Relations with Vladimir Putin caused a split in the South African government. President Cyril Ramaphosa‘s main partner in the ruling coalition refused to consider Putin, who started the war, as a friend and ally of South Africa.
The dispute over three of the most important foreign policy issues – Russia, Israel and China – has revealed deep ideological divisions between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), with which the ANC has been brought together. -bond after voting for. for the first time in May’s elections it did not receive a majority in 30 years after the end of apartheid, writing Financial Times. They also raised fears that the coalition, which has a total of 10 parties, would not last the required five years.
At the BRICS summit in Kazan, Ramaphosa, who is also the leader of the ANC, called Putin a “valuable ally” and a “valuable friend” of South Africa. DA leader and Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen strongly echoed those words. Putin may be Ramaphosa’s friend, but his “authoritarian administration, which is now violating international law by waging a war of imperial conquest against a sovereign state,” is certainly not the friend of South Africa, Steenhuisen said.
Vincent Magwenya, Ramaphosa’s spokesman, responded by saying that Steenhuisen was trying to “manage the president in small ways,” who has maintained good relations with Moscow since the apartheid era, when the USSR trained ANC fighters and gave them weapons.
“If Ramaphosa wants to be friends with an imperialist like Putin, that’s up to him,” said UN international affairs spokeswoman Emma Powell. But as the ANC only got 40.2% of the vote in the election, he does not have the right to make political statements on behalf of the government without reaching an agreement with the coalition partners, she said: consensus is necessary so that “we can regularly follow policy of non-alignment.”
Ramaphosa is already accused of double standards, because in 2022 his government did not condemn the Russian attack on Ukraine, explaining this in detail with the traditional policy of not aligning with different alliances, but in January 2024 South Africa appealed to the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
And in October, the government ordered Taiwan to move its diplomatic mission from Pretoria, where all embassies are located, to Johannesburg, where trade missions are based. The DA accused the ANC of upsetting its other long-term partner, China.
The South African government’s foreign policy “does not refer to democratic achievements or to our own principles that we agreed upon during the transition”. [от апартеида]but to revolutionary mythology,” laments Greg Mills of the Brenthurst Foundation think tank:
South Africa has never allowed impartiality to influence its foreign policy or the issue of human rights to influence its relationship with any authoritarian regime.
The South African government has previously been suspected of placing weapons on the US-sanctioned Russian ship Lady R, which visited a naval base near Cape Town in December 2022. Although which South African authorities denied, they took a public statement from the US ambassador to the country about a possible arms shipment to Russia for the government to open an investigation. In September 2023 Ramaphosa reportedwhich, as an independent investigation revealed, the weapon was loaded onto the Lady R, but intended for the South African armed forces under a contract dating back to 2018, and not permission to export was granted.
2024-10-29 10:38:00
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