JAUNDICED EYE
South Africa’s growing alignment with Iran is not only abysmally amoral — a violent, oppressive Middle East theocracy and the world’s foremost state sponsor of international terror— but may prove to be spectacularly unwise.
It has the potential to cause economic disruption on the scale that in the mid-1980s rocked this country and ended 46 years of National Party hegemony. The African National Congress government today faces among its Western trading partners a hardening of attitudes similar to that which triggered the sanctions and investment boycotts that finally undid the apartheid regime.
South Africa’s formal foreign policy, where anti-Western sentiments masquerade as multipolarity, is one thing. More insidious and dangerous because they are hidden, are the ties between the ANC’s party apparatus and an array of violence-fomenting organisations. Consequently, the warm relationship and dealmaking with Iran are beginning to come under much closer and more jaded scrutiny.
Key to how it all plays out is the response of the United States. The indulgence of the Biden administration towards a purportedly neutral South Africa that clamours for US aid, investment and preferential trade terms on the one hand, while literally embracing Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists on the other, has already been wearing thin. Also, the US will be perturbed by signs that BRICS, which Iran joined this year, is being swayed by Russia, China and Iran from its initial economic developmental focus to a more overtly, aggressively anti-Western stance.
The trifecta of Donald Trump as president, with a Republican-controlled Senate and House, will bring these concerns to the foreground and inject a note of impatience. US policy towards Iran and those viewed as its allies and enablers will harden in lockstep with even more vigorous support for Israel, the country that Iran and militant Islamism are dedicated to obliterating.
This week, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), released a report on the pattern of anti-Israeli rhetoric and behaviour from the ANC and the ties the party has developed with Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, as well as Russia and Qatar, in the light of South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Rather than being an exercise of moral leadership, its application “may more accurately be viewed as a cynical, politically motivated manoeuvre heavily influenced by foreign economic and political factors”.
ISGAP is a US-based think tank that produces academic research, seminars, and conferences to study antisemitism, racism and prejudice. Because of its field of study and the fact that it gets funding from Israel, ISGAP’s work is predictably dismissed out of hand by the anti-Zionist lobby. However, it has a credible profile in interdisciplinary scholarship and research and its annual fellowship programme at Oxford University draws dozens of international scholars, the overwhelming majority of whom are not Jewish.
The ISGAP report notes that in the wake of the October 7 massacres, South Africa was one of the earliest and most vociferous voices to condemn Israel, not Hamas. It further claims that the legal team assembled to argue the genocide case included a number of “highly biased individuals and NGOs with a history of overt anti-Israel activism, including some with links to terrorist entities”.
While the report does not try to mount a legal rebuttal of the case put before the ICJ, it does rather compellingly highlight the ANC’s, and hence the South African government’s, mala fides towards Israel by tracing in detail the ideological, technological and increasingly hazardous links with an array of international terror-supporting groups, especially those funded by Iran.
Of course, this is partly driven by the ANC’s historical infatuation with revolution against the imperialist oppressors. But more pragmatically, it is powered by the ANC’s insatiable need for massive and ongoing monetary infusions. As recently revealed by former ANC Treasurer-General Mathews Phosa, the party has despite public denials long relied on secret financial lifelines from unsavoury sources, including Muammar Gaddafi, to keep going. Today, Iran, Russia and Qatar fulfil the same purpose for the party and its leadership elite that Libya did during the Jacob Zuma years — that of an ATM.
At the beginning of 2024, the ANC was a few hundred million rands in the red, unable to pay its staff and facing imminent bankruptcy. However, dovetailing with South Africa’s genocide charges at the ICJ and for the first time a stridently anti-Israeli stance on the hustings, the situation was transformed. It suddenly inexplicably came up with the funds not only to pay off all its creditors but to run a general election campaign that was even more lavish than that of 2019, when it spent an estimated R1 billion.
The speculation, rejected by the ANC, is that Iran is the source of that largesse. Initially, the Electoral Commission acceded to a request by ActionSA to investigate the miraculous transformation of the ANC’s financial fortunes only to reverse its decision months later, saying that there was “no prima facie case to investigate”. In the absence of another Phosa-type spilling of the beans, we may never know the truth.
While there are no startling smoking gun revelations in the ISGAP report — it would be naïve to expect any given the high stakes for the shady players involved — it is salutary to be reminded how extensive and well documented these ties are, as well as what the costs are. For example, the major reason for South Africa’s presence on the Financial Action Task Force’s “grey list”, is that it has “failed to demonstrate that it is effectively identifying, investigating or prosecuting terrorist financiers or addressing terrorism finance”.
So, it’s one step forward and two back. Islamic organisations sanctioned by the US Treasury as fronts for terror financing operate freely in South Africa. And at the same time as the South African Treasury and the Reserve Bank are scrambling to get us off the grey list, the ANC party structures and Hamas — designated a terror organisation by all the democracies with which we have strong cultural, political, investment and trading ties — have formalised their vows of fraternal political solidarity with formal memorandums of understanding and direct lines of communications between their leaderships. Or as IGAP puts it, “The ANC has openly welcomed extremist elements into its ranks and its support networks, while attempting to maintain an air of legitimacy.”
That South Africa has been spared the Islamic terrorism that has ravaged much of Africa is less likely to be random good fortune than a quid pro quo for the country’s deepening alignment with Iran, which is a major sponsor of such terrorism. Alarm bells should be ringing, since the terrorism genie is difficult to put back in the bottle.
On the ground, locally, the situation is becoming serious. Neighbouring Mozambique has been battling in the north an Islamist insurgency — of the Sunni kind, not its bitter rival, the Iranian Shiite variety — since 2017. At least 5,000 civilians have been killed and over a million displaced. The Frelimo government, just seven months away from its 50th anniversary of totalitarian rule but under pressure from protests over election fraud, is looking more fragile by the day. This is playing out across from us along a porous 500km border that is overseen by a corrupt and incompetent border authority backed by an overstretched and under-resourced military.
Willem Els, a researcher at the Institute of Strategic Studies, painted a worrying picture of this threat in an address last week to a Border Management Authority conference. There were radical elements within the South African Islamic community, News24 reports him as saying, and these were essentially unmonitored because of a lack of capacity on the part of the intelligence services, as well as a lack of political will. “We see that they have programmes where they are indoctrinating children from as young as 11 years old. That programme has been sustained and is ongoing.”
There was, said Els, “a severe problem” with homegrown Islamic radicals moving back and forth between South Africa and Mozambique. “They receive their radicalisation here [and] then are moved abroad where they receive their training. Some move on to countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and also to Somalia. But some of them return to South Africa and become sleeper cells.
Els said South Africa had become a “breeding ground” for terrorists and was vulnerable if its borders were not policed effectively. “One of the main challenges is not only the understaffed border control … but the embedded corruption that is prevalent where state-embedded actors are being compromised not only by terrorist groups but also by transnational organised crime groups.”
Referring to the influx of undocumented Ethiopian and Somalian immigrants of soldiering age, he asked: "So, what are they doing in South Africa? We do not have enough information, but it raises eyebrows.”
Els’s remarks on the sinister role of state-embedded actors are borne out by the August arrest of 95 Libyan nationals at a secret military training camp in Mpumalanga. They allegedly were foot soldiers for one of the groups — linked to Russia’s cat’s paw in Africa, the Wagner Group — battling for control of that country’s unstable unity government. The men, since deported without charge, had entered South Africa on genuine visas issued, said Home Affairs, on the basis of “misrepresentations”.
The ANC’s making of common cause with Islamic fundamentalism is not only foolish in diplomatic terms but it is out of kilter with popular opinion. It is planted in shallow religious soil. The Muslim population, although exceptionally influential within the ANC, is small in the larger scheme of things. In a population of 62 million of which 82% are Christian, 7% hold indigenous beliefs, 6% are non-believers, and 2.4% are Hindu, Muslims number barely a million, about 1.7% of the total. And only 3% of these Muslims share the Shiite faith that is dominant in Iran.
The ANC’s attempts to galvanise the Muslim vote in the May general election — visits by Hamas leaders; ANC leaders wearing keffiyeh; and the brandishing of Palestinian flags at party rallies — failed miserably. In the Western Cape, despite its high concentration of Muslim voters, the ANC lost votes to the Democratic Alliance, which holds a moderate position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and especially to the volubly pro-Israel Patriotic Alliance.
There are no signs, however, that the ANC is walking back on its support for Iran. The question, then, is whether the resultant strains will break the party, the Government of National Unity, or South Africa itself.
ISGAP report: https://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/SA_Report_Final_121124-1.pdf
JE column on Phosa’s revelations: /opinion/mathews-phosa-the-silent-witness (Subscription)
JE column on ANC’s foreign policy and the GNU: /opinion/curbing-sas-radical-foreign-policy (Subscription)
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