By RW Johnson
South Africa’s foreign policy has gone through multiple phases. Even the ANC period has seen little continuity.
SA’s international standing peaked in 1945. It had been a key member of the Allies – the United Nations as FDR and Churchill referred to them – and this meant that SA was a founder-member of the UN. Smuts was a major world figure who had worked with Churchill, FDR, De Gaulle and Eisenhower.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___After the war South Africa remained aligned with what became the NATO powers and co-operated with them – SA participated in the Berlin Airlift and also contributed to the UN effort in the Korean War. It also remained a key member of the Commonwealth.
Apartheid saw all this lost. South Africa left the Commonwealth, was under constant attack at the UN and even the Western countries participated in sanctions and boycotts against SA. And with the rise of first the Warsaw Pact powers and then the Afro-Asian bloc, the international environment changed much to SA’s disadvantage.
Then came the great turning point of 1990-94. SA joined the OAU/AU and even presided over it. In Mandela SA again had a major world figure as President. It was also a major player within SADC. It became far more prominent at the UN, several times serving on the Security Council. SA rejoined the Commonwealth and it also took the initiative in launching major international initiatives- the World Conference Against Racism, Nepad and the Non-Aligned Movement.
The brief “human rights” period
On taking office Mandela announced that South Africa’s foreign policy would be based on human rights. But Thabo Mbeki, who was largely running the government while Mandela played a mainly symbolic role, did not agree at all.
The key incident came in 1995 over the bloodthirsty regime of the Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha, who had come to power by overthrowing the elected president, Mashood Abiola. Abacha had sentenced the former president, Olusegun Obasanjo to life imprisonment and had also imprisoned Abiola. Mandela, appalled, sent Mbeki and Tutu to intercede. Abacha feted Mbeki and they got on well. It was then announced that 43 “coup-plotters” had been shot by firing squad – a major massacre. To spare Mbeki embarrassment they were then re-defined as “armed robbers”. Mbeki refused to comment.
On his return to South Africa Mbeki told Parliament that SA must avoid all criticism of Abacha and make no hostile moves or sanctions. Instead it should adopt a policy of “quiet persuasion” – ie. do nothing. Mandela allowed himself to be convinced and went along with this.
Then came the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Auckland, New Zealand in November 1995. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel laureate, was campaigning for sanctions against the Abacha regime and all attention was fastened on Ken Saro-Wiwa and 8 other Ogoni activists sentenced to death by Abacha.
Crucially, Mandela was on his own in Auckland, having left Mbeki back in SA. Mandela, who was only too conscious that he and his fellow Rivonia triallists might all have been hanged back in 1962, threatened to act against Abacha action if the sentences were carried out. All 9 men were then hanged by Abacha.
Mandela was furious. “Quiet persuasion” had been made to look foolish and worse. He demanded Nigeria’s expulsion from the Commonwealth plus tough sanctions including an oil embargo. The white Commonwealth leaders had greatly feared that other African Commonwealth leaders might be reluctant to stand up against Abacha and were thrilled by Mandela’s firm stand on human rights. They voted to suspend Nigeria from the Commonwealth.
Subverting the “human rights” policy
Back in SA Mbeki got the Cabinet merely to say it wanted to see the restoration of democracy in Nigeria. There was no mention of suspending Nigeria from the Commonwealth or of sanctions.
Thereafter Mandela continued to badger John Major and Clinton demanding oil sanctions, Mbeki and Aziz Pahad simultaneously told other African states that SA would not call for an oil boycott, thus making it clear to them that Mandela was being undermined. Abacha denounced Mandela as a threat to African unity and he was publicly hanged in effigy at an Abacha rally. Mandela then tried and failed to get SADC to back an oil boycott – but Mbeki had quietly told SADC delegates that the ANC didn’t support Mandela.
In addition Mbeki kept putting pressure on Mandela to give up the notion of a human rights-based policy. Meanwhile Wole Soyinka held a conference of anti-Abacha Nigerians in Joburg. Mbeki quietly sabotaged the conference by withholding entry visas for most delegates. I attended the conference and can attest to the fact that the delegates were furious with Mbeki but regarded Mandela as a hero. For Mandela’s stand had made him immensely popular in Nigeria, where the Abacha regime was widely hated.
Mbeki kept up the pressure on Mandela, who finally gave way. In June 1996 SA formally restored full relations with Nigeria and dropped its hard line. This was the end of the human rights-based foreign policy, which had lasted just eight months. This was taken as a green light by Abacha, who had Mrs Abiola murdered that very day. Abiola himself was murdered shortly thereafter.
But Abacha died of a heart attack in June 1998. If only Mandela’s line had been held SA would have scored a huge international victory, consolidating its leadership in Africa and earning the admiration of the world’s democracies. An enormous chance was thus missed.
Mandela had given a glimpse of an alternative human rights based diplomacy. Had this been pursued not only would SA have taken a tough anti-Mugabe line in 2000-1 – which would doubtless have been enough to lead to the installation of a democratic regime in his place. Such a policy would have transformed SADC: democracy could have been made a condition of membership, with SADC becoming a democratic bloc, thus fulfilling the promise of SA’s democratic revolution.
The Mbeki period
Mbeki, the ANC’s great international relations expert, had subverted Mandela’s human rights-based policy, for he had an immensely ambitious programme of his own, built around the central idea of the African Renaissance. This was, however, based on a faulty and wishful version of history according to which Africa had been held back only by colonialism. Now that all Africa was free, he argued, it would gallop ahead almost automatically – provided it could be at peace. Wars were, Mbeki thought, merely due to the vestiges of colonialism – a most unrealistic notion.
The truth was, of course, that before colonialism Africa had been riven by conflict. Colonialism forcibly extinguished these conflicts and established a lengthy period of peace – perhaps the longest Africa had ever known. With the end of the pax colonial conflicts had mushroomed. Mbeki’s peace-making efforts, creditable though they were, did not change that.
Nepad
The discredited OAU was scrapped to make way for the African Union whose central programme would be Nepad – aid and investment flows of $64 billion a year into Africa from the rest of the world. This immensely ambitious programme depended on the goodwill of the major Western powers, the only possible source of such large capital flows.
Mbeki had managed to get himself invited to several G8 meetings where he put the Nepad case. The idea was that only with such large capital inflows could Africa modernise and take up its rightful place in the world. The G8 leaders – especially Clinton, Bush and Blair – were not unreceptive. Should Nepad come to pass then Mbeki would greatly consolidate his position as the de facto leader of Africa, particularly since he might be in a position to help direct some of these capital flows.
At the same time, however, Mbeki wanted to advance a radical Third World agenda. He wanted to be the leader of the global South – and to that end re-launched the long defunct Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which he chaired. He also wanted to turn the ANC’s struggle against racism into a global crusade – hence the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). He launched the Pan African Parliament too – with South Africa paying handsomely for all these initiatives.
Zimbabwe, the fatal issue
But the most important issue was Zimbabwe. As soon as Zimbabwe blew up – during and after the election of 2000, with Mugabe’s violent campaign against the MDC opposition and his simultaneous land invasions – Mbeki summoned the liberation movements of Southern Africa to a secret meeting in Johannesburg. There he told them that the rise of the MDC and the West’s sanctions against Mugabe were part of a larger Western imperialist offensive against all the liberation movements. He then sided strongly with Mugabe under the thin disguise of “quiet diplomacy”.
Mbeki’s initiatives were largely anti-Western. The NAM inevitably saw a festival of anti-colonial and anti-Western rhetoric while the WCAR saw a walkout by Israel and the US over its overt anti-semitism and threats of similar action by several other Western powers. Both were dead ends: NAM did not continue and the WCAR movement faded into obscurity, while the AU continued to depend on Western subsidies.
This all climaxed at the CHOGM at Coolum, Queensland in March 2002. The SA Observer mission had said the recent Zimbabwean election had been “legitimate” (a verdict openly laughed at by many), but the Commonwealth Observers said the opposite. Blair, backed by the white Commonwealth leaders, demanded Zimbabwe’s suspension. Mbeki used the race card to round up African votes to stop that. Blair, extremely irritated, told Mbeki “Remember, you can have Zimbabwe or you can have Nepad but you can’t have both”.
Mbeki’s bluff was thus called. He had audaciously tried to mobilise Western support for Nepad while simultaneously attacking the West in other forums. In exile the ANC had got away with this sort of contradictory behaviour but for an ANC government the rules were different.
The Canadian PM, Jean Chretien, then phoned Mbeki – Canada was hosting the next G8 – to warn him that G8 would refuse to work on Nepad with any African leaders who supported Mugabe’s denial of democracy in Zimbabwe.
Mbeki was furious, calling Blair a white supremacist and accusing all Western leaders of being imperialists who wanted to impose leaders on Africa. But no one in G8 was listening. Moreover, Mbeki’s Aids denialism had completely undermined his image and credibility.
So Nepad was another dead end. It lives on as a sub-committee of the AU but it has nothing to do. Capital flows to Africa came in as either bilateral aid, bilateral loans or private investment. None of it went through Nepad.
So in the end Mbeki’s initiatives all failed. His only “success” was that the Zanu-PF regime totters on in Zimbabwe, bankrupt, under sanctions and presiding over a ruined country.
- Part Two will appear in this newsletter tomorrow
