It might not be Churchill’s riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but the curious case of the Russian ship in the night is definitely a muddle wrapped in a gravy-stained napkin in a quietly burning dumpster, and I for one don’t know who to believe, or at least who to distrust the most.
On the one hand, science tells us that if the ANC is moving its mouth, it’s lying. On the other, there are the many lefties reminding me that US ambassador Reuben Brigety represents the country that lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction so that it could help itself to Iraqi oil.
With respect to the latter group, I’m not sure we have anything valuable enough to warrant a trumped-up invasion — our biggest growth industry at the moment seems to be fake degrees, and you can buy those anywhere, not just from Fort Hare. But I get their point, which is that the US dishes disinformation with the best of them.
Personally, I can’t shake the hunch that the past week’s shenanigans are going to be revealed as moonlighting by ANC and Kremlin tenderpreneurs, romping around in the dollar-flooded cuddle-puddle that forms when countries are so hollowed out by corruption that state and private interests become virtually indistinguishable.
(When I proposed this idea on Twitter, a number of people told me it was unlikely because private operators don’t get to use SA military installations. They are going to be very surprised when they hear about the Guptas and the Emirati royal family.)
At this point though, I’m entirely open to the possibility that those alleged crates contained something completely unrelated to the war in Ukraine, like thousands of unsold copies of Jacob Zuma’s book, or David Mabuza, carefully packed in potting soil, with a note stapled to the lid of his box providing strict instructions not to expose him to sunlight or garlic.
More seriously, I also can’t shake the feeling, based on nothing but my belief that the governments of SA, the US and Russia are capable of almost infinite hypocrisy, and the extreme eagerness of all parties to make amends, that Brigety blabbed about something that was about to be swept under the utterly filthy carpet of global realpolitik.
To be clear, this is speculation, but given President Cyril Ramaphosa’s revelation at the weekend that SA and the US had “very cordial discussions” about the alleged arms shipment several weeks ago, and that then — “surprise, surprise … the American ambassador comes [back] to South Africans and accuses us”, I can’t help picturing an ambitious diplomat discovering a set-up in SA of the sort that was prevalent in Austria during the Cold War, where enemies could exchange intelligence or personnel — or, in this case, arrange the shipment of God knows what to points north in Africa — in private.
Which brings me to the other reason I’m withholding judgment, or at least outrage: I don’t think we’re clear about what it is, exactly, we’re being asked to be outraged by. Certainly it can’t be the sale of weapons to oppressive regimes, which we’ve been doing for decades: Algeria — the most heavily armed country in Africa, sucking in about half of all the arms imported to the continent, and one of the most successful quashers of the Arab Spring — has been an excellent customer.
We also don’t seem to have a problem with SA weapons being used to commit war crimes abroad: in the previous decade, a sizeable chunk of locally produced firepower went to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which promptly lobbed it at Yemeni schools and hospitals. Bizarrely, the only temporary obstacle to that torrent of death was our own government, which briefly suspended exports to make sure buyers weren’t selling the weapons on to third parties, a move that elicited worried noises from the apolitical, amoral arms industry about job losses.
So why the anger this time around? One answer might be our own often uninterrogated beliefs about war and peace. In 1945 George Orwell wrote that people who abhor violence “can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf”. Fifty years later, the military-industrial complex was so loathed by liberals that when A Few Good Men more or less paraphrased Orwell, the words had to be given to the villain of the film, who sneers: “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns … You don’t want the truth [about what those men sometimes do] because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall — you need me on that wall.”
I don’t think we’ve decided as a species what we believe about walls and the men with guns who guard them. I don’t blame us: thinking about what we believe might cause us to decide that walls are a bad idea, in which case we need to reorganise humanity completely, and that’s a lot to ask people who just have enough mental energy to boil a thermos before the power goes off.
No, all we have space for is easy, clear targets; villains such as Russia who are clearly in the wrong. But if you’re looking for more clear targets, don’t look at Simon’s Town or the ANC, because all you’ll see, at least for now, is smoke.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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