Let’s be clear: Russian President Vladimir Putin runs an authoritarian kleptocracy that is engaged in a complex war with Ukraine — ostensibly over territory, but really about a stand-off between Nato and Russia.
The Russian Federation is a member of Brics — as is SA — and President Cyril Ramaphosa may be conflating the support the ANC received from the USSR with the relationship he seeks with Putin’s Russia. This is as he cosies up to the great bear in the hope of, among other desires, driving a wedge between former president Jacob Zuma and the new Russia, declaring that Russia is a “valued ally who supported us from the beginning ... of our struggle against apartheid”.
For the record, Ukraine was part of the USSR when it supported the ANC in its struggle against apartheid. The statement by Ryan Smith, the DA’s deputy spokesperson on international relations, in which he says, “Ukraine has always been an ally in the fight against the systemic disenfranchisement of SA’s black majority by the apartheid government,” appears to suffer from a similar historical confusion as Ramaphosa displayed vis á vis a seamless continuum between the USSR and Putin’s Russia.
While Putin’s Russia melds nationalist imperialism with conservative orthodoxy and authoritarian aspects of Stalinism, it’s a far cry ideologically from the USSR. Likewise, Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine is a complex state, striving to modernise and integrate with the West, while managing the internal challenges of its post-Soviet identity as it navigates the contentious geopolitical landscape with Russia.
Against this background, DA leader John Steenhuisen, in a vain bid to ensure maximum consensus and agreement among the parties to the government of national unity (GNU), fumed in a subsequent statement: “We cannot and will not agree that SA should consider an authoritarian regime, that is currently violating international law by waging an imperialist war of aggression against a sovereign state, as an ally.”
While Ramaphosa might well have been more diplomatically circumspect, it’s interesting that given the breaks in ideological continuity, Steenhuisen focuses on “an imperial war of aggression”. Equally noteworthy is his lament that Ramaphosa should have acted like India’s Narendra Modi, who, Steenhuisen tweeted, “had not fawned over Putin and had not declared Russia to be a good ally”.
Perhaps Steenhuisen needs reminding that India has always been a good ally of Russia, prompting Putin to remark at the recent Brics conference: “Our relationship [with Modi] is so strong that [he] will understand me without any translation.”
Then Steenhuisen ventures further into the quagmire and tweets: “What happens when Gayton McKenzie goes to Israel and puts his arm around Benjamin Netanyahu and tells him he is a good ally of SA?” Perhaps the leader of the DA might remember when, days after then-president Zuma “firmly discouraged” visits to the Jewish state, Mmusi Maimane — with Steenhuisen firmly in tow — met Netanyahu in Jerusalem at the DA and the Israeli foreign ministry’s behest.
Meanwhile, amid Israel’s ongoing deadly onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which has allegedly left almost 50,000 people dead and family lives destroyed, the DA still holds that it advocates for a two-state solution as opposed to calling Israel an aggressor.
As if the battles in the GNU about the National Health Insurance Act, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act and broader economic issues aren’t enough to contend with, a quarrel about foreign policy with implications for our relationship with Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine now looms. Both parties — the DA and the ANC — had better get a grip on history, diplomacy and the right stance to take.
They might take a leaf out of the non-alignment movement, so ably led by the likes of Egypt’s Nasser, India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno and China’s Zhou Enlai and review the non-aligned conference — the first large-scale Afro-Asian Conference, which took place on from April 18-24 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, and compare it with the aims of the Brics Summit held from October 22-24 this year in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, in Russia.
• Cachalia is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson.
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