Defending the government’s stance on Iran, and its hosting of the Iranian navy in January this year in the wake of the deaths of tens of thousands of its citizens protesting the Islamic regime, South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola has argued that “our views on the conflict [are] anchored on international law. As South Africa, we are a country that values international law and subscribe [sic] to it. In fact, we are a country that wants to vindicate the international rule of law.”

On the Israeli retaliation against Hamas in Gaza following the attacks of 7 October 2023, President Cyril Ramaphosa said at the Global Progressive Mobilisation in Barcelona this month, “The resurgence in unlawful wars of aggression and genocide in places like Palestine are linked to the ideologies of supremacy that continue to treat places like Africa, Asia and Latin America as second-class global citizens.” Never mind that plenty of regimes in Asia and Africa do a pretty good job of treating their own citizens as second-class – witness the plight of the Uighur in South Africa’s ally China, for example, Palestinians across the Arab world or, closer to home, the brutal repression of oppositions in Uganda and Tanzania.

In the same breath, Pretoria has maintained “non-alignment” regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. Ramaphosa has urged a peaceful resolution to the conflict, avoiding calling it a war or an invasion, while his government has abstained from several United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia. There has been little mention of the imperative of upholding sovereignty or international law, in this instance, because the African National Congress (ANC) identifies strongly with Russia.

Adherence to international law is optional and selective, apparently.

Chemical Attack

The cultivated flatlands on the drive to the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja hint at this history of legal ambivalence and moral equivalence as much as its own history as a market town.

Today, Halabja is synonymous with atrocity and the apology that masquerades as South Africa’s global leadership.

Saddam Hussein’s pathology of violence touched its particular moral bottom when his cousin General Ali Hassan al-Majid ordered an attack using gas on Halabja in March 1988 in the final months of the eight-year war with Iran. Kurdish fighters, allied with Iran, whose border was just eleven kilometres away, had taken the town the previous day. There is a recording of Al-Majid – who acquired the moniker “Chemical Ali” as a result – boasting: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck the international community and those who listen to them!”

After Saddam’s forces attacked the occupying Peshmerga (literally, “those who face death”) with artillery and air-strikes, the Kurdish fighters withdrew from Halabja to the surrounding hills, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly. The following day, 16 March, the town was bombed by Iraqi Sukhoi jets with a cocktail of mustard, VX, and Sarin gas, many of the ingredients for which had been supplied by Western companies.

More than 5 000 civilians were murdered at Halabja, and at least twice this number suffered long-term health effects, from blindness to miscarriages. Al-Majid, the chief of the feared Mukhabarat secret police, among other roles, was tried and executed in January 2010 for his part in this crime.

Inside the town is a memorial to the attack, the roof of the building constructed to resemble blisters, just as those poisoned came out in giant welts. Nearby is a gravesite containing the fallen, sometimes with three names per stone, sometimes whole families in a row. It is little wonder a fading sign outside the cemetery reads: “Not allowed for Bathesm [members of Saddam Hussein's former Ba'ath Party] to enter.”

No sooner had peace been made by Iraq and Iran in August 1988 than Saddam invaded Kuwait almost exactly two years later, motivated partly by reasons of territory and financial debt. Iraq’s inevitable defeat at the hands of the international coalition, which included Arab countries, in February 1991, proved the beginning of Saddam’s end.

That finally came with the March 2003 invasion, which deposed the strongman and, in the process, ignited an insurgency pitting Iraqi against Iraqi, tribe against tribe, Sunni against Shia, jihadists against nationalists, and Iraqis against foreigners. It became the defining moment of the George W Bush presidency and Tony Blair’s leadership, both because of the fallacious premise of Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and for the chaotic post-war planning which helped to seed the chaos.

South African Defence

South Africa vigorously defended Saddam’s Iraq against the threat of international intervention in 1991 (when it called for a diplomatic solution) and especially in 2003. The 1991 defence was curious since not only were the Arab states in the United States (US) coalition, but apartheid South Africa had supplied Saddam with perhaps as many as 200 G5 howitzers. When President FW de Klerk met President George HW Bush in Washington in September 1990, he reportedly gave the US president an undertaking to halt deliveries of the long-range weapon. In an early hint of things to come, a group of South African Muslims led by Maulana Azir Aziz Desai wanted to raise a 10 000-strong army to defend Saddam’s imperialism while staging regular meetings outside the US embassy chanting slogans such as “Save oil, burn Bush” and “One Bush, one bullet.”

Under then-President Thabo Mbeki, South Africa viewed the subsequent 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom as an unlawful "imperialist" action. Mbeki tried to persuade Bush and Blair against the war, citing a lack of evidence of WMDs (although no one claimed that Saddam did not want to possess them), characterising it as a major violation of international law. Mbeki went so far as to deploy South African experts to assist with international inspections to verify the non-existence of WMDs, with his exile sidekick (and deputy foreign minister) Aziz Pahad and other foreign affairs officials traipsing over the country – and Pahad actually meeting Saddam, though he was reputedly not certain if this was the Tikrit strongman or one of his doubles.

Mbeki’s predecessor, Nelson Mandela, was outspoken in his attack against President Bush, somewhat bizarrely declaring that the US president’s contempt for the UN lay in the fact that its secretary-general, Kofi Annan, was black.

“Why is the United States behaving so arrogantly?” asked Mandela. “All that [Bush] wants is Iraqi oil,” he said. “Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man? They never did that when secretary-generals were white,” said the former South African president.

With the benefit of history, South Africa’s opposition to the war was a good call when it came to WMD, but this was tarnished by its defence of Saddam. And even on WMD, there were doubts according to members of the team assembled to investigate. While the purpose of the delegation that Mbeki sent to inspect Iraq’s weapons arsenal, led by Pahad, was to demonstrate by in situ inspection that there were no WMD in Iraq, members of the delegation did see the precursors for mustard gas in unmarked barrels, in storage.

Apparently, these observations were ignored, presumably given the ideological imperative to show that the pretext did not exist.

Against the West

Why did South Africa use this moment to take a stance against the West, in so doing sending the country’s foreign policy off in an ideological direction from which it has not returned? It could hardly have been based on its adherence to international law, given its tacit support of Russia’s action in Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, and countless other instances that have clearly called for humanitarian intervention, from the Congo to Sudan.

Was this due to money, always a reason for ANC policy switches?

The ANC has long been willing to accept donations from outside governments, no matter their nature. Some indication of the extent of these foreign dealings was disclosed by Mandela in April 1999. The president acknowledged that at his request, in 1998, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd had donated $10 million to the party, as had Shaikh Said bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. Fahd had earlier given $50 million to the ANC in 1990. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia had donated $50 million, while President Suharto of Indonesia had given $60 million. Earlier, it was announced that the ANC had received $10 million in funding from the Taiwanese government for the 1994 election campaign.

Many other rumours of external funding support for the ANC circulated in South Africa and abroad, including the alleged creation of an ANC election “war-chest” with funds from Libya for the 1999 election. Gaddafi and Suharto were awarded South Africa’s then-highest state honour, the Order of Good Hope, in 1997. In both cases, too, the ANC government also interceded diplomatically on behalf of those regimes and used South Africa’s influence to shield them from criticism over their human rights records.

On Iraq, the Volker Report on the UN’s Oil-for-Food Programme was debated by the US Congress in February 2005. It showed that the Saddam regime sold more than $64.2 billion of oil to 248 companies under the Oil for Food Programme between 1996 and 2003. In return, Iraq purchased $34.5 billion of humanitarian goods from 3 614 companies. Oil surcharges were, by the South African government’s own findings, paid with the contracts of 139 companies, and humanitarian kickbacks with the contracts of 2 253 companies. The report notes that “Iraq had instituted a policy of imposing a 10% kickback requirement generally on all humanitarian contractors”.

“When reading Mr Volcker’s interim report,” said Dana Rohrebacher, the chair of the oversight committee, “we are left with one indelible impression: The Oil-for-Food Programme was tainted by corruption, rank political considerations, and incompetence from the very start.”

Imvume Management, Tokyo Saxwele [sic] Holdings (Mvelepanda) [sic], Montega, Lexoil and Omni Oil are all South African companies listed in the various reports including the ‘Report on Programme Manipulation by the Independent Inquiry Committee', (or IIC Report), which was commissioned by the UN. Although the Volcker report notes that “Tokyo Saxwele [sic] Mvelaphanda Holdings … reacted angrily to its inclusion in the list, but has not denied buying oil under the Oil for Food Programme”. Imvume Management later went insolvent after receiving a “facilitation fee” of R15 million from the state-owned oil company, PetroSA.

This source of lard might explain why, in July 2002, the year prior to the US invasion of Iraq, Saddam’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was met with praise and honour by then-deputy president Jacob Zuma.

South Africa’s moral equivalence was on show in its rush to criticise the US-led Western action in Iraq or even that in Afghanistan in 2001 in the wake of 9/11.

Moral Equivalence

Moral equivalence denotes the claim that two opposing actions or views are equally immoral or moral. It is often used to minimise atrocious acts by comparing them to less severe ones, or to create a “false equivalence” (such as “whatboutism”) to deliberately obfuscate clear moral distinctions. By disregarding or flattening the nuances that differentiate a democracy's unintended wartime errors (such as an unintended attack on a civilian target) in search of a bigger objective in the overwhelming common good (ridding the world of a jihadist nuclear weapon, for instance) from a terrorist organisation's deliberate, targeted violence against civilian targets, the aim is to make two moral failures the same.

But these cases cannot be removed from their context. It is hard, for instance, to compare the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy with that of Saddam Hussein, or the aims of Hamas and Hezbollah with those of Israel, no matter the excesses of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

In Saddam’s case, his Mukhabarat secret police (literally, “communications”) carried out much of his dirty work, assassinating dissidents at home and abroad. No one knows how many people were killed under Saddam’s regime, but estimates on domestic deaths and disappearances run as high as half a million, with another three million Iraqis (among a nation of seventeen million by 1990) forced to emigrate.

“Saddam was a monster, and it is better for all of us that he was removed,” says Daban Shadala, the deputy foreign minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq’s north. The Kurdish population of northern Iraq suffered disproportionately under Saddam, an estimated 182 000 losing their lives during the 1987–88 Anfal alone.

Encouraged by the defeat of Saddam’s forces, and by the rhetoric of President George HW Bush, the Kurds again rose in hopeful rebellion, as did the Shia in the south. Once again, however, they were crushed by the might of Saddam’s artillery and air power, two million Kurds fleeing into the mountains before a no-fly zone was imposed over the Shia in the south (“Southern Watch”) and the Kurds in the north (“Northern Watch”) from March 1991. Along with widespread sanctions against Saddam, this measure eventually led to the establishment of a de facto Kurdish state.

By the time the genocidal campaign ended in the autumn of 1988, some 4 500 Kurdish towns and villages had been destroyed. Sulaymaniyah’s Amna Suraka (“lest we forget”) museum, which is housed in the former Mukhabarat headquarters, details the atrocities committed by Saddam’s regime. There was no presumption of innocence, no stone left unturned if Saddam thought he saw a threat, and women and children were not immune to a machine that had no bounds in its ruthless, imaginative methods. A separate section details the war with the Islamic State (ISIS) between 2014 and 2017, in which 8 000 Kurds lost their lives in stopping ISIS from reaching Baghdad.

While the Kurds welcomed Saddam’s demise following the March 2003 invasion and worked closely with American forces to accomplish it, many are scathing about the chaotic and incoherent post-war plan and administration of Iraq. But there is no way they would wish Saddam’s return, never.

In the same vein, only an idiot (or an ideologue) would argue that Russia is trying to install democracy or good governance in Ukraine.

If Minister Lamola and, indeed, the ANC want to be taken seriously in international relations, they should abandon their crude attempts at moral equivalence and speak out in favour of the upholding of international law per se without ambivalence and whatever the inconvenience of the truth.

Mills and Hartley are with the Platform for African Democrats.