Do We Need A Foreign Policy?
By: TSUDAO GURIRAB
ARTICLES 96 and 144 of the Namibian Constitution establish the framework within which our country’s external relations are to be practised.
This, inter alia, enjoins the state to strive for the promotion of peace and security and the settlement of international disputes by peaceful means. Given this Weltanschauung, our international relations should be incontrovertible. And in furtherance of these goals, our country is a member of continental and international organisations. It is self-evident that we should live up to external obligations we commit ourselves to, whether these be multilateral or bilateral. These apply, with equal force, to our diplomatic relations. We say this in light of a report in one of our newspapers last week, that the government has turned a cold shoulder to accredited representatives of the government of Libya in our country.
If true, such action would not only be illogical and unwise, but paint our country as one where reason has been substituted by duplicity. For those awaking only now from a long snooze, the world has long moved on since the storming of the Berlin wall, taking in its wake GDR, the Soviet Union, Romania, in fact the whole of Stalinist Eastern Europe. In Africa and elsewhere, choice, as represented by multiparty political systems, is gaining ground. And the Arab world recently, if belatedly, proved that this change for the better, as clearly demonstrated by the wave of the Arab Spring, was not going to bypass their shores. That’s the real world. The rest is inept nostalgia.
Or what is Windhoek playing at? Has it anointed itself as the avant-garde movement to sweep through Lusaka, Tripoli, Cairo, Tunis, Moscow, Kiev, Berlin, Bucharest, etc to restore ancient regimes? We recall vividly the visit to Lusaka of Nicolae Ceauescu, where all entrances to the auditorium had to be secured and windows locked when he came to address us at Unin [United Nations Institute for Namibia] circa 1980. Sadly, his people strung him up in Bucharest as a dinosaur and a relic of the past. And we should not be in the business of resurrecting him or others of his ilk. For they have been taken along by the currents of history. Premier Li Keqiang of China and Raul Castro in Cuba appear to have taken note of these developments. So watch this space on future developments in China and Cuba.
On matters of war and peace, it is better not to be pissing in the wind but to build genuine alliances. And for these reasons, it is a breath of fresh air that in the case of Mali, for example, we are implementing the resolution of the AU summit and have, as a result, gone ahead to make a financial commitment to this end. The war in Mali has all the hallmarks of a drawn-out quagmire akin to the DRC, albeit for different reasons. In Congo, we committed our troops to an ill-conceived misadventure, at Harare’s behest, keeping Cabinet, Parliament and the country generally in the dark. Sadly, the crisis in the Congo is far from over with the UN voting only last week to increase the size of the peacekeeping force in eastern Congo with an enhanced mandate to engage the rebels.
The disastrous campaign by our neighbours, South Africa, in the Central African Republic adds to similar unsuccessful outings to Libya and Côte d’Ivoire and critically brings home the point that we have a greater prospect of success acting as a group than as individual countries. This is what our collective approach in Zimbabwe demonstrates though the ANC and other unreconstructed elements are snapping at the heels of this success.
The point is that the countries of the North, with far more superior resources of any imaginable type and firepower, coordinate in these matters, whereas we, as individual countries, play cowboys in the treacherous trouble spots on our continent. In an ideal world, it is always prudent to intervene before the belligerents cross the line in the sand and engage in war at the cost of lives and destruction of our fragile economies. In the case of both Côte d’Ivoire and CAR [Central African Republic], it was obvious that the incumbents were sitting cosy in breach of the undertakings made. The countries which had committed troops to shore up the regimes as well as the AU failed to act as guarantors of the agreements made by all parties, only to hurry to the scene of the crime ex post facto.
In diplomacy credibility is everything. Elsewhere relatively small countries have successfully played the role of brokers, middlemen and guarantors in troublespots, away from the glare of the media. Our country must continue to honour its multilateral and bilateral undertakings in full. But our diplomacy needs to move up a gear up and our plenipotentiary emissaries must be brokers carrying messages and proposals for settlement of war or to resolve protracted global problems. We can. But then remember, credibility is the currency of diplomacy.