LETTER: ANC-led government seems not to know what genocide is

SA’s recent legal attack on Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is just another example of a morally and intellectually bankrupt foreign policy by an inept and corrupt government.

SA’s foreign policy history since 1994 has been fraught with terrible decisions, an artefact of the ANC’s allegiance with the now dead Soviet Union.

While the rest of the world has tried to move on, the ANC is obsessed with retaining its ties to a communist bloc that no longer exists — doing everything it can to spite the West, global institutions, and what it perceives to be “colonial powers”.

It is a perpetual Cold War and anti-colonial revolution that exists only in the heads of ANC decision-makers.

SA’s voting record at the UN is torrid. UN Watch describes SA as repeatedly failing to support positive actions for human rights. From 2015 to 2018 it abstained on a motion to provide a solution to conflict in Syria, sided with Iran and its quest for theocratic regional hegemony, abstained from reining in North Korea and repeatedly chose the opposite of the desired outcome to achieve peace and human rights globally.

Always, it chooses to vote alongside rogue states and dictatorships such as China, Cuba, Iran, Russia and North Korea.

We almost left the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2016 because then president Jacob Zuma didn’t want to arrest a proven genocidal warlord, then Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, a man wanted on several counts of genocide, war crimes and human rights violations. This is not even to mention how Zuma used SA foreign policy as a tool to enrich his cronies in the form of the Guptas.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, SA proceeded to play war games with Russia, remains suspected of sending it weapons and refused to condemn the unjustifiable invasion of a neighbouring and slaughter of Ukrainian civilians.

Despite its continuing genocide of the Uyghur people, SA also continues to maintain close ties with China. President Cyril Ramaphosa even went on a trip to China in 2015 to learn how we might copy its authoritarian model for our benefit.

Mbeki propped up and supported Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe, ignoring the theft of mass amounts of land while conveniently looking the other way as Zanu-PF waged a successful genocide of the Ndebele and Kalanga people — with the help of the North Koreans. Even today the SA governing party keeps close ties to Zanu-PF, while its people starve and exist in misgovernment-induced squalor.

All of this culminated in SA’s dismal response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel. Civilians, women, children, the elderly and the infirm were tortured, raped and slaughtered by terrorists. Rather than condemn these actions, SA’s government celebrated it. And when Israel rightfully fought back against its attackers, SA cried genocide.

Yet as is obvious from the above examples, the government party either has no idea what genocide actually is, or it is playing an arbitrary game of picking genocidal friends while getting on its high horse when it comes to the actions of perceived ideological enemies. 

Nicholas Woode-Smith
Cape Town

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