As South Africa commemorates the last few days of Women’s Month, human rights activitists are asking the ANC-led government to explain why its international human-rights activism is so disproportionately focused on Israel, while women and children on the African continent continue to endure devastating violence, displacement and humanitarian suffering.
The deteriorating situation in South Sudan, and women’s rights abuses in the Middle East, demand far greater attention. The United Nations reported this month that 7.8 million people in South Sudan currently face acute food insecurity and 2.2 million children are acutely malnourished, while women and children face heightened risks of exploitation and abuse as humanitarian assistance is reduced.
Imram Thabang Makama, National Head of Africa Young Entrepreneurs South Africa argues that testimonies emerging from South Sudan should force South Africans to ask difficult questions about the consistency of their government’s foreign policy: “If human rights truly form the foundation of South Africa’s foreign policy, then those principles cannot change according to which country is accused. African women and children deserve the same urgency, international advocacy and moral concern that our government claims to champion elsewhere.”
Makama said South Africans should pay particular attention to testimony coming from people who have served within South Sudan’s own political institutions: “When former senior representatives are prepared to resign and publicly allege serious abuses against their own people, the international community has a responsibility to investigate those claims and demand accountability. We cannot look away simply because these victims do not fit the political narratives dominating international headlines.”
SAFI notes that South Africa has called for a ceasefire, dialogue and implementation of South Sudan’s Revitalised Peace Agreement. Yet Pretoria’s response stands in stark contrast to the extraordinary diplomatic, political and legal resources it has devoted to attacking Israel internationally.
“This disparity raises an unavoidable question during Women’s Month: where is the same political mobilisation when African women and children are the victims? The ANC government cannot credibly claim a principled, human-rights-based foreign policy if its outrage appears to depend on the identity of the country being condemned” adds Bafana Modise, National Spokesperson at SAFI.
South Sudan is sadly not an isolated example. Across the Middle East, women, human-rights defenders and political dissidents continue to face grave abuses: “We’ve done a lot of work with Druze and Alawite communities in Syria, and are deeply concerned by the disturbing pattern of violence being reported against women and girls since the fall of the Assad regime. We have heard directly from communities about women and girls being abducted and remaining missing, while reports of rape, sexual violence, forced marriage and threats that women will be taken as ‘spoils of war’ have created profound fear” shares Charmaine Hedding, President of the Shai Fund.
In Suwayda, community reporting provided to the Shai Fund speaks of hundreds of women and girls, including children, having been abducted. This violence does not only devastate individual victims; it terrorises entire communities, leaving women afraid to travel, work, study or move freely, while families desperately search for missing daughters, sisters and mothers.
Hedding adds that: “Five years after the fall of Kabul, we are also witnessing the devastating consequences of systematically excluding women and girls from society in Afghanistan. Girls are denied education beyond primary school, women are barred from universities, largely excluded from employment and public life, and face severe restrictions on their movement and independence. Having been involved in efforts to evacuate thousands of at-risk Afghans following the fall of Kabul, I have seen the human consequences of this repression. During International Women’s Month, we must remember the millions of women and girls whose freedoms, opportunities and futures are being stripped away, and ensure that their plight is neither forgotten nor normalised.”
Modise finds the ANC’s silence nothing short of shocking: “Why does the ANC government find seemingly endless diplomatic energy to condemn Israel, while women suffering repression, disappearance and violence elsewhere in our own region and across the Middle East receive a fraction of that political attention? Human rights cannot be selectively invoked according to political convenience. If South Africa claims to champion the rights of women internationally, that principle must apply equally in Tehran, Damascus, Baghdad, Sana’a, Juba and Suwayda”.
South Africa has repeatedly taken Israel, a democratic state confronting terrorism and continuing threats against its civilians and a global leader in integrating the LGBTQI+ community, to task on the world stage, while atrocities and humanitarian catastrophes across the Middle East, and much closer to home, receive considerably less support or political attention.
SAFI calls on the ANC to use its influence within the African Union, its relationship with South Sudan and its diplomatic platforms to demand the protection of women and children, with unhindered humanitarian access, and credible investigations into these human rights abuses, as and when they occur in Africa, and the Middle East.