Going South

By James Kirchick

South Africa has become a paragon of resentment, anti-Americanism, and the coddling of dictators.

The ANC has also made important entrיes with the Arab and Muslim bloc by striking a defiantly anti-American pose. The ANC government opposed sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for example, and even questioned the legality of the American- and British-enforced no-fly zones, which protected the Kurds and Marsh Arabs from certain genocide. In the run-up to the Iraq war, South African Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad (who earlier this year claimed that the United States was responsible for a “volatile, dangerous, and unpredictable environment” in world affairs) met with Hussein in Baghdad to deliver a letter from South African President Mbeki that “expressed [Mbeki’s] solidarity with Iraq.” Other ranking members of the ANC have expressed similarly bizarre, anti-Western views. Just before the war began, the secretary general of the ANC told anti-war protesters that “Because we are endowed with several rich minerals, if we don’t stop this unilateral action against Iraq today, tomorrow they will come for us.” A year prior, the Guardian quoted the country’s health minister (who has suggested that aids sufferers eat beetroot and garlic to treat themselves) as saying that South Africa cannot afford drugs to fight HIV/AIDS partly because it needs submarines to deter attacks from nations such as the United States (she later denied ever making the statement). The ANC (due to South Africa’s appalling lack of political finance regulations) has accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, former Indonesian strongman Suharto, and the viciously anti-Semitic Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed of Malaysia. Perhaps wary of how such an act would be received by its steadily increasing Muslim population, South Africa also decided not to co-sponsor the UN General Assembly resolution on Holocaust denial in January, and has joined in the chorus of those nations calling for the United States and the European Union to lift their sanctions on the Hamas-led Palestinian government.

Though South Africa’s Muslim community is small (just 1.5 percent of the population), it has become increasingly radicalized, and the ANC has done everything to appease it. In June of 2003, Pahad met with representatives of Hezbollah and legitimized the group by stating that “clear distinctions” ought be made “between terrorism and legitimate struggle for liberation.” The ANC often lends credence to terrorism against Israel by likening the struggle of the Arabs to that of South Africa’s non-whites. Three years ago, Pakistani police captured three South Africans who stand accused of plotting to blow up the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and government buildings in Pretoria. Another South African has been arrested in connection to the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings, and earlier this year, the United States Treasury named two South African cousins as substantial financial contributors to al-Qaida. While the American government blocked them from making financial transactions in the United States, South Africa’s foreign minister attempted to use his country’s new seat on the Security Council to block the terrorist-sponsoring designation from taking effect. And to top this all off, the ANC called for South Africans to “turn out in their thousands” the week of June 4 “in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Ultimately, however, what ought to matter most to the international community is South Africa’s increasingly outspoken role in legitimizing Iranian nuclear ambitions. And the United States has indeed shown concern: In response to the Iranian foreign minister’s visit to South Africa last August (when South Africa again declared that Iran has an “inalienable right” to a peaceful nuclear energy program) the United States sent its permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to Pretoria in hopes of convincing South Africa to take a harder line. Given the complicated nature of South African-American relations due to the latter’s inaction (and, at times, obstruction) in bringing down apartheid, it was understandable that Ambassador Gregory Schulte would attempt to win the South Africans over with flattery: “South Africa’s example and leadership position you to help Iran’s leaders to think hard about Iran’s future and to consider two different models: The first, North Korea—nuclear-armed, but impoverished, isolated, insignificant; the second, South Africa—nuclear weapons-free, but secure, dynamic, and a respected player in your region and the world. The choice should be clear. You can help Iran’s leaders make the right one.” Nevertheless, South Africa has remained credulous of Iranian protestations about the supposedly civilian purpose of its nuclear program. Indeed, its representative to the UN recently told South Africa’s Sunday Times that “We will… defend the right of countries to have nuclear technology for peaceful uses. For instance, Iran.”

South Africa’s friendliness toward Iran has apparently increased in proportion to its emergence as a considerable player on the world stage. In March, serving in its temporary role as Security Council president, South Africa attempted to halt the imposition of a new round of sanctions on Iran for its defiance of IAEA mandates. The sanctions, proposed by the unusual alliance of the United States, China, Russia, France, Great Britain, and Germany, instituted an arms embargo and asset-freeze—both of which South Africa fought to remove from the resolution, and, barring that, to postpone until after a ninety-day “time out” period. Although the Security Council’s five veto powers overruled South Africa’s attempts at watering down the resolution, France’s UN ambassador told the Associated Press that South Africa’s diplomatic maneuvering had nonetheless “weakened a lot of the resolution.”

That South Africa would support Iran is partly a matter of oil politics: Iran supplies almost half the oil South Africa uses. Two years ago, the Iranians claimed that they had entered into talks with South Africa about the latter’s supplying them with unprocessed uranium for enrichment purposes, a claim the South African government later denied. But South African sympathy for Iran clearly goes deeper than mere trade links. For instance, South Africa has recently found itself in a situation similar to Iran’s as it debates whether or not to proceed once again with a uranium enrichment program for “peaceful purposes.” Perhaps, then, the South Africans believe they will be labeled hypocrites for demanding greater scrutiny of Iranian activity while simultaneously sponsoring an enrichment program of their own.

Yet the issue with Iran, at least, has never been uranium enrichment per se. Rather, it has been transparency and intent. No one seriously believes that South Africa’s motives in potential uranium enrichment would be nefarious, and that South Africa—for the most part a good international citizen—would hinder any sort of outside inspection effort of its facilities. The same can hardly be said of Iran. As the Johannesburg Star recently advised the South African government, “Sometimes you have to get off the fence and take sides.” When it comes to Iran, a democratic country like South Africa ought to know which side to take.

Increasingly an influential force behind South Africa’s power plays in the world arena is Ronnie Kasrils, the country’s minister of intelligence and possibly the highest-ranking Jewish official in any government outside of Israel. A veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Kasrils fled the country at the cusp of twenty-five and spent the next twenty-seven years in exile as a leader of the ANC’s military wing. Though the vast majority of South African Jews—safely ensconced within that country’s privileged white community—did little to fight apartheid, Kasrils was one of the Jews who, in disproportionate numbers, took an active role in opposing the racist system (in addition to being one of the Jews who, also in disproportionate numbers, joined the Communist Party). Kasrils is also a vocal anti-Zionist and Israel’s most outspoken critic in South Africa. He, like other high-ranking ANC figures, appears to believe that Iranian intentions are ultimately benign, and that Israel is in fact the major source of aggression and instability in the region. The prism of Kasrils’ views on the Middle East provides the necessary context for understanding the ANC leadership’s views on international affairs.

In early September of this year, Kasrils wrote of Israel in the weekly Mail & Guardian that “we must call baby killers ‘baby killers,’ and declare that those using methods reminiscent of the Nazis be told that they are behaving like Nazis.” This article was published mere days before Kasrils ventured to Tehran to glorify Hezbollah. A few months prior, Kasrils joined some seventy South African Jews in a statement published in several of the country’s newspapers declaring that, “Jewish support for Israel aggression kills humanity.” Not surprisingly, Kasrils supports boycotting the Jewish state, endorses a “one-state solution” that would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and frequently lends credence to the “Israel is an apartheid state” meme. Kasrils’ stance on Israel has become so egregious that Helen Suzman, a prominent secular Jew who served thirty-six years in parliament as an opponent—sometimes the only one—of apartheid, has written that “it is not only religious Jews who object to Kasrils’ allegations. The issue is the anti-Semitism fostered by Kasrils’ pronouncements.” In May of this year, Kasrils invited Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader and prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, to South Africa. Of the invitation, the South African Board of Jewish Deputies released a statement reading that “Expressing support for an organization whose very founding charter describes the Jewish people as evil enemies of humanity and calls for its total annihilation, fundamentally contradicts the ideals both of South Africa and of the ruling ANC itself.”

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