Ramaphosa’s silence on Brics serial human rights violators is shameful
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s closing address at the Brics summit had much to say about mutually accelerated growth, sustainable development, trade and investment, continental markets and the global financial architecture.
On one subject he was notoriously silent: the rule of law and the fundamental rights of citizens, as set out in the United Nations Charter on Human Rights and South Africa’s own Constitution.
Why did the president so studiously steer away from this vital subject?
After all, South Africa has nothing to be ashamed of — it is deemed a free country in the rankings of every rights monitor. In addition, our Constitution enjoins South Africans to promote and protect the Bill of Rights.
Was he embarrassed to mention the issue before the serial violators among South Africa’s Brics partners? China is third from bottom of 177 countries ranked by Amnesty International in its human rights and rule of law index; Russia (ninth from bottom) and the ubuntu-loving partners that will join from next year, including Iran (second from bottom); Ethiopia (17th from bottom); and Saudi Arabia (22nd from bottom).
Ramaphosa’s speech made one veiled reference to the issue: he said members might have different opinions but shared “a vision for a better world”.
Is abhorrence for the security force killing of child protesters a mere “opinion”? Or the unprovoked invasion of a neighbouring state that has shattered its civilian infrastructure and left millions of people homeless?
It is a dishonest evasion to excuse the horrors of the Iranian regime on the grounds that some of its Western accusers have a tainted human rights record.
“What-aboutery” is a typical propaganda device of human rights violators — the apartheid state, for example, pointed to the crimes of African governments to justify itself; Israel likes to contrast its own political system with the democratic shortcomings of its Middle Eastern neighbours. Rights-conscious South Africans should be ashamed to use it.
The point is that Amnesty’s ranking, revised each year, is based on current, not historical events.
It is similarly dishonest to pretend that Vladimir Putin’s imperialist aggression can be compared with the expansion of Nato in Eastern Europe. The latter is a primarily defensive alliance whose growth since the 1990s has been fuelled by fears of Russia, fostered by decades of living under Soviet rule.
No one is forced to join Nato — European nations that have not done so include Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and until recently, Finland and Sweden (both of the latter have recently applied for membership).
What is of particular concern for South Africans is how, over the longer term, the Brics association could erode South Africa’s rights culture.
The notion that the country could leverage Brics to influence its partners to start observing human rights norms has been utterly exploded by Ramaphosa’s fence-sitting and periodically sympathetic stance on Putin’s pitiless war.
Remember that Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor initially called for Russia to withdraw, but was swiftly yanked into line.
The concern, as Steve Tsang, director of the Soas China Institute has been quoted as saying, is that what Brics offers is “a world order in which autocrats can feel safe and secure in their own countries”. And, one could add, acts as a buffer from global criticism.
To confront the blood-stained realities, let us examine Iran’s recent record — not through Amnesty International, which the ANC’s rightwing nationalists would no doubt dismiss as a Western stalking horse, but through a report by the United Nations’ Commissioner for Human Rights, Nada Al-Nashif.
From 1 August 2022 to 15 April 2023, the report notes the arrest of about 20 000 Iranians, among them thousands of children, for protesting against the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after the “morality police” pulled her in for not wearing her veil correctly.
At least 488 protesters were subsequently killed by security forces using birdshot, buckshot and live ammunition, including 68 minors. Other protesters have been blinded by birdshot (remember birdshot? A form of crowd control illegal in many countries, but much favoured by the apartheid police).
One of those condemned to death was accused of the unforgivable crime of leading street unrest and blocking the streets.
The UN notes numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment in custody to extract confessions, as well as persistent claims of sexual violence against girls, women and men.
Prison conditions allegedly include deliberate denial of medical care, “dire” sanitary conditions, contaminated drinking water and overcrowding.
The report says that during the protests the authorities imposed sweeping control over cyberspace and intensified online censorship. Access to certain media and messaging platforms was banned.
In August 1922 President Ebrahim Raisi signed a decree allowing face recognition technology to track unveiled women and critics of compulsory veiling, imposed after the 1978 Iranian revolution.
New provisions in the Penal Code for such offenders, reportedly under parliamentary consideration, include imprisonment and flogging.
In February this year the BBC reported that 700 schoolchildren had been poisoned with toxic gas in what many saw as a deliberate attempt to force schools to close.
There is no evidence that the death of Mahsa Amini has been investigated or that any of the protest-related deaths have been thoroughly scrutinised in an internationally acceptable process.
Iran’s broader human rights violations include one of the world’s highest rates of judicial execution — 582 in 2022, four for involvement in the nationwide protests. Including three children, this represented a 75% jump on the previous year.
At the time of the UN report, 19 others were sitting on death row for protest-related actions. Many trials for capital crimes allegedly hinge on confessions extracted under torture, and hearings — some lasting mere minutes — are often held behind closed doors.
Public executions, often by hanging from a crane, were temporarily put on hold, but since the protests erupted are back in vogue.
Other unusual punishments embodied in the criminal code, all straight out of the Middle Ages, include blinding, amputation, crucifixion and stoning
Capital offences include homosexual sex, in a country whose policies on sexual matters are considered among the world’s most repressive. Any sex out of wedlock is unlawful.
Discrimination against women should be of concern to South Africans, who made gender equality a central theme of the 1996 constitutional settlement. In December last year Iran was expelled from the UN Committee on the Status of Women for its entire 2022-26 term.
The brutalising of girls and women during the protests partly accounted for this, but there is a wider pathology. Amnesty points out that the country, a theocracy controlled by diehard Islamic clerics, has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Iran has no separate law criminalising domestic violence, the rights monitor adds, while women are treated as “second-class citizens” in matters of divorce, inheritance, child custody, employment and political office. The legal age for marriage is 13, but this can be further reduced if the father petitions a judge.
Given his seminal role in South Africa’s constitutional negotiations, it is hard to believe that Ramaphosa accepts such medieval barbarism as reflecting a legitimate difference of “opinion”, or that he endorses Putin’s hatred of “neo-liberal democracy”. In what meaningful sense is social democratic Europe, his larger enemy, “neo-liberal”?
It has been widely reported that the main drivers in the last-minute enlargement of the Brics were the Chinese.
It is also hard to believe that this essentially non-ideological politician thinks a Brics-inspired “miracle on the Rhine” or revolution in world economic relations is in the offing. After 15 Brics summits, the West — the United States, Europe and their offshoots — remains far and away South Africa’s most important trading partner.
One suspects that Brics has become a legacy issue for the president, more symbolic than real.
Ramaphosa may want to shed his image as the West’s pet African leader.
He has always been an ANC man to the tips of his highly polished shoes. For the purposes of the approaching election, and in the context of widespread disillusionment among voters, he may also want to project the party as a bringer of economic revival
Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.
The views are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian