When considering Putin’s visit, SA needs to look at why the ICC issued arrest warrant

When discussing whether Russian president Vladimir Putin should be arrested if he sets foot in South Africa, we need to consider why the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant.

Should South Africa choose sides against Russia or stay what the ANC calls ‘neutral’? Or should the country let the West bully it into turning on an ally from the days of the struggle?

And the most important questions: should South Africa even let Vladimir Putin visit the country for the Brics gathering in August? Should it arrest him when he does come? Should it listen to the ICC or not?

We have heard all the arguments both for and against a visit by the Russian president. However, nobody mentions why the ICC issued summons against Putin and his inappropriately named “children’s rights commissioner”, Maria Lvova-Belova.

It is easier to stick to being non-partisan when you do not mention what Russia is doing to the children of Ukraine.

ALSO READ: Putin’s visit is a red flag for sanctions

The ICC says in its arrest warrant that Putin and Lvova-Belova are allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of children and their unlawful transfer from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation since at least 24 February 2022.

Some of them are as young as three. Think of a child of three who you know. Think of them already going through life scared, hearing bombs explode all the time, seeing the adults around them also scared. Even seeing people bleed and die.

Now they are taken to Russia, where they may not speak the language, where they do not have a familiar face to make them feel less scared. There they will be re-educated to forget their family, language, culture and memories.

Children who were lucky enough to be returned to Ukraine give spine-chilling accounts of often violent ideological coercion and having to sing the Russian anthem to get food or a chance to shower. And this is even before the physical and sexual abuse starts.

This is not the first time that Russia has used children to punish a country. It already started as early as 1794 after an uprising in Poland against the Russian Empire. A similar abduction is depicted in Piotr Michalczewski’s 1831 painting called ‘Abduction of Polish children in Warsaw by Muscovites’. In 1914, Moscow deported Polish children after the Koścuiszko uprising.

ALSO READ: IN PICS: Billboards put up along SA highway urging Ramaphosa to arrest Putin

Show me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are. If your friends can do this to children, what do you do to the children of your own country? No proper sanitation at some schools and not properly teaching them to read. Let them sleep in boxes?

Now we can add a little girl who died when her oxygen machine could not work due to rolling blackouts.

Nelson Mandela once said: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” We can add to this: how it treats another country’s children.

National Child Protection Week was ‘celebrated’ this week to raise awareness of the rights of children as articulated in the Constitution and Children’s Act. How ironic.