THE WASHINGTON POST • February 23, 2023

JOHANNESBURG — Clement Manyathela, who hosts a popular and influential
talk show on South Africa’s Radio 702, remembers the outrage he felt
when Russian troops first surged into Ukraine. He had believed Russia’s
insistence that it wasn’t planning to attack and felt cheated when war
broke out.

“We were lied to,” he said.

But as the fighting continued, he, and many of those who call in to his
show, began to ask questions: Why had President Vladimir Putin deemed it
necessary to invade? Was NATO fueling the fire by sending so many
weapons to Ukraine? How could the United States expect others around the
world to support its policies when it had also invaded countries?

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/africa/2023-02-22/ukraine-war-global-divide-9222379.html

“When America went into Iraq, when America went into Libya, they had
their own justifications that we didn’t believe, and now they’re trying
to turn the world against Russia. This is unacceptable, too,” Manyathela
said. “I still don’t see any justification for invading a country, but
we cannot be dictated to about the Russian moves on Ukraine. I honestly
feel the U.S. was trying to bully us.”

In the year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a reinvigorated Western
alliance has rallied against Russia, forging what President Biden has
trumpeted as a “global coalition.” Yet a closer look beyond the West
suggests the world is far from united on the issues raised by the
Ukraine war.

The conflict has exposed a deep global divide, and the limits of U.S.
influence over a rapidly shifting world order. Evidence abounds that the
effort to isolate Putin has failed, and not just among Russian allies
that could be expected to back Moscow, such as China and Iran.

India announced last week that its trade with Russia has grown by 400
percent since the invasion. In just the past six weeks, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov has been welcomed in nine countries in Africa and
the Middle East — including South Africa, whose foreign minister, Naledi
Pandor, hailed their meeting as “wonderful” and called South Africa and
Russia “friends.”

On Friday, a year after the invasion began, the South African navy will
be engaged in military exercises with Russia and China in the Indian
Ocean, sending a powerful signal of solidarity at a moment the United
States had hoped would provide an opportunity for reinvigorated
worldwide condemnations of Russia.

Conversations with people in South Africa, Kenya and India suggest a
deeply ambivalent view of the conflict, informed less by the question of
whether Russia was wrong to invade than by current and historical
grievances against the West — over colonialism, perceptions of
arrogance, and the West’s failure to devote as many resources to solving
conflicts and human rights abuses in other parts of the world, such as
the Palestinian territories, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Western countries “are hypocritical,” said Bhaskar Dutta, a clerk in
Kolkata, India. “These people colonized the entire world. What Russia
has done cannot be condoned, but at the same time, you cannot blame them
wholly.”

U.S. officials point out that 141 of 193 countries at the United Nations
voted to condemn Russia after the invasion and that 143 voted in October
to censure the Kremlin’s announced annexation of parts of Ukraine. But
only 33 countries have imposed sanctions on Russia, and a similar number
are sending lethal aid to Ukraine. An Economist Intelligence Unit survey
last year estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population lives in
countries that have refrained from condemning Russia.

This is not a battle between freedom and dictatorship, as Biden often
suggests, said William Gumede, who founded and heads the
Johannesburg-based Democracy Works Foundation, which promotes democracy
in Africa. He pointed to the refusal of South Africa, India and Brazil
to join Biden’s global coalition.

That reluctance, he said, is the outgrowth of more than a decade of
building resentment against the United States and its allies, which have
increasingly lost interest in addressing the problems of the Global
South, he said. The coronavirus pandemic, when Western countries locked
down and locked out other countries, and President Donald Trump’s
explicit disdain for Africa, further fueled the resentment.

As the West pulled back, both Russia and China stepped into the vacuum,
aggressively courting developing nations and capitalizing on the
disillusionment with the United States and Europe by presenting an
alternative to perceived Western hegemony. The Middle East and Africa
are key battlegrounds in this struggle for hearts and minds, as are Asia
and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, whose fortunes are more closely
bound by geography to the United States.

The Middle East is one region where Russia has succeeded in winning
friends and influence, said Faysal, a retired Egyptian consultant on
organized crime who asked that his full name not be used because of the
sensitivity of discussing political issues in Egypt.

“Of course I support Putin,” he said in an interview in Cairo. “A long
time ago, we lost faith in the West. All the Arabs on this side of the
world support Putin, and we are happy to hear he is gaining lands in
Ukraine.”

“There’s been a failure of the West in the past 15 years to see the
anger building up around the world, and Russia has absolutely exploited
this,” Gumede said. “Russia has been able to portray Ukraine as a war
with NATO. It’s the West versus the rest.”

Despite Western efforts to attribute global inflation and a food crisis
to the Russian invasion, most countries around the world blame the West
for the imposition of sanctions, said Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian
foreign secretary.

They do not subscribe to the narrative that countering Russia is a moral
imperative if the principles of democracy and territorial integrity and
the rules-based world order are to be upheld, Sibal said.

“That’s not an argument that serious people buy,” he said, citing the
NATO bombing of Serbia, U.S. support for dictatorships during the Cold
War, and the Iraq War as examples of what he sees as the United States
violating those same principles.

“The rest of the world genuinely sees this as a European war. They do
not see a global conflict or the way it is presented by the West,” he
said. “Yes, it has international repercussions such as inflation. But
those repercussions are because of the sanctions.”

In refusing to risk its relationship with Russia, India is taking a
hardheaded view of its own interests, he said, including its dependence
on Russia for military supplies and the opportunity to hold inflation at
bay by buying discounted Russian oil. There are tens of thousands of
Chinese troops massed on India’s border with China, its geopolitical
rival, and India can’t afford to alienate Russia or risk any
interruption of its weapons supplies, he said.

The United States needs India to counterbalance China and, after initial
attempts to pressure New Delhi to fall into line with its policies, now
appears to have accepted India’s position, Sibal said. The United States
decided not to impose sanctions on India for a missile deal it concluded
with Russia last year and instead has been pursuing expanded ties,
including its own defense deals.

South Africa’s decision to join military exercises with Russia and China
has been met with less understanding. U.S. and Western diplomats have
expressed alarm at both the timing and the nature of the drills, saying
they suggest that South Africa is veering beyond its professed
neutrality toward siding with Russia.

South African officials have noted that the country also participated in
exercises with the U.S. military last year. But those drills were
focused on humanitarian and disaster responses, said a U.S. official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. The
Russia-China exercises, which began Friday, involve offensive naval
capabilities and could conceivably enhance Russia’s naval combat
capacity. The Russian force includes one of Moscow’s premier warships,
the Admiral Gorshkov, which Russia has said is equipped with its newly
developed hypersonic Zircon missile.

The exercises are giving Russia an important public relations boost as
the West’s attention is focused on the anniversary of the war, said
Kobus Marais, spokesman for South Africa’s Democratic Alliance
opposition party. He said South Africa had become “Russia’s useful
idiot” and could become complicit in war crimes if the Admiral Gorshkov
is later deployed to fire missiles into Ukraine.

The exercise follows the mysterious docking at a South African port in
December of a Russian ship, the Lady R, which is under U.S. sanctions
because it is known to have engaged in weapons deliveries. The cargo
ship was denied permission to dock at Cape Town, its original
destination, and instead sailed a few miles away to a smaller port at
Simon’s Town, where it was observed unloading and then reloading
containers that had apparently originated at a South African special
forces ammunition-storage site, according to Marais.

The U.S. government sent a formal warning to the South African
government that any entity that interacted with the vessel would risk
secondary sanctions, but received no reply, the U.S. official said. The
South African Defense Ministry has said it is investigating the matter.

“Their ostensible position of neutrality is, to put it charitably,
harder and harder to believe,” the U.S. official said. The United States
has invested heavily in post-apartheid South Africa and is South
Africa’s biggest foreign investor and biggest export market, and it
makes little sense for it to jeopardize its relationship with
Washington, the official said.

But South Africa has its own reasons for remaining loyal to Russia
despite the risks, South Africans say. The ruling African National
Congress party was backed by the Soviet Union throughout the decades it
spent in exile during the apartheid era, and many of its most senior
figures received training in the Soviet Union, including the powerful
defense minister, Thandi Modise.

On the streets of Soweto, the vast urban settlement on the edge of
Johannesburg that was a center of resistance to the apartheid regime,
people say they still see Russia as an ally. “Russia was with us when we
were in chains,” said Elijah Ndlovu, 51, who is unemployed. “We don’t
say Russia is good by destroying Ukraine, but if you ask us where we
stand in that fight, we have to be honest. We can never turn our back on
Russia.”

Shakes Matlhong, 33, said that his understanding of the conflict was
hazy but that he has long regarded the United States as an “imperialist”
power. “And now Russia is fighting back,” he said.

“Africa’s attitude to the war is that Russia is defending itself against
NATO,” he said. “Russia never participated in any colonialism. It might
be that Russia is wrong, but people’s attitude is determined by history.”

That Russia did not participate in the colonization of Africa and that
the Soviet Union backed many of the continent’s liberation movements are
points that have been exploited by Putin in his messaging, said Liubov
Abravitova, Ukraine’s ambassador to South Africa. She acknowledges an
uphill struggle in trying to win the sympathies of Africans for the
Ukrainian cause. Russia’s “only card is that they never colonized
Africa,” she said. “But this is also true of Ukraine.”

### - am always intrigued/interested in what s.africa thinks/has to say
as they look back over their shoulder at a system they've long since
abandoned: the old left Vs. right system that very nearly brought their
nation to utter ruin, at a system the west still uses! our system!

a few serious thinkers/observers on this planet considering that what
happened in s.africa - a total political change/shift in direction that
ultimately saved them from destroying themselves - to be the forerunner
of exactly what's gonna eventually happen to the rest of the planet too;
the global situation merely peaking there first!

which, if ya thinks about it, is actually a very interesting &
intriguing idea, in that the system that 'created' their problems in the
first place was NOT a system able to provide the solution, that 'new'
ideas were required to circumvent the problems 'inherent' in the original!

to which end, the right-wing as represented by the rich/contolling
whites, instead of disappearing altogether eventually 'merged' with the
left and the ANC Party was born! - wow! i mean, who would have ever
thunk it???

attempting to 'translate' a similar change into OUR system, however,
isn't perhaps quite so clear... what form would it take? would the
wealthy 'merge' with the poor for example?? (very difficult to imagine
that heh) and/or would the republicans in america 'merge' with the
democrats??? (images of the proudboys melting their assault rifles and
instead teaching little black kids to read or whatever? hah!)

the mind just boggles! LOL ! :D

else, and very currently, we're DEFO going down the EXACT same road to
destruction s.africa did! we NEED to change TOO!!! change or die!

in s.africa they made it ONLY just in the very nick of time! (true)

and now WE in the west are arriving at a very SIMILAR situation!

THEY 'chose' to live INSTEAD of dying!

they 'elected' to change RATHER than die!

(must have been so difficult huh)

can WE do the same???

we need to!