If you want to stick your fingers up the nose of the biggest guy on the block, you must at least have a good reason for risking a bruising. Pious declarations about the sovereign right to
sell weapons of destruction to whomsoever we choose, or solidarity with that noted democrat Hafez al-Assad, do not justify a confrontation with a superpower.
The Americans have no right to dictate who our friends should be, but the proposal to sell tank firing control systems to Syria is a completely different proposition to keeping company with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi.
Whatever one feels about the intransigence of the Israeli government and its past military collaboration with the apartheid regime, South Africa has no business complicating the peace process in the Middle East. Giving Denel the go-ahead to market weaponry to the Syrians is wrong, and not just because it violates the government’s own guidelines restricting arms sales to regions where there is conflict.
Nor is the worst of it the fact that the deal is being promoted by arms merchants who learnt their trade by breaking the arms embargo and dealing in the stinking back alleys of the world arms bazaar. No, it is plain silly because we have alienated powerful international forces for nothing.
It is most improbable that the deal will ever go ahead. The only reason it got as far as it did is that Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who normally keeps a handle on matters requiring subtle diplomacy, was not at the Cabinet meeting where the leaked decision was minuted.
This implies a disturbing lack of depth in the government’s decision-making capacity. The National Conventional Arms Control Committee, which with spectacular ill- timing backed the sale of arms to Rwanda shortly before war broke out in eastern Zaire last year, appears to have been duped once again by the arms merchants. Its chairman, that ardent moralist Professor Kader Asmal, has been uncharacteristically silent this week. The most generous explanation for his lapses of judgment is that he wears too many hats and is overextended.
Despite the bleating about national sovereignty by presidential aide Parks Mankahlana, the fact is untold damage has been caused for absolutely no gain. Instead of imitating PW Botha and giving the finger to the world, instead of dressing up naivety and incompetence as doughty defiance, President Nelson Mandela should be figuring out ways to avoid such debacles in future.