Zuma’s puzzling omission after atrocity
A lack of condemnation of the slaughter of SA citizens abroad is difficult to understand
ARE WE to conclude that President Jacob Zuma approves of the suicide bomb attack in Kabul this week which killed eight South Africans working for an air charter company?
The Islamist militant group Hezb-e-Islami claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for the US-made video Innocence of Muslims which ridicules the Prophet Muhammad.
One would like to assume that was not Zuma’s intention. Yet when he missed at least three opportunities to express his condemnation, or even mild disapproval, of this atrocity, you have to wonder what message he was trying to convey.
First, he issued a statement on Tuesday, the day it happened, expressing sadness and conveying condolences to the bereaved, but nothing stronger. The Department of International Relations and Co-operation said much the same.
So maybe they both just forgot to condemn the attack.
But when Zuma’s spokesman Mac Maharaj was asked the next day, after criticism had been aired, why there had been no condemnation, he said something like… we have more important things to do, like providing consular assistance to the families.
Come on! How time-consuming is it to insert the phrase, “We utterly condemn this barbaric atrocity against our innocent compatriots,” into a statement? As a Western diplomat remarked, Maharaj could have replied, “Well of course we condemn it, that’s taken for granted, surely?”
That he failed to do so must surely have been deliberate.
By then the Department of International Relations had had second thoughts and said: “The South African government believes in peaceful means to settle disputes and/or conflicts and we strongly condemn the use of violence, particularly violence targeted at innocent civilians.”
But still nothing from Zuma. On Wednesday afternoon he again expressed his condolences in Parliament but went no further to condemn or criticise.
Why? All sorts of conspiracy theories inevitably spring to mind. Was it something to do with the Western Cape vote at Mangaung in December?
Ian Davidson, the DA foreign policy spokesman, thought not, saying the Western Cape ANC’s contribution to the outcome of Mangaung would be miniscule.
Davidson believed that Zuma’s reaction flowed rather from his government’s “overwhelming desire to be non-aligned”, though he added that in tracking a supposedly nonaligned position, SA was actually opposing the West most of the time.
Perhaps Zuma took his cue from the Cape Town-based Muslim Judicial Council, whose spokeswoman Nabeweya Malik told the Cape Argus in effect that the eight South Africans had been caught in the crossfire of Muslim protest – which she implied was legitimate – against US “state terror” being perpetrated across the Muslim world.
“As our hearts are pained by the deaths as a result of the US and its allies’ occupation forces, we are also pained that this war has now taken the lives of our South African brothers and sisters,” she said, laying the blame squarely on the US.
But perhaps Zuma has made the same leap of logic and been paralysed in a “non-aligned” position, somewhere between blaming the US and blaming the actual Muslim perpetrators, for the atrocity.
But, if so, he, like the Muslim Judicial Council, would be letting his ideological disposition run way ahead of the facts. This was a suicide bomb detonated in protest against an amateurish video insulting the Prophet Muhammad, and not against the US occupation of Afghanistan.
The council, incidentally, also implicitly apportioned some of the blame for their deaths on the victims, saying anyone seeking employment “in occupied areas” must be fully aware of “the reality of death”.
This also suggests another possible explanation for Zuma’s omission, that he perhaps thought the South Africans should not have been working in Afghanistan. In 2006 Parliament passed the Prohibition of Mercenary Activity and Regulation of Certain Activities in Areas of Armed Conflict Act, which criminalised even humanitarian activities by South Africans in war zones, unless they first received clearance from the SA government.
The act was never promulgated, so it is not law, but it evidently reflected government thinking.
When all of this ideology has been pared away, though, the fact remains that eight innocent South Africans were murdered by Hezb-eIslami.
Zuma should have taken his cue instead from Cape Town’s Claremont Main Road Mosque which condemned the attackers, saying that by choosing violence as a response to provocation, “the attackers betrayed the Prophet’s legacy and wisdom”.
Earlier, the mosque’s Imam Rashied Omar had said that the Prophet Muhammad would have responded to the provocation of the video with “resolute patience”.
That was well said. And that should be the message which not only Zuma but mainstream Muslims and other moderate voices everywhere shout ever more loudly from the rooftops as the wave of rage against the video continues to wash across the Muslim world.
That wave will no doubt acquire new momentum from the publication of offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the French journal Charlie Hebdo. The French government is shutting down embassies and schools across much of the Muslim world to protect its citizens against angry mobs.