JOHANNESBURG—Iranian warships docked in Cape Town harbor on April 1 in contravention of U.S. sanctions.
A week earlier, the dock hosted an ammunition-loaded Russian frigate. In February, China, Russia, and South Africa conducted war games in the Indian Ocean.
Most recently, from March 30 through April 2, a delegation of senior African National Congress (ANC) officials met in Moscow on a “working visit” at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, not long after South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration accused the International Criminal Court (ICC) of “double standards” for issuing a war crimes warrant to arrest the Russian president.
These are the latest moves by a South African government drawing ever closer to countries considered by Western nations and their allies to be “pariah states.”
South Africa’s minister of international relations, Naledi Pandor, said at a press conference in Pretoria, South Africa, that the choices “show South Africa has an independent foreign policy.”
We decide who to have friendly relations with; no external power will dictate that to us,” she said.
But professor Steven Friedman, a senior political analyst at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, told The Epoch Times: “This government doesn’t seem to understand that we can’t be friends with everyone. Or maybe it does, and it’s choosing its enemies. These are dangerous times, and we are finding ourselves on the wrong side of those times.”
In late March, the South African state-managed ports authority confirmed the arrival of the IRIS Dena and IRIS Markan. IRIS is the acronym for the Islamic Republic of Iran Ship.
“Basically, that’s the Iranian navy,” Institute for Security Studies maritime expert Timothy Walker told The Epoch Times.
Iran’s Fars News Agency, managed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an armed wing loyal to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, reported that the Dena was “equipped with anti-ship cruise missiles, torpedoes, and naval cannons.”
South Africa’s ports authority stated that the vessels had docked for “refuelling and replenishing supplies.”
“The notification of arrival received from the vessel agent was accompanied by a copy of diplomatic clearance approval by the department of international relations and cooperation,” the authority said in a statement.
The Iranian Embassy didn’t respond to questions from The Epoch Times for clarity about the mission of Tehran’s warships.
But a senior South African Defense Department official told The Epoch Times that “the Iranian ships are part of a flotilla that claims to be circumnavigating the world.”
“Apparently, these two ships are on their way to the Panama Canal. Don’t ask me why,” the official said.
Fars News Agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to Pretoria, Mehdi Aqa Jafari, as saying that “the flotilla’s travel aims to convey the Iranian nation’s message of peace and friendship to the peoples of South Africa and all the African countries.”
The news agency stated that Jafari had “hailed the strong presence of the Islamic Republic’s strategic Naval Fleet in the Atlantic Ocean and South Africa’s hosting of it, and said the flotilla’s mission would certainly play an important role in promoting global peace and stability and security of maritime connecting routes.”
The ambassador noted that the docking of Tehran’s warships “indicates the high level of relations between the two countries and will greatly help to further strengthen cooperation between both sides’ navies.”
In late January, the news agency quoted Second-in-Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy Rear Adm. Hamzeh Ali Kaviani as saying that the country’s 86th flotilla of warships—of which the Dena and Makran are part—“has raised the Iranian flag in the western waters of Latin America” and that Iranian navy flotillas “now also have a strong presence in the Northern tip of the Indian Ocean.”
In February, on the anniversary of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, the navies of China, Russia, and South Africa participated in a “joint training exercise” near the South African ports of Durban and Richards Bay.
The White House criticized the drills.
“The United States has concerns about any country ... exercising with Russia as Russia wages a brutal war against Ukraine,” a White House spokesperson said.
The docking of Iran’s warships in Cape Town, South Africa, drew an immediate response from the U.S. Embassy in the form of a diplomatic note sent to the International Relations Committee in the South African Parliament. It warned South Africa that “entities and individuals that provide support, including maritime services to designated entities, could be subject to sanctions risk under U.S. authorities.”
Pretoria declined to comment on the note.
“There is very good reason Iran is a pariah state: The continuing attempts at destabilisation of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, using the Sunni-Shia schism as their weapon. The attempt at production of a nuclear weapon, the oppression of its people, especially women, the terror tactics it carries out to international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the arrest of foreign nationals, on trumped up charges, for political leverage.”
As economists have pointed out, while China is South Africa’s single biggest trading partner, Pretoria does much more trade with Europe and the United States than with all other regions combined.
There are more than 600 American firms present in Africa’s second-largest and most industrialized nation, including giants such as General Motors and General Electric.
“All of this is now at risk because of the ANC’s sustained and purposeful mission to ally South Africa with an axis of evil,” said Darren Bergman, a South African member of Parliament and international relations spokesperson for chief opposition party the Democratic Alliance.
“What will the ANC do next? Invite North Korea to launch a rocket from South African soil?”
Bergman said South Africa is now “very close” to being sanctioned by the West.
“The ANC says its foreign policy is based on what’s best for South Africans. But how can alliances with pariah states, warmongers, and human rights violators be in the best interests of our citizens? We have the highest unemployment rate in the world, and here we are, driving investors away. It’s shameful, and it’s all based on the ANC’s selfishness and some sort of ‘anti-imperialist’ agenda. ... As if Russia and China are themselves not excellent examples of imperialism,” he said.
ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe told The Epoch Times: “The party’s stance is to be open and friendly with everyone. ... Just because we are friends with some does not mean we are enemies with others.”
Laura Rubidge, foreign policy researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said that if this was indeed the ANC’s true position, it was “naive.”
“I don’t think many sober-minded people will deny that South Africa, steered by the ANC, is moving away from the West,” she told The Epoch Times.
The South African government first raised ire when it refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, citing its “neutrality” and “nonalignment.”
“You can’t be nonaligned in matters such as this,” Friedman said. “You can’t allow ships from a brutal regime to dock in your harbors and expect [to] not be judged harshly, at the very least.”
In further defiance of the international community, the Ramaphosa government has invited Putin to attend the summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) bloc of countries to be hosted by South Africa in August.
The invitation was issued in spite of an ICC warrant compelling South Africa, as a signatory to the ICC charter, to arrest Putin on war crimes charges should he visit the country.
As a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in Italy in 1998, failure to enforce the arrest warrant would be a violation of international and domestic law.
In 2016, the ANC government allowed former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to leave South Africa despite an active ICC arrest warrant against him for war crimes in his country’s Darfur region.
In recent years, the ANC has called on the ICC to probe Israel for alleged war crimes against Palestinians. It also previously called for former U.S. President George W. Bush to be prosecuted for war crimes allegedly committed during the U.S. occupation of Iraq from 2003 until 2011.
The United States isn’t a signatory to the ICC charter.
“I have mentioned the issue of double standards of global affairs,” Pandor told reporters in late March. “There are many other countries that have been involved in wars, invasion of territory and killing people, arresting activists, and none of them have been called up by the ICC.
“If you are powerful and enjoy a particular status in the global community, you escape, and this does worry us because it dims the objective character of the ICC as an arbiter that is fair on all abusers of human rights and all infringements of humanitarian law.”
David Ikpo, advocacy officer for South Africa’s Center for Human Rights, told The Epoch Times that Pandor’s comments “rang true” but were “coming from the wrong direction.”
“It’s not reasonable to say, ‘We’re going to ignore war crimes and human rights violations committed by X because the ICC didn’t prosecute Y.’ Either you are a constitutional democracy that promotes human rights, or you are not,” he said.
Ikpo said the South African government was guilty of the “very same hypocrisy” that it often accuses the West of.
“It says it has created a society built on a foundation of human rights and freedom for all, laid during its struggle against apartheid. But its best friends are serial human rights abusers that oppress their people,” he said.
Ikpo said the ANC’s “kowtowing” to China, for example, began in 1996, when then-President Nelson Mandela’s administration “derecognized” Taiwan.
The ANC government also repeatedly denied entry visas to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who’s fighting for the territory’s independence from China.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Pretoria has also shifted closer to Moscow, which, in turn, is cultivating close relations with Beijing.
Both China and the former Soviet Union supported the ANC in its guerrilla war to overthrow apartheid, at a time when some Western governments, including the administration of President Ronald Reagan, were describing the ANC as “terrorists.”
The ANC has stated that it wouldn’t abandon “long-standing allies and friends” and wouldn’t forget those who had “chosen not to back” its “war against racism and colonial imperialism.”
The ANC officials’ visit to Moscow was at the invitation of Putin’s United Russia Party (URP). The interparty meeting was just the latest in a series of contacts between the ANC government and Russia since the war in Ukraine started.
In August 2022, South African Defense Minister Thandi Modise was a speaker at the Moscow Security Conference. There, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu described the invasion of Ukraine as the end of the “unipolar world order.”
A few months later, South Africa, Russia, and China held joint naval exercises. Then, in March, ANC parliamentary speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula and other senior party figures attended a conference in Moscow organized by Russia’s Duma, with the theme being “Russia–Africa in a Multipolar World.”
Mapisa-Nqakula told the Russian Parliament, “We will continue to lean on you, and you can rest assured that, as a country and as a people of South Africa, we will continue to support the people of Russia.”
Professor Dirk Kotze, political analyst at the University of Johannesburg, said the ANC seems to be “ignoring the fact that this isn’t the same Russia, the same friend, that supported its armed struggle.”
“I also can’t see what the URP and the ANC have in common, other than animosity towards the U.S. and Western Europe. The URP is conservative and has established relationships with right-wing political parties across Europe,” he said.
Kotze said the ANC appeared to no longer hold on to any specific ideologies or principles, describing it as a “fractured mess of opposing factions.”
“I am surprised though that the war in Ukraine has sparked the ANC into moving so much closer to Russia. One has to ask what it stands to gain by supporting Putin so openly. Maybe there’s something we don’t know about,” he said.
A Russia expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Professor Irina Filatova, said there was indeed one goal that the ANC and URP had in common, namely a “wish for the recalibration of the global order.”
“It’s clear from the language constantly used by South Africa’s international relations minister, when she refers to ‘bullies’ and the like, that she’s not talking about China or Russia,“ Filatova told The Epoch Times. ”It’s also clear who she’s referring to when she talks about being tired of the ‘same few great powers’ dominating world affairs.”
Filatova said the Putin regime’s “coziness” with the South African government was a “big feather in the Kremlin’s cap.”
“South Africa is the most developed country on the continent and carries great weight around the world. If there is indeed a new world order forming, it will be an important part of that,” she said.
The question now, according to Kotze, is how that part is potentially going to look.
“From where I’m standing right now, it’s not going to look good,” he said. “Certainly not to the traditional great powers.”
