"The air smells of blood and fear. Fear has a smell and it is not good."
Someone who worked for the emergency response teams in the UN once told me this about the situations he faced regularly. I thought he exaggerated until I went to Kenya in 2007 after violence broke out after the election of former president Mwai Kibaki and thousands of Kenyans were butchered. It was then I realised that it was true. When large-scale violence breaks out, fresh air turns rank with the smell of blood and fear.
Ask anyone who worked in Rwanda during the genocide, or Sudan, or any of the countries where vulnerable people have fallen prey to dictators and their violent hatchet-men. They will all tell you the same thing.
At the end of October, the South African Parliament reinstated the International Crimes Bill. This bill, tabled during the Zuma years, lays the foundation for South Africa to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.
This court was founded 21 years ago in Rome. Finally, after years of inaction (and not since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials), victims of crimes against humanity such as genocide and mass murder had somewhere to turn; a court where even the most powerful of Big Men could be held to account.
During the signing ceremony of the Statute of the Court (the Rome Statute), the then-secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, described the court as a "gift of hope to future generations, and a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law".