For very good reasons, diplomacy – at least the effective variety – is seldom conducted in public. Among the best of these reasons is that diplomacy often involves saying unpalatable things, and secrecy often provides the most benevolent circumstances under which to say them.
Secrecy allows the parties involved the freedom to exchange views which, if traded in public, might result in one or other’s humiliation, or in the end of a project which promises great benefit to all sides in the longer term.
We therefore have little difficulty in understanding the instinct that has prompted President Thabo Mbeki to be secretive about his diplomatic initiative to bring some semblence of rationality to Robert Mugabe and to government in Zimbabwe. Mugabe is pathologically sensitive. And it is in the interests of us all that the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe be resolved – with an end to unlawful farm occupations, thuggery and murder, and through free and fair elections that produce a credible, lucid government.
But the secrecy Mbeki has employed has also threatened to undermine the very objectives he is seeking to achieve. His government has failed to state unequivocally in public that it finds unacceptable the flouting of the rule of law in a neighbouring state – as regional treaty obligations entitle him to do. The same is true of the use of violence by Zimbabwe’s ruling party against its opponents.
Mbeki’s silence has created alarm in some sectors of our society. We have needed, and waited for, our president to speak out on these issues – for they touch on race, on how we best correct the centuries-long historical injustice against black South Africans, and on the centrality of multi- partyism to our democracy.
The financial markets have needed similar reassurance. The markets, we accept, are notoriously fickle. They will, seemingly, always find a reason for hysteria. And the crisis in Zimbabwe satisfied that need. But they, and those whose fixed investment we require, have needed to know that South Africa, as the most powerful state and economy in the region, will unequivocally and resolutely speak and act in defence of property rights and the rule of law.
Mbeki’s approach has been that he will prove this commitment to the markets by getting concrete results through his secret diplomacy. But it now seems Mbeki should also have found a way of telling them about his government’s view that developments in Zimbabwe were unacceptable, or of directly signallying this to them.
We do not underestimate the difficulty in reconciling the need for secrecy in diplomacy, on one hand, with the imperatives of the democratic process and our economic prosperity, on the other. But the presidency needs to find a way to do it better on future occasions.
In the meantime, Mbeki should now take the country into his confidence and, at least, explain the attitudes that underlie his diplomatic dealings with Mugabe. It is time he now talked to us.
Amnesty, but no answers
Were it not for a pervasive national numbness that has set in since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed its report in late 1998, the decision to grant amnesty to a veritable rogues’ gallery of policemen for the death of East Rand activist Stanza Bopape would surely have resulted in howls of outrage and disbelief.
But we are living in distressingly anaesthetised times, and the TRC amnesty committee’s bizarre verdict has been met with barely a murmur – as was the case of the equally disturbing granting of amnesty only weeks earlier, to the self- confessed killers of Soweto youth activist Sicelo Dlomo.
Both decisions are highly questionable. Both decisions (one indemnifying African National Congress cadres, the other security policemen) can only be sustained by ignoring key facts available to the TRC, and both leave more questions unanswered than they lay ghosts to rest.
Both amnesties rest, at crucial points, on submissions by the applicants which the amnesty committees themselves describe as implausible and unsatisfactory. However, they go on to argue, essentially, that since these points were not disproved, they had to be accepted. So we are asked to accept the police version that Bopape died as a result of fairly mild electric shock – because of a heart condition, duly recorded in subsequently destroyed hospital records, but of which his family had no knowledge.
The TRC is taking upon itself the burden of proof that clearly should rest on the applicant to provide full disclosure of the events in question.
We wonder if the committees are getting lazy or confused, or whether there are hidden political directives to get the whole thing over and done with, no matter how. Or has a decision been taken to treat the ”lesser” amnesty cases as rubber-stamping matters, and to prosecute a few high-profile cases – such as Eugene de Kock and Wouter Basson – for the symbolic appetites of the public?
Whichever way, South Africa is being done no service by decisions like these. We still don’t know with any kind of clarity why or how either Dlomo or Bopape met their deaths. Nothing has been done to promote a catharsis for the families or friends of either slain youth or to allow them to lodge civil claims against the murderers of their loved ones – in short, to allow Stanza Bopape and Sicelo Dlomo to rest in peace.