The fierce struggle to combat apartheid in the years before its demise and in the ongoing fight against its residual effects sometimes, however, loses sight of the fact that the root causes of apartheid evil lay deeper than its manifestation. Human greed, exclusion and unbridled power continue to manifest themselves, writes Charles Villa-Vicencio.
Many of us would feel a lot better if President Thabo Mbeki, the most credible and influential leader in the region, would phone Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and give him a firm and irrevocable deadline to move out of office. It would enable us to feel that the fundamental human rights values,for which we fought in the struggle against apartheid, are alive and well. The problem is that South African foreign policy does not work like that.