South Africa may become the next big promoter of terrorism and piracy

[martybegan]

The more we see of the current South African leadership and their proposed path, the more respect I have for Nelson Mandela and his attempts to bury the past in South Africa.

Now the new crop of ANC leadership wants to dig it up, and bury it's opponents.

When the late anti-Apartheid activist Nelson Mandela emerged from prison and became South Africa’s first black president, he carefully steered the country away from the radicalism of the African National Congress’s Marxist past and toward a policy which embraced moderation and responsibility in international affairs. Rather than precipitate conflict, he sought to mediate and resolve. South Africa gained widespread respect as a country embracing peace and looking toward the future rather than catalyzing the radical causes which have sown conflict around the continent and wider world.

Alas, Mandela was unable to make his changes permanent. After his five-year presidential term ended in 1999, and especially after his 2013 death, the leaders who followed Mandela—Thabo Mbeki, and especially Jacob Zuma and now Cyril Ramaphosa—have spent South Africa’s moral capital shilling for increasingly radical regimes, terrorist groups, and causes.

Seizing cargo ships when you rely on exports of minerals shipped on cargo ships is also not a great way to keep an economy running

South Africa’s new radicalism has now spilled over into piracy. Nearly a year ago, a Marshall Islands’-flagged cargo ship carrying phosphate made an unscheduled stop in Port Elizabeth. At the request of activists from the Polisario Front, an autocratic Marxist group which claims both to lead the self-styled Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and refuses to allow an U.N.-mandated referendum to determine what people living under its control really want, the South African government impounded the ship and its cargo. The Polisario claimed that phosphates mined in the Western Sahara should really belong to it. When the Polisario Front tried the same tactic in Panama, a Panamanian court rejected it outright.

But South African officials now favor terrorist groups and radical causes over international law. On March 19, it began to auction the cargo and transfer the proceeds to the Polisario Front, the same group which during the Cold War forcibly separated children from their parents in order to train them in Cuba and which continues to embezzle humanitarian aid. In effect, South Africa’s government and courts now signal they are willing to seize ships belonging to nationals of countries they dislike in order to seize cargo.