outdoors conversation you make each other repeat words in the din of a million birds, each keen on diffusing its own melodious babble.

Schweppes, the golden Labrador, has gleefully abandoned the lackadaisical pose he had been adamantly sticking to before the fireplace during all the winter months in the count’s Parisian apartment. He is now going insane chasing wasps and butterflies. Every now and then he plops down on the grass, panting, looking up and giving out a couple of sharp barks: ‘Okay, so I didn’t get any. But, boy was that fun!’

In a way, André de la Roche himself can hardly be called to be in a mood much different from Schweppes.’ He has been working hard in the cellars, whistling as he dotingly checks his produce, known here as the nectar of the gods, in its various stages of maturation. Out in the field he makes sure to rid his vineyards of unwanted growths and have the superfluous branches clipped in order to make the good ones more resistant.

The count nevertheless finds time to discuss for the readers of Dawn the issue that is bothering us today: the hullabaloo about the international criminal court and its avowed mission of punishing the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, anywhere in the world. The case in point is the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

‘I am glad to see finally there is someone with guts enough to thumb his nose at this masquerade. Ever since the ICC issued an arrest warrant against him on March four this year, he has merrily travelled to Egypt, Eritrea and Libya and was enthusiastically welcomed at the Arab League summit in Qatar. This is more than just a show of defiance.

‘By publicly qualifying the warrant against him as ‘not worth the ink it is written in’ President Omar al-Bashir has put to test an entire concept concocted by a set of lavishly paid bureaucrats comfortably sitting in The Hague and trying to arrest leaders all over the Third World.

‘The International Criminal Court, as you know, is a very recent phenomenon that went into operation only seven years ago. In the media-dominated world of today, it apparently is given to embroidering a highly attractive (for the young in any case!) vocabulary that Socrates would not have failed to notice as rhetoric.

‘Take a deep breath and think about it. When we utter words like ‘international community,’ ‘one world’ and ‘crime against humanity’ etc, words that would have been considered total gibberish only 30 years ago, are we communicating an infallible truth? Or is our aim simply limited to flattering people in order to convert them to our point of view? That’s exactly what Socrates identifies as rhetoric in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias.

‘The Americans triumphantly held the Nuremberg trials in 1948 against the defeated Nazis. This was just three years after the biggest war crime ever committed in the history of humanity. Do you know how many civilians died in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear bombings and their aftermath? More than 250,000!

‘The ICC has set for itself the starting point of human history as of July 1, 2002 and is not concerned with events that took place prior to this date, thus automatically granting immunity to the nuclear terrorists.

‘Just as well, come to think of it! Because if you push this logic to its most ludicrous hilt, you better prepare to dig up Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte from their graves and put them on trial too.

‘I have heard no voices from The Hague against the crime against humanity committed in Iraq! The invasion began in 2003, in other words well within the province of the ICC. How many civilians have been killed there? There are no statistics available to date and the list is growing every day. Then, how many Pakistani and Afghan civilians have died since the Afghan surge began? How many more will die in the days, months and probably years to come?

‘Oh, let me correct myself. As a matter of fact the ICC prosecutors did throw out as ‘manifestly outside our jurisdiction’ a complaint from the Iraqi people in February 2006, pleading that the war crimes in Iraq ‘did not appear to meet the required gravity threshold for our investigation.’

‘A phony argument is often put forward (or is it mere simple-mindedness?) according to which in a democracy freedom of expression is an effective check against human rights abuses. Well, all the facts pertaining to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings were published in the American press. Did that stop the My Lai massacres from happening? And did all that was published concerning Vietnam stop the Iraqi invasion?

‘The ICC, under the false premises that crimes against humanity only take place in non-democratic countries, does not consider possession or use of weapons of mass destruction a felony. It has nevertheless issued 12 warrants since its inception against African leaders, four of whom are actually under arrest currently.

‘Despite incessant moralising tirades from American human rights groups, the United States never deigned to join the ICC. One is allowed to be sceptical about his real motivation, but one is tempted not to entirely disagree with a declaration from John Bolton, the former US ambassador at the UN. According to him ‘the ICC remains a fundamentally illegitimate body’!’

As if in approval of his master’s conclusion, Schweppes, now sufficiently rested, gives out a decisive ‘woof!’ and bolts in hot pursuit after a rainbow-coloured dragonfly.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com