EDITORIAL: Our shameful friendship with a rogue state

Today, SA goes sailing with its Russian friends, and into the doldrums of international irrelevance.

When our navy sails into formation with a Russian frigate today, we are sending a series of clear messages to the world. The first is that we don’t care that people of Ukraine are being bombed, kidnapped, raped and executed in mass killings. We’re happy to give the Putin regime a platform to project international solidarity on the anniversary of their illegal and inhumane invasion of a sovereign country.

South Africans, of all people, understand the scars left by fascism and imperialism. In our contempt for the Ukrainian people as they face this, we discard like trash what remains of our moral authority and our soft power. Our international brand is probably irreversibly despoiled by this affair.

The second message we send into the world is that we are embracing our irrelevance on the global stage with inexplicable vigour. Why we do this is hard to discern. It is hard to see a strategic purpose behind playing war games with international war criminals. We have no navy to speak of, so we can’t “implement learnings”. The government’s argument that SA will lead the way in mediation would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and the notion that this is an exercise in “non-alignment” is palpably wrong.

It is also clear from recent research that most South Africans have a dim view of Russia. Today’s exercise flies in the face of that and shows contempt for the people of this country in whose name it is being done.

Understanding may be sought in the history of the ANC, and its traditionally anti-Western positioning. It is strange and sad that the ANC’s institutional memory on this overwhelms the clear case of right and wrong in the war in Ukraine. It is not a principle, or in any way strategic, but an organisational psychological tic that has been left unexamined since the 1950s. It is also as a matter of fact an absurdity. It was the USSR (including Ukraine), not Russia, that gave succour to the ANC during the struggle against apartheid.

The remaining answer to the riddle, like in many other spheres of national life, is that we don’t really have a plan and we don’t really have a coherent foreign policy, and we don’t value our own influence in the world. What have we achieved in the Group of 20? On what topic has our progressive voice rung out at the UN? There is more than a little melancholy in this. We used to matter. Our voice was important.

There is still much on the line. Our long-suffering friends, allies and trading partners will hope for support at an upcoming UN resolution that they are likely not to receive. They will watch closely who the government decides to send to the Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg in July where they will learn just how little a sanctioned and ostracised Russia has to offer us.

They will consider the mystery of the Lady R, the Russian vessel that departed Simon’s Town navy base in the middle of the night after being loaded with cargo, and they will wonder why there is a veil of secrecy over the whole affair. What are the South Africans hiding? What was loaded onto the Lady R bound for Russia?

They will remember the daft comments by international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor that it is “simplistic and infantile” to ask Russia to stop attacking Ukraine, when it is in fact simplistic and infantile to think that this is how diplomacy works.

All of this will be on the minds of the US Congress when a discussion takes place about the expiration of the African Growth and Opportunity Act in less than two years. Many in Congress will, not unreasonably, ask why the US should continue to give such preferential market access to a friend-turned-enemy like SA.

The precipitous collapse of our moral standing in just 30 years reaches a new low today. We are much diminished by this and will less and less be counted upon as a voice to speak up for freedom and democracy. That is because we are no longer that voice. Today, we are standing shoulder to shoulder with a rogue state involved in a savage war on civilians. It is shameful.