South Africa’s choice of forging close ties with Iran is sending “a clear message to the world” that it has chosen the wrong friends, official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said on Monday.
Speaking to the Union of Jewish Women in Houghton, Johannesburg — on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the World Trade Centre killings in New York — Leon said at no stage during the recent meetings between South African Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in South Africa had any mention been made of the fact that Iran “is actively supporting Hezbollah and neither was its hostility towards the state of Israel ever mentioned”.
Leon charged that it “is entirely unclear what national or international interest our diplomatic engagement with Iran is serving”.
By sending the message that South Africa is choosing the wrong friends, “we risk alienating our most important partners, without whom we would have little or no export industry nor few friends with real influence”.
“We therefore need to be more strategic and more generally non-aligned when deciding how we will act in relation to the major problems and issues currently facing the world.
“As we commemorate the tragic events of five years ago, we would be well served to reflect on our own actions over the same period and resolve to act in future to strengthen international security.
“As a nation, who fought so hard to achieve its democratic freedoms, we should take more care about the company we keep on the world stage. If we are to retain our high moral standing in international affairs, there can be no compromises in the friends we cultivate.
“The democratic values that inspire and inform our Constitution and our state demand no less of us than this.”
Leon said further that: “Instead of honestly confronting the facts and standing up to those countries and organisations who are a direct threat to the liberal-democratic values we purport as a nation to uphold, we are becoming the chief regional apologist for countries such as Iran.”
He charged that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad had denied the fact that Iran armed and funded Hezbollah.
Under the current leadership of President Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s moral high ground in international affairs “has simultaneously been advanced and undermined”, said the DA leader.
“The final verdict remains uncertain: on the one hand he has taken the cause of Africa and the developing world into the chancelleries of the West and the forums of the world, but he has also retarded our progress by declining to develop a no-nonsense approach to human rights violators and to the kleptocracies of the world.
“I say this because under Mbeki, South Africa has repeatedly chosen to align itself with some of the most undemocratic pariah regimes wherever we may find them.”
Leon noted that South Africa had voted at the United Nations Human Rights Council in favour of motions of “no action” on human rights violations in the Sudan, Belarus and Zimbabwe. — I-Net Bridge