In defence of the African Peace Mission to Ukraine and Russia
22 June 2023
The African peace mission led by President Cyril Ramaphosa and other African heads of state to Ukraine and Russia was crucially important.
“As the SACP, we fully support the effort by Africa to seek an end to the conflict in Ukraine by peaceful diplomatic means, as opposed to those who want South Africa and other African states to pick a side, and unashamedly that of imperialist forces”, said Solly Mapaila, the Party General Secretary in Johannesburg.
The SACP encourages President Ramaphosa and other African heads of state to strengthen the effort to end the conflict in Ukraine by peaceful diplomatic means.
“We welcome back home and pledge our solidarity with our South African delegation of the African peace mission to Ukraine and Russia on the unpleasant experiences they encountered in Poland, on their way to Ukraine”, said Mapaila.
The sabotage in Poland reminded us that the assassin Janusz Waluś, who pulled the trigger, killing the SACP General Secretary Chris Hani in cold blood on 10 April 1993 in defence of apartheid perpetuity, is from Poland. To this day, the assassin enjoys widespread racist celebration in Poland as a hero.
In frustrating the South African delegation of the African peace mission, Polish authorities should be viewed to have been acting in the context of the United States-led imperialist manoeuvres to block efforts aimed at securing a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. A part of this agenda in South Africa became clearly visible recently in the baseless but well-calculated allegations by Dr Reuben Brigety. The United States ambassador hysterically alleged that South Africa supplied weapons to Russia in December 2022 from Simon’s Town amid the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other former colonial powers from western Europe, who are at the centre of the European Union, provoked the conflict in Ukraine in pursuit of their imperialist interests. Through what they transformed into their intergovernmental organisation of military aggression in other global regions, their United States-dominated NATO, they embarked on an eastward expansion aimed not only at Russia but ultimately at China.
The United States and its automatic European NATO allies want totalitarian control of global natural resources and the world-economy to rescue their imperialist hegemony from the multiple crises it now increasingly faces. As part of their military-politico-economic strategy, they actively supported the coup that took place in Ukraine in 2014. “The imperialist forces created the conditions for Russia’s response in the form of its Special Military Operation, which they turned into war”, said Mapaila. NATO militarily supports the war on the side of Ukraine by pumping billions of dollars and euros into weapons of war and associated technical capacity, among others. In addition, acting shamelessly against media freedom, NATO banned RT and blocked its global signal to deny the world access to media diversity and to straitjacket the victims of this draconian censorship with their propaganda.
Not only do the United States-led imperialist forces and former colonial powers have embedded media outlets in South Africa actively transmitting their propaganda, a point we will return to in due course, but also some “civil society” and political organisations doing the same. The party of the virtually lily-white leadership in South Africa is a typical example. The DA earlier had its one Mr John Steenhuisen embark on a gimmick to Ukraine but has come out guns blazing, attacking the democratically elected government of South Africa for forming part of the genuine African peace mission not only to Ukraine but also to Russia. This has a historical context.
For decades, until our April 1994 democratic breakthrough, the overwhelming majority of South Africans endured colonialism of a special type – inclusive of apartheid. This means that the white supremacist colonisers and the colonised black majority lived in the same territory, but in which the colonisers racially segregated human settlement and systematically underdeveloped the colonised and the areas they confined them to, the bantustans.
After our April 1994 democratic breakthrough, the beneficiaries of colonialism of a special type, which was designed in the interests of imperialism, increasingly shifted their support and party-political funding to the DA. In African and global politics, the DA, through its posture and what it does, serves as nothing but a neocolonial and imperialist agent and mouthpiece. It therefore did not come as a surprise when the DA’s Helen Zille, one of its top leaders and “intellectuals”, praised colonialism, juxtaposing it with our hard-won democratic dispensation.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson, SACP, 22 June 2023
