Going South

By James Kirchick

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

Joel Pollak, currently a student at Harvard Law School and a former speechwriter for the opposition Democratic Alliance, is a knowledgeable observer of Kasrils, having written a Master’s thesis on his relations with South Africa’s Jewish community, which currently numbers between 70,000 and 80,000. It is not, Pollak maintains, Kasrils’ extreme views that most upset South African Jews, but rather the way in which Kasrils advances them. “Kasrils, unlike Tony Judt, has political power,” he told me. He went on to explain that Kasrils’ attacks on Israel—and South African Jews, as well, for their alleged complicity in Israeli “war crimes”—echo the not so subtle warnings issued to Jews in the early 1960s by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who cautioned that Jewish support for the anti-apartheid Progressive Party might inspire a wave of government-sanctioned anti-Semitism. Though Pollak says there is no doubt that Kasrils believes the things he says about Israel (his unwavering communism, for instance, helps account for much of his anti-Zionist ideology), he has cynically used his Jewishness—a trait he rarely ever acknowledges, except when criticizing Israel—to curry favor within the ranks of the ANC, where anti-imperialism is still in vogue, however outdated. Kasrils “knows that because he’s a white minister in an intensely racially nationalistic cabinet, he’s very vulnerable,” Pollak concludes. Thus, by so publicly going after his own relatively miniscule minority community of Jews, Kasrils proves his leftist, third-worldist bona fides to the ANC elite. And if his rise in prominence within the party is any indication, the ANC certainly approves of Kasrils’ frequent Israel-bashing: In 2004, he was appointed intelligence minister from his former post as minister of water affairs and forestry.

Kasrils, characteristic of the South African communists who were catapulted into power while their ideological fatherland crumbled, is unrepentant about the Cold War. In his self-congratulatory memoir, Armed and Dangerous, he writes, “Whatever the drawbacks and failures I am convinced that in years to come humanity will look back to Soviet achievements as a source of profound inspiration.” He blames the defeat of the Soviet system on those in power who were affected by a “fatal loss of confidence and will” and he writes admiringly of Che Guevara and “other communist heroes.”

Many people might prefer to wave Kasrils off as a harmless crank from a bygone generation. But as minister of intelligence, Kasrils is instrumental in shaping South Africa’s approach to dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat. As Pollak observes, “South Africa is now the only state in the democratic world aside from Venezuela, maybe, that is standing behind Iran on everything.” So, too, is Kasrils integral to South Africa’s treatment of the Zimbabwe problem: In the spring of 2005, not long after Mugabe uprooted 700,000 of the country’s poorest citizens from their homes in a move reminiscent of apartheid governments’ forced relocations of poor blacks to “independent homelands” in the barren countryside, Kasrils signed a military agreement with Zimbabwe, declaring that “the liberation struggles of Southern Africa and the resultant shedding of blood for a common cause… cemented our cooperation on the way forward in the development of our respective countries.”

The source of the ANC’s kid-gloves treatment of totalitarians is undoubtedly its historic skepticism, even downright hostility, toward the West. This viewpoint solidified during the apartheid years, when it was the Soviet Union that supplied the ANC with weapons and issued diplomatic broadsides against the United States and Britain for their cozy relations with the apartheid regime. Today, the ANC rules South Africa not by itself, but as part of the fabled “tripartite alliance” that it legally formed with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the early 1990s after these opposition movements were legalized by the apartheid government. Herein lies much of the problem.

To its credit, the ANC’s left wing has been its most insistent internal critic on Zimbabwe (largely because Mugabe has crushed his country’s independent trade unions). Nonetheless, anachronistic, “anti-imperialist” ideology still fills the heads of those in the highest echelons of the party. Only compounding matters, both the COSATU and the SACP are “rabidly anti-Israel,” as a South African Jewish community leader told me, viewing Israel as America’s mouthpiece in the region. Moreover, while the ANC has supported liberal macroeconomic policies (to the delight of both domestic and international business), this is due to economic necessity rather than an ideological commitment to free markets. Indeed, the ANC has long been suspicious of Western intentions, to the point of paranoia, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the attitudes of many high-ranking ANC figures on the supposed “Western” approaches to HIV (such as the belief that it actually causes AIDS) and Zimbabwe.

The ANC has always featured communists in its ranks, and while some members were fervently opposed to left-wing totalitarianism, they never reached anything approaching critical mass. Indeed, those liberal anti-apartheid movements and activists who were just as outspoken in their opposition to communism as they were to racial discrimination—such as the novelist Alan Paton, leader of the short-lived Liberal Party; Helen Suzman of the Progressive Party; and the English-language press—have notoriously been maligned by ANC apparatchiks as handmaidens to apartheid. Consequently, a history of anti-totalitarianism—a strong, bipartisan current in American politics, shaped by the Cold War experience—simply does not exist in South Africa. Instead, fuzzy leftover notions of “anti-imperialism” dominate the political discourse of influential ANC leaders.

South Africa’s coddling of Iran, then, must be seen as of a piece with its deferral of responsibility as concerns Zimbabwe, its following of the Chinese cue on Burma, and its siding with the Palestinians. All of these decisions are undergirded by a long-established and deeply rooted uncertainty, if not downright antagonism, toward the West.

Of course, this bleak picture just painted should not obscure the many admirable developments on the continent in which South Africa has played a leading role. It oversaw, for instance, the transformation of the Organization for African Unity, for too long a group that legitimized the kleptocratic tendencies of its member states, into the African Union, which, however weak, has at least deployed several thousand peacekeepers to Darfur. And with the largest and most professional military on the continent, South Africa has also deployed peacekeeping troops in the Congo, the Ivory Coast, and Burundi. Despite his faults (and they are many), Mbeki is a dedicated internationalist who envisions his country playing a robust, leading role on a continent that could learn much from South Africa’s democratic liberalism, political stability, and economic vitality.

But creeping anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments seem to have bubbled up from under the surface of South African political discourse. Indeed, they have now become an ideological underpinning of South Africa’s foreign policy. The American political and media establishment looks askance at this development as, at least on its face, it pales in comparison to the actual human misery that is so widespread on the continent. Moreover, there is little that America or its allies can do to “punish” South Africa for its waywardness; on the contrary, the United States relies heavily on South Africa to be the continental, never mind regional, hegemon, and isolating Pretoria might imperil America’s many other initiatives in Africa.

For decades, the international community rightly considered South Africa a pariah state. With the fall of apartheid, South Africa earned the unique right to be a clarion voice for freedom and human rights around the world. What a shame, then, that the ANC pursues policies hearkening back to its country’s discredited past.

James Kirchick is Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic.

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