South Africa needs to regain its moral compass to prevent its good standing in international affairs being undermined, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said on Friday.
After rejoining the community of free nations in 1994, South Africa set its sights high, seeking to become a force for moral regeneration and to affect a new compact for the emerging world, he said in his weekly newsletter on the DA website.
”Undoubtedly, newly democratic South Africa has punched above its weight, cementing its reputation as a bridge between the developing and the developed world.”
In his quest for good governance in Africa, President Thabo Mbeki has personally intervened as peace broker in regional conflicts, most notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Burundi. South Africa has also committed troops to peacekeeping in all these countries.
The government can also take great credit for ensuring the emerging world’s voices were heard at international forums.
”Alongside these positive interventions, there has been a contrary strain which threatens to undermine our good standing. I refer to our government’s repeated determination not to criticise or actively to support undemocratic regimes in the non-Western world, who at some time gave support to the ANC [African National Congress], either as a liberation movement in exile or subsequently in government.”
The irony is that, as South Africa’s moral standing has brought influential international platforms, these platforms have increasingly been used to aid and abet regimes that too often typify the opposite of South Africa’s own reputation. ”Indeed, it seems our government has yet to meet a dictator it does not like,” Leon said.
South Africa’s flirtation with rights-delinquent developing-world regimes crystallised around its new United Nations Security Council non-permanent seat.
”Our first act in council was to join China and Russia in vetoing a Western-instigated resolution condemning human rights violations in Myanmar, formerly Burma — one of the world’s most repressive countries.
”This schizophrenic approach — courtship with the West on one hand, succour to the West’s adversaries on the other — undermines our international credibility, all but obliterating the moral high ground we attained through our transition to democracy.
”In our obsession with ensuring the unity of the developing world, we have in many senses lost our moral compass.”
The most glaring instance of this loss is South Africa’s record on Zimbabwe — a foreign-policy disaster that will compromise Mbeki’s reputation to posterity.
Leon said he obviously wishes Mbeki well in his new role as an ”honest broker” in Zimbabwe. But for him to even enjoy the remotest prospect of success in this hazardous undertaking, he would have to abandon his attitude of straining to hear and excuse every egregious outrage of President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
”This not only needs to change, but there needs to be a recognition in South Africa and the wider world that in Zimbabwe we are not dealing with two equal or simply quarrelling parties: one in government, one in opposition.
”We are dealing here with a ruthless despot who has rent his country asunder with massive doses of state-sponsored terror, pillage and starvation.
”If Mbeki’s appointment as honest broker is to succeed and the crisis is to be meaningfully resolved, then nothing short of a change of attitude and approach is now required,” Leon said. — Sapa