Gaye Davis
JUST two years ago, the very idea of a Socialist International (SI) meeting in South Africa would have been inconceivable — so this week’s two-day meeting in Cape Town of the council of the world federation of social democratic, socialist and labour movements in Cape Town was richly symbolic.
That it took place in a five-star hotel, prompting some cynical observers to comment that delegates represented “the acceptable face of capitalism”, in a hall hung with portraits of 17th Century burghers, simply added to the mix, reflecting the world’s changing realities.
Sitting alongside representatives of ruling social democratic parties in Scandinavia and Europe, were men and women from movements engaged in bitter struggles for justice: Burma’s National League for Democracy; Polisario; Equatorial Guinea’s Convergencia para la Democracia
Then there were the movements whose decades- long struggles — backed by SI in terms of both moral and material support — had ushered in fledgling democracies, such as Frelimo, Swapo and, of course, the ANC.
Jose de Pena Gomez, SI vice-president, recalled late-night clandestine meetings with leaders of the battle against apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia as part of an SI delegation that made a Southern African odyssey way back in the Seventies.
This time around, apartheid was not on the agenda: the gathering’s theme was “Democracy, Development and Peace in Africa”.
There was no African National Congress delegate recounting the latest excesses of a recalcitrant regime. And there was no need to sing “Free Nelson Mandela”, for there he was, prisoner turned president, delivering heart-felt thanks from the podium for SI’s support over the decades (and noting that the need for it to continue had not been erased by apartheid’s de facto demise).
Hours before he spoke, news came that Burmese Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi had been freed unconditionally, days after completing her sixth year under house arrest. Just last month, a high-level SI delegation’s bid to enter Burma was aborted when the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) refused to issue visas.
>From elsewhere in the world, as delegates delivered reports on conditions in their countries, the news was less heartening.
SI has been at the forefront of struggles against injustice. Since the collapse of communism, it has gained new significance as perhaps the only global forum for left-of-centre political
More than 60 organisations across the world, many of them former communist groupings with adjusted policies, are standing in line to become members: as SI president Pierre Mauroy pointed out: “The fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union has opened the floodgates.”
A high-powered ANC delegation, which included SACP, Cosatu and ANC Youth League delegates, attended as observers. Despite Mauroy saying he would like to see the ANC as an SI member, it is not in the queue. “The matter has not arisen,” said ANC delegate Blade Nzimande, chair of the ANC NEC’s international affairs
Nzimande sees SI gaining sway in Africa, a continent increasingly marginalised by geopolitical realignments since the end of the Cold War.
Nzimande sees SI’s importance as lying in the absence of “any other force which can act as a bulwark against ultra-liberal economic policies. It’s a potential rallying point for alternative international economic policies,” he said. “It is for that reason you increasingly find organisations like Frelimo and Sandinista wanting to join. Revolutionary parties have increasingly been pushed towards centre-left positions as a result of world political
“SI is a significant force; it can act as a pressure group and provides a platform to push other world forums, like the United Nations, to play a more meaningful role.”
As Norwegian prime minister and SI first vice- president, Gro Harlem Brundtland, pointed out: “African countries are no longer seen as potential clients for the main antagonists in East-West power politics and rivalry. East-West tensions no longer shape alliances and dependencies (or) motivate aid …”
This was the context for two days of close scrutiny of Africa’s many problems: the spiral of debt and underdevelopment fuelled by harsh structural adjustment programmes, soaring population growth and dramatic loss of share in world markets — not to mention war, famine and disease epidemics.
African delegates were quick to claim joint responsibility for many of the problems — but also decried the “Afro-pessimism” which sidelined the continent as a hopeless case.
“It is not difficult to see how this translates very easily into the original racist position which asserted … that the black was inherently inferior and that part of the white man’s burden was to protect these savages from themselves,” said Deputy President Thabo Mbeki.
Socialist International’s task would be to “counter the dangerous trend of reduction of interest and attention to the fate of African countries” said Harlem Brundtland. “There are daunting problems in Eastern and Central European countries, but these problems must not be allowed to produce a shift in global attention from the South towards the East. The developed world has the capacity to have both situations in mind and it can afford it if there is sufficient political will.”