The search for African answers

22 September 2011 - 03:17 By Brendan Boyle
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South Africa has tried to punch above its weight in global diplomacy, but has failed since Nelson Mandela retired from the presidency to land that devastating left hook that the world would talk about for ever after.

In several of the fights it has picked, however, the government has been on the right side of the principle and has failed more on strategy than on substance.

Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, the minister of international relations and co-operation, made fools of us all last week when she refused to put her handbag through the scanner at a Norwegian airport and then claimed it was a matter of principle and not about what was in the bag.

She should have let it go through and fired off a stiff letter to the Norwegian government later explaining why it was out of line to want to search her.

How will she represent us on the thorny issue of Libya if she could not manage such a simple contretemps without triggering a diplomatic incident?

It is Leadership 101 that you should pick your fights and only engage in those you can win. Nkoana-Mashabane did not.

South Africa has had a better case on other bigger issues on which it has gone to war with the West, but still has failed to make a convincing case.

Former president Thabo Mbeki was right in principle when he insisted in 2004 that the human rights crises in Zimbabwe and Sudan were issues for the UN's Human Rights Council and not for its Security Council because they did not threaten international peace and stability, which are the proper mandate of the Security Council. He made the same argument in 2007 when South Africa held a non-permanent seat on the Security Council and refused to condemn Zimbabwe or China's human rights record in Burma.

But if not Security Council condemnation, sanctions or military action, then what, is the question South Africa should have been ready to answer. In the event, Mbeki's government was pilloried because it was seen to be supporting oppressive regimes at the cost of oppressed people.

He argued at the time that South Africa had simply failed to explain itself adequately, but the real failure was to offer a viable alternative to put an end to the suffering of those oppressed people.

If a small African nation is going to take on the Western consensus, it better be armed with more than an arcane point of principle, and its record on matters of principle should be as good at home as it demands of the globe's dominant players.

The issue is topical again not so much because of Nkoana-Mashabane's faux pas, but because of South Africa's principled position on Libya.

President Jacob Zuma, Mbeki and even the ANC Youth League's Julius Malema are right that Western forces went far beyond the mandate of UN Resolution 1973 in their military response to rogue leader Muammar Gaddafi. The mandate was to ground Gaddafi's air force with a no-fly zone and to protect civilian life. Instead, the Western powers and later Nato armed the rebels and bombed a path for them to the Gaddafi compound in Tripoli.

South Africa's problem now is that it cannot defend Gaddafi's right to run Libya. He was a cruel leader with an appalling human rights record and hare-brained ideas about the future of Africa.

Africa, including South Africa, is now saying it always knew Gaddafi was a bad leader, but that it was up to the Libyans to remove him. Meanwhile, nearly all of them continued to offer him a VIP reception whenever he arrived on their front lawns with his tent and his eccentric retinue.

Zuma, most recently in a speech to a UN summit on Tuesday, Mbeki and other African leaders insist that the AU's road map for Libya should have been the blueprint for that country's rescue.

But the AU has been unable to honour its own founding commitment to protect human rights even with military action against a member state.

The argument that nations should choose their own leaders is fine in principle, but absurd in countries like Zimbabwe, Burma and Libya, where totalitarian regimes have absolute control over access to arms and to the means to communicate and to organise.

It is akin to telling workers on a Karoo farm they must enforce the rights afforded them in our Constitution. The government does not do that because it knows they would be powerless against an abusive master who controls every aspect of their lives, from housing, health care and food to access to the weapons.

It was equally absurd in Libya, where Gaddafi's forces had infiltrated every sector of society and crushed all dissent.

South Africa's own liberation forces were supported with sanctions, training, weapons, money, transport and, towards the end at least, a rising crescendo of diplomatic support.

There is a real risk that, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, the US will cherry-pick the leaders with whom it is willing to work.

But if South Africa wants more principled international relations, we must dare to identify the leaders who deserve to belong to the Africa club and take the lead in acting against those who don't.

If Africa wants African solutions to African problems, we are going to have to admit that Africa has problems and be braver about tackling them.

If we don't, we leave a vacuum for the US and the Western consensus to do it for us.

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