SA’s foreign policy: Cyril clears the fog

President Cyril Ramaphosa fired with all cylinders at the United Nations General Assembly (Unga) this week as he prevailed on the international community to work for peace in the world.

He reiterated his statements of the last 18 months at least, that all conflicts should be resolved by peaceful means and that some countries had regressed to war.

With his address at Unga, South Africa’s foreign policy has become clearer now than before. Ramaphosa has cleared the fog about what we want in the world and how the world can benefit from us.

So far Ramaphosa is not only displaying consistency, but is assertive about where South Africa stands on world affairs.

He has been unrelenting from the need to reform the UN itself and the international financial institutions, wars in the world, the African renaissance and economic growth of the continent, the blockade against Cuba and sanctions against Zimbabwe and how such actions affected their neighbouring countries, to the questions of Palestine and Western Sahara.

The world needs to realise that there is nothing more important than peace.

You can fight and fight in an attempt to defeat each other in wars, but after all the deaths and destruction you have to come back to peace.

In the long run, after everybody is exhausted, millions of lives lost and cities destroyed, Africa – and South Africa in particular – would be vindicated on the need to resolve the war in Ukraine peacefully.

South Africa knows what violence means and what peace means. We have experienced both. The repression against blacks in South Africa ran parallel to the Nazism that sought to exterminate Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

The relationship between the National Party and Nazists and the growth of neo-Nazis in the country is on public records.

The country’s liberation movements insisted on the peaceful approach of negotiations – and their pleas that were rejected by the white government until 1990.

As a response to the intransigence of white government, defiance campaigns were adopted in the ’50s to oppose the apartheid policies of racial discrimination.

The Freedom Charter that was adopted by the liberation movement encapsulated the spirit of non-racialism and equality, while it articulated the aspirations of the black majority.

The charter was also unequivocally about the need for peaceful resolution of world conflicts and the rejection of war.

It’s not about Ramaphosa’s hardlining or even a show of arrogance that SA insists on a peaceful resolution instead of continued war in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict today, but it’s a historic approach of the country.

Therefore, it’s not only unfair, but mischievous to say it’s because South Africa favours Russia in the war without contextualising South Africa’s historical approach to foreign policy.

It’s unfortunate that the apartheid regime did not want to listen to pleas for peace by black leaders like Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela.

But their approach was confirmed by the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to Luthuli and subsequently the same honour to Mandela and Desmond Tutu decades later.

This was an acknowledgement by the outside world that South Africa wanted peace in the country and the world.

But with the armed struggle, blacks had to respond to violence meted out to them by the regime symbolised by the gunning down of 69 and injuring hundreds of anti-pass protesters in Sharpeville in 1960.

The armed struggle became the last resort after all doors for peaceful solution were closed with the banning of the same liberation movement that had been seeking peace for close to five decades and their leaders jailed.

It is reassuring that today we have a clear foreign policy on these matters, especially the choice of peace over war in the resolution of international conflicts.