DONALD MACKAY: Mission to Washington to safeguard R400bn in trade will be futile

The media reported recently that President Cyril Ramaphosa is sending a delegation to Washington to smooth the way for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s planned visit to SA in August for the Brics summit.

Insiders say the president is hoping to avoid diplomatic fallout that could put trade ties worth R400bn at risk. Thank goodness. That is a lot of money. Our trade with Russia for 2022 was a paltry R13.5bn, down R1.8bn from 2021.

The meeting in Washington will not achieve anything. The Brics meeting is happening right before the African Growth & Opportunities Act (Agoa) summit. If most of the Americans do not pitch for the Agoa meeting — a not unreasonable prospect if Putin actually comes to SA and is not arrested the moment he steps out of the plane — things could spiral quickly.

Our openly belligerent approach to the Russian issue is making it difficult to step back from the precipice without losing face, yet that is what must happen, and quickly too. The risk is underestimated because the government takes trade with the West for granted. Even if it turns out to be right (unlikely), it is not a gamble worth taking.

We are trying unsuccessfully to send the message that we will not be told what to do by any other country, a position that would be more credible if we had not, for example, refused to issue a visitors’ visa to the Dalai Lama, a man who has yet to invade another country. Three times, actually: once to attend Archbishop Tutu’s birthday party. The Arch said he could not “believe that the SA government could shoot itself in the same foot thrice over”.

The governing party is angry because the Americans and Europeans are less than keen on us inviting and then hosting Putin, but why on earth did we invite him? No-one forced us, and I doubt even Putin would have cared if we had not extended the invite, given the circumstances.

No matter how we choose to see Brics, it is not an alternative to our trade with the West. Our Brics trade is really trade with China (15.5% of our total trade) and India (5.6%). Brazil at 0.9% and Russia at 0.3% are hardly worth mentioning. And we do not even need Brics for this trade to happen. There is no trade agreement between Brics states, and it’s unlikely there will ever be.

Attempts at trade agreements with China and India both stalled long before Brics was formed. Our preferential trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc, which includes Brazil, appears to have been deliberately designed to only include products that neither Mercosur nor Southern African Customs Union countries actually trade in.

Stolen children

Let’s assume for a moment there was no pressure from the West. We would lose our excuse and simply be supporting a warmonger who invaded Ukraine twice and Georgia once (so far). The International Criminal Court (ICC) has accused Putin of the “unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation”. This, it turns out, is a war crime.

It’s estimated that 20,000 children have been taken to Russia from Ukraine. Russia only admits to 2,000, which they say were more borrowed than taken. The good news is that some of them are being found, but most seem to be gone, quite possibly to never even know they are Ukrainian.

This is chillingly similar to the lost children of Spain’s fascist dictator Gen Francisco Franco. Working with the Roman Catholic church, he kidnapped kids from “undesirable” parents (anyone opposed to Franco, unmarried women or carrying the “red gene” — communism). This continued from the 1930s to the late 1970s. Mothers would be told their children had died in childbirth, only to have them sold to “good” Catholic families.

Franco banned contraception and abortion, so there was no shortage of children to be traded through this infernal market. Tens of thousands of children were removed from their parents and sold to buyers who saw the world through Franco-tinted glasses.

Kidnappers

It is hard to think of anyone responsible for the mass abduction of children who turned out to be all right afterwards, and Putin is unlikely to be that one exception to the rule. The Nazis took about 250,000 mostly Polish children who looked too Aryan to be Poles and gave them to SS parents to be “Germanised”.

The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet facilitated the abduction of children as a way to reduce poverty in Chile, by removing children from poor families and sending them out of the country. Between 1973 and 1990 thousands of Chilean children ended up in the Netherlands, US, Sweden and Germany.

Next door, the Argentinian junta, waging its US-funded “dirty war”, abducted between 220 and 500 babies, many from pregnant mothers who were held in secret detention centres until they gave birth. It is presumed that the mothers were killed after they had given birth.

Uganda’s Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army ordered the abduction of more than 60,000 children to become child soldiers and sex slaves. Kony has 42 children of his own.

My takeaway from all of this is:

• Do not abduct children, especially lots of them. If the Nazis did it, you can usually assume it is a bad thing;
• Do not invite kidnappers to visit SA, if only because their stink is bound to rub off on us; and
• Do not be surprised if people in other countries judge SA harshly for its stance on Putin. Pragmatically, harsh judgment will equal negative economic consequences.

SA can still walk this back until the moment Putin arrives. We must. There is no upside to SA’s stance on Russia or Putin, but there is a lot of downside. If we opt not to uninvite Putin to SA and do not arrest him (which we will not), our government will have deliberately chosen to break both domestic and international law.

This is bad — even worse than when we facilitated the departure of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2017, because then at least we could say Jacob Zuma was in charge. Now we have President Cyril Ramaphosa and a court precedent making it clear that if war criminals arrive in SA we have to arrest them.

• MacKay is CEO of XA Global Trade Advisors.