The British non profit organization Chatam House has published the transcript of a talk by Laurie Nathan of the University of Cape Town titled Explaining South Africa’s Position on Sudan and Darfur.
South Africa’s policy is explained in the transcript in some detail, including specific positions on African Union peacekeeping forces and some of the more byzantine aspects of the situation in Sudan. The author explains the South African policy sympathetically, but concludes that it is not working.
The transcript does not discuss China’s involvement with Sudan, but it outlines the thinking behind the resistance of many developing nations to apply pressure on Sudan. Some of the South African government’s positions, with a little rewording, would sound like Xinhua press releases.
Here are two excerpts from the transcript:
[This] article emphasises the anti-imperialist character of South Africa’s foreign policy, which colours and sometimes overrides the commitment to human rights and democracy. Those who are surprised by Pretoria’s apparent appeasement of dictatorial regimes fail to grasp the history and ideology of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). They mistakenly view South Africa as akin to West European countries because of its liberal constitution, democratic politics and urbane leadership. They ignore the ANC’s history as a liberation movement with a Marxist-Leninist orientation, backed by the Soviet Union, most at home in the Non-Aligned Movement, supportive of other liberation struggles and antagonistic towards Western powers that buttressed the apartheid regime. The anti-imperialist character of the ANC historically has little impact on South Africa’s domestic policies but is strongly evident in its foreign policy…
…[Another] explanatory factor is Pretoria’s conviction that the international community is much more likely to induce positive change in problematic regimes – like Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran and Sudan – through diplomatic engagement than through condemnation and coercive measures; coercion and isolation, it is felt, only heighten the regime’s intransigence. Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma sums up this perspective as follows: ‘Our own national experience has taught us the value of seeking negotiated solutions to problems, no matter how intractable they may at first seem, and of engaging all the relevant role players in a dialogue’. Dlamini-Zuma notes that this thinking greatly influenced South Africa’s votes in the UN Security Council in 2007.