Washington-Pretoria Power Spasms: The Ambassador’s trauma
March 25, 2025
Heads continue to turn northwestwards, here in South Africa. Eyes and ears are carefully tuned not only to the latest X.com and TruthSocial dispatches from Donald Trump’s White House, Mario Rubio’s State Department and Elon Musk’s overstressed brain. They’ve proven to the Pretoria government in recent days, not only that the most basic of diplomatic conventions are in tatters – as this article demonstrates.
There are also lethal reductions in humanitarian, healthcare, research and climate aid by Musk’s and Rubio’s offices that cut especially deep here, as the next article will clarify. At the same time, heinous economic-policy marching orders are being given to South Africa’s Treasury from International Monetary Fund headquarters directly in between the White House and State Department. Neo-liberalism is now at its most brutal in the post-apartheid era, thanks to Washington-dictated budget cuts and tax hikes against ordinary people.
And another article will adjust the gaze from these haunted sites to a yet more deadly setting across the Potomac River: the Pentagon’s potential deployment of U.S. soldiers or more likely Blackwater-type mercenaries in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), neo-conservative style. In one scenario nervously discussed in Pretoria, this could unfold in coming weeks against nearly 2000 of Pretoria’s own so-called ‘peace-keeping’ troops, who are currently being held hostage by Rwandan-backed rebels at a border airport in the city of Goma. At stake: control over $24 trillion in underground minerals nearby.
As a result, South African politicos have just as bad a whiplash condition as witnessed in the capitals of Washington’s former allies: Ukraine, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland-Denmark and the European Union.
Actually, over the past week, this society has become much more attuned to Trumpism than probably anywhere else, since so much more appears to be at stake on terrains of geopolitics (especially Palestine’s rebooted genocide by Israel fueled by Trump’s renewed weapons supply), economics (especially finance and currency disputes), climate, public health and race relations – with South Africa apparently Washington’s bulls-eye.
It’s too early for any (even tentative) conclusions. Still, notwithstanding an upsurge of international, anti-imperialist solidarity outcries against Trump’s flagrant bullying of South Africa, it will become apparent that Pretoria’s most obsequious, subimperialist tendencies are exceptionally durable. Judging by power relations unveiled during Trump’s short presidency, these tendencies may well prevail by late November when South African President Ramaphosa hosts the G20 here in Johannesburg.
(For more on what to expect then, scroll to the bottom of this article, to join a University of Johannesburg G20-from-below webinar on Wednesday: “G20 tree-shakers and jam-makers: Outsiders and insiders debate elite legitimation.”)
Meantime, one man’s story hints at why this is such a fluid, difficult determination.
Ebrahim Rasool booted from Washington, for speaking truth to the powerless
On March 14, a Friday afternoon, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was informed that Pretoria’s Ambassador to Washington had risen early to give a webinar presentation to a handful of researchers in Johannesburg and a few dozen online, about the implications of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) for South Africa.
Within hours, the editor of the hard-rightwing ezine Breitbart, Joel Pollak, alerted Rubio and other readers about critical race theory being deployed against Trump. Since 2018, the U.S. President has made zany pronouncements about South African affirmative-action investment requirements, against (ineffectual) land reform aimed at redistribution to black victims of settler colonialism, and in solidarity with allegedly-genocided Afrikaner farmers. For more than a half-century, Trump has been accused of various forms of documented racism.
After reading Pollak’s report, a furious Rubio tweeted, “South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country. Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”
Rasool was ordered to scram, to leave town within a week. Meanwhile, Pollak has been explaining his own desires to become Trump’s Ambassador to his native South Africa.
Why? Rubio’s ‘race baiting’ charge was based on Rasool’s somewhat euphemistic observation:
“I think what Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, on those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home and, I think I’ve illustrated, abroad as well. So in terms of that, the supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA: the MAGA movement as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white… a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon. And so that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things. I think that there’s data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this [Mexico border] wall being built, the deportation movement.”
You can tell from the tone and vocabulary, that Rasool was speaking truth to the powerless.
In my own personal reading, Rasool’s term ‘incumbency’ refers to neo-liberal and neo-conservative fusions of Western economic and military power. This prevailing version of imperialism is being undermined – how deeply remains to be seen – by what reactionary-populist guru Steve Bannon terms Trump’s ‘flood the zone with shit’ distraction from, and destruction of, what had been foreign and domestic policy certainties in Washington and the world’s other capital cities.
For Rasool, “the power exercised is of the shock and awe variety. One of the South Africans in the inner circle of MAGA, Joel Pollak, speaks about the 200 executive orders that must be prosecuted within the first 100 days.” (Pollak himself wrote many of these up in his book, The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, with a foreward by Bannon.)
And the term ‘supremacist’ refers to much more than mere white-power politics – indeed, it reflects a streak of ‘paleo-conservatism’ or in Bannon’s words, ‘rightwing populist nationalism.’ Often considered a neo-fascist ideology, paleo-con characteristics include the isolationist, protectionist, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, transphobic, evangelical, Islamophobic, and climate-denialist orientations that have opened up vast rifts in societies across the world.
Rasool was correct to assess supremacism as part of an ideology, not merely a reflection of Trump’s racism. He explained upon his return, “We were analysing a political phenomenon. Not a personality, not a nation and not even a government. And so I stand by that.”
Ramaphosa’s immediate response was vapid: terming the expulsion ‘regrettable’ – while accepting Rubio’s authority to expel Rasool – thus blaming the victim: “The Presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter.”
Diplomatic indecencies
Decorum? In 2016, Rubio himself labeled Trump a lunatic, a con man, dangerous and erratic, and Trump’s Vice President JD Vance wrote that he was going “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a–hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
In any case, the practice of decorum in diplomatic conversation between Washington and Pretoria had already collapsed in 2023 when the Biden Administration’s Ambassador to South Africa, Reuben Brigety, claimed a Russian ship docked surreptitiously in a Cape Town naval base port in December 2022: “We are confident that weapons were loaded onto that vessel and I would bet my life on the accuracy of that assertion.” (The South African currency immediately fell, as a direct result, from Rand 18.6/$ to R19.2/$.)
After a South African foreign ministry demarché of the bumbling Brigety (an act meant to display mild-mannered displeasure), Ramaphosa appointed an official commission to consider his allegation. It concluded that the Lady R had merely loaded food onto the Lady R, and unloaded old AK47s for use by Pretoria’s army in Mozambique (defending TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil gas facilities against an Islamic insurgency).
Then Ramaphosa quashed nationalist pressures to expel Brigety, who ultimately never publicly came forward with proof. But nor did he commit suicide (thank goodness). Nor did Brigety retract his claim upon leaving Pretoria in January.
Brigety’s arrogant assuredness reminds of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who bet – and lost – more than one million Iraqi lives, after his 2003 allegation to the United Nations General Assembly that in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s possession of prolific Weapons of Mass Destruction justified the subsequent U.S.-UK invasion. Washington’s occupying troops never located those arms.
Trying to appease Trump, Ramaphosa boots Rasool under the bus, alongside Leila Khaled
South African reactions to Rasool’s firing – by Rubio – are worth mulling over because, as political economists Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros once put it, regarding the BRICS bloc, “there is a schizophrenia to all this, typical of subimperialism.”
The differences reveal what veteran Sunday Times columnist Barney Mthombothi concluded on March 23: “Rasool is collateral damage in ANC’s diplomatic debacle. Judging by Ramaphosa’s anodyne response, we’re either naïve or totally unprepared for this almighty brawl.”
It could become a brawl, or far worse, if the eastern DRC becomes the next theatre, as local military experts fear. On March 23, one of the main Sunday newspapers (City Press) headlined, “US interference could see South African troops in the DRC become M23 ‘hostages’” – a point worth returning to later given the vast mineral stocks that neo-cons and extractive industries covet.
Such antagonisms within the imperial-subimperial power structure range from the heights of global geopolitics and climate change management to the role of African minerals in the global value chain, to a African body’s ability to suppress HIV, and even a symbolic street renaming in Johannesburg.
The latter site of struggle is now vital because of celebrated freedom fighter Leila Khaled (80). Based in Jordan, she is best known as a revolutionary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1969-70 led two plane hijackings (with the loss of one life, her main comrade). Often compared to Che Guevara, she was admitted to hospital on March 16 after a stroke, and is now in a coma, on life-support.
On March 20, utterly insensitive to her condition, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya – a corporate PR specialist in service to many subimperial corporations – appealed to the ruling coalition in the Johannesburg council to reverse course on honoring Khaled’s long ties to South African liberation, which the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been attempting through a street name-change resolution since 2018. Ramaphosa is opposed, as Magwenya pronounced:
“We recognize the diplomatic sensitivities in renaming Sandton Drive, particularly with the United States of America. The purpose of the talks with the City of Johannesburg is to agree to a process for the national executive to manage the diplomatic tensions with the U.S. without enflaming the situation.”
The main reason for sensitivities is that two offices are situated on this short strip of road that cuts through the Johannesburg financial district: a U.S. State Department Consulate (the largest in Africa) and the Ichikowitz Family Foundation.
Within the ANC, at least one pro-Palestine leader of a far more populist persuasion than Ramaphosa, Nomvula Mokonyane (the party’s deputy secretary general), had previously announced, “We want the United States of America embassy (sic) to change their letterhead to Number 1 Leila Khaled Drive. We are sending a message that they cannot dominate us and tell us what to do. It must be in their face, it must be in their computers, in their letterheads.”
Predicted Pollak in a March 13 tweet, “Helpfully, the renaming would create another saving for the Department of Government Efficiency: close the consulate.” A renaming petition contest was won (77,694 to 34,335) by Leila Khaled Drive advocates. But Pollak threatened that if it goes ahead, “The consulate will be closed and not be reopened. It will not be move and go to another office. The United States will not do business with Johannesburg.”
The main occupant of the street’s other building of note, Ivor Ichikowitz – whose 1 Sandton Drive address has a lawn adorned with a giant corpse statue – might want to move, rather than accept a name change. His foundation openly supports the Israel Defense Forces by supplying its genocidaire soldiers with tefillin spiritual leather garb, to strengthen their resolve to fight.
Ichikowitz was once a major ANC funder – indeed the party’s leading donor in 2022-23 – and was once extremely close to Ramaphosa’s predecessors Jacob Zuma and Kgalema Motlanthe. But since early 2024, he has repeatedly condemned the ANC for its world-leading opposition to Israeli genocide, especially at the Hague International Court of Justice.
Ramaphosa’s top-down order against renaming Sandton Drive, notwithstanding Khaled’s medical condition, is infuriating to local pro-Palestine activists. The Sisulu Foundation for Social Justice insisted that
“renaming the street to Leila Khaled can reinvigorate South Africa’s commitment to human rights, and recanting on this supreme course as some would wish us to do can only serve to defile the honour of Walter and Albertina Sisulu and their comrades.”
Magwenya also announced on March 20 that the welcoming party for Rasool three days later at the Cape Town airport should follow Ramaphosa’s request:
“We would like to urge all political formations that are planning various homecoming rallies for Ambassador Rasool to assist us and refrain from partaking or engaging in action that may seem inflammatory and may worsen the already volatile diplomatic relationship with the United States.”
That weak-kneed logic was overwhelming, according to a regional ANC leader, Mvusi Mdala, interviewed at the airport on March 23: “As the ANC we are going to respect the caution by the president to restrain ourselves not to make statements that are going to inflame our relationship with the United State of America.”
In contrast, a left civil society opposition leader, Rev. Allan Boesak, expressed disgust with Pretoria politicians, in contrast to the community’s
“welcoming of the way in which he [Rasool] expressed their feelings about what is happening in the United States today. They’re welcoming him in order to express their anger that the president, who is extraordinarily weak in these things, has thrown him under the bus so quickly and so easily.”
A wedge drives deeper into the South African polity
Rasool’s expulsion has split the country. Nationalist, anti-imperialist spirits are higher than I can recall since my 1990 immigration to Johannesburg (from my PhD research site: ultra-nationalist Zimbabwe). As an example, the fourth largest political party – the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – quickly labelled Trump the “grand wizard of a global Ku Klux Klan… The EFF calls on President Cyril Ramaphosa to not allow the country to be bullied by the orange clown occupying the White House.”
In a similar spirit, Boesak – chair of the Sisulu Foundation, who in 1983 led the founding of the United Democratic Front, the mass movement which played the central role in overthrowing apartheid from within South Africa – commented in a March 20 interview,
“There is a view that ambassadors should be extraordinarily careful because they are diplomats – they are not activists – and so they must be careful what they say and how they put their words, especially when they talk about the country that is their host. And so, that’s one point of view. There is another point of view that says, but you know, ambassadors are valuable people because in certain situations they develop experiences; they develop views and perspective that can be very important for the public – the broader public – to hear. So, they’re not just there to defend or explain their country’s policies; they are also there to explain to their country’s public what is really going on.”
Some in South Africa don’t want to know what is really going on. Rasool’s critics extend beyond white reactionaries frightened by his truth-telling; they also include a layer of the polite, petit-bourgeoisie (of various races) which obviously becomes very nervous when a South African diplomat pokes the bear and risks a painful backlash.
Especially one that is partly based on a decades-old personal feud.
Animus within a schizophrenia typical of South Africa
An important feature of the battle terrain that explains Rasool’s fate, stems from the man who tipped off Rubio: Breitbart’s Joel Pollak. Upon his return to Cape Town, Rasool blasted the “ex-South African anti-intellectual hatchet man hiding under a pseudonym” (while listening in on the March 14 webinar).
In The Agenda, Pollak writes: “I was born in South Africa in 1977, and my parents believed they had to emigrate because, as my father puts it, ‘Illegality had become the law’… My parents gave up lives of relative privilege in South Africa because they cherished the rule of law, which the United States exemplified. They knew that without justice, no society can survive. It was a lesson I learned again in South Africa” after returning to the University of Cape Town for a masters degree.
First a self-described “leftwing activist in college” (at Harvard), Pollak later became a conservative in South Africa when he served as speechwriter for the early-2000s neo-liberal opposition leader, Tony Leon. (The current opposition manager Helen Zille wants Leon to take Rasool’s place in Washington.)
At the same time, another political evolution occurred when Pollak’s mother-in-law, Rhoda Kadalie, a former anti-apartheid activist, became Christian-conservative. (Her grandfather, Clements Kadalie, was the heroic founder of modern trade unionism in Southern Africa, with the Industrial and Commercial Union in 1919.)
According to Pollak’s 2022 biography of Kadalie, “In 2005, Rhoda alleged that two senior journalists who worked for the Independent Newspapers group had been paid by failing Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool of the ANC.” Kadalie had ended her membership in the party six years earlier, and regularly lambasted Rasool for his many leadership failures and acts of petty corruption.
As early as 2001, Kadalie attacked the provincial governor: “You will go down in history as Coconut Rasool. That at least would appear to be an accurate description of what the inside of your skull looks like.” This followed an ironic op-ed by Rasool entitled, ‘We are the coconuts,’ an auto-critique of the mixed-race (‘coloured’) community’s shift to the right, to Leon’s Democratic Alliance.
On the one hand, Kadalie had by then also become elitist in policy orientation, criticizing Rasool for his failure to “fight the culture of non-payment” by “cutting off people’s electricity.” She would refer – when explaining AIDS in 2001 – to “the rampant, uncontrolled sexuality of South African men in general, and black men in particular,” which was a pernicious trope that contributed to then President Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism.
By 2008, she and her daughter Julia Bertelsmann (who married Pollak a year later) claimed, “There are no laws in Israel that discriminate against Arab citizens or separate them from Jews.”
Yet while “having shed ourselves of all our Marxist leanings” by 1985, even in 2001 Kadalie had considered herself a radical feminist. In an interview with the liberal Helen Suzman Foundation when asked, “Would a leftwing breakaway from the ANC be a positive development?” Kadalie’s answer:
“Of course it would be a positive development. Many who are disillusioned with the ANC are looking for a home on the left and such a party would be a home to many of those who still vote for the ANC for purely sentimental and nostalgic reasons.”
The ironies don’t end with her move to the right. Consider her mid-1990s pride at having promoted land restitution within Cape Town (the ‘District Six’ forced removals), using USAID resources:
“When I was appointed to the District Six land claims unit to deal with about 2,000 unprocessed claims I thought in my soul that this was the job for me. So many people I knew, including my own huge extended family, had been forcibly removed from District Six. I had a staff of nine all squashed into one temporary room and the promise of a budget of R1.7 million [then $450,000]. A year later not one cent of that budget was forthcoming. We had no money for pens, for the first six months we had no computers, and when they did arrive either had no software or were broken. I used my own contacts to get us some better office space and set about raising money. USAID helped me find the definitive computer program for land claims. Once we had that it meant we could simplify the process enormously. USAID also funded our community education project. We held many meetings on the Cape Flats explaining how to claim and recruiting more claimants. It was fantastic.”
To his credit, USAID’s role in land reform financing was mentioned favourably in Pollak’s biography of Kadalie. Given the admirable depth of that book, no matter its conservative undertone, there is little reason to doubt Pollak’s sneery comment to a local TV station about his potential Ambassadorship to Pretoria:
“If South Africa decides that they don’t want me, that’s fine. I would just offer one word of warning: anyone else the president is likely to select is going to be nastier than me. I think that I have a knowledge of South Africa, a background from South Africa, and a love of South Africa that I don’t know is widely shared among other possible candidates.”
(One final irony is that after Kadalie suffered domestic violence by her German husband, they divorced and he married the daughter of a man, Franklin Sonn, whom Nelson Mandela named as the first democratic South African ambassador to … Washington.)
According to Leon, Rasool’s critique of Trump – amplified in a way no one else but Pollak could – had created “not a hiccup in the relationship as President Cyril Ramaphosa characterized it, but a full-blown crisis. It’s the lowest point in U.S.-South Africa bilateral relations in recent or indeed living memory.”
Talk left, walk where?
Rasool was well aware of that low point, having had a torrid, miserable time trying to gain access to the Trump regime during his two-month stay in Washington. As he explained on his return,
“In all of the more than 20 meetings with Senators and Congress Members, in the weekly forums we addressed of Thinktanks and Business Associations, in the few meetings with the Administration, we were forced to discuss seriously how Afrikaners could be refugees in the USA, while ANC leaders are threatened with personal sanctions. We had to avoid arguing how there was a genocide in Israel…”
The tragic muting of ‘the megaphone’ of Palestine advocacy was something Rasool had already signaled last December, weeks before going to Washington. Nevertheless, in yet another reflection of out-of-touch U.S. politicos, the conservative South African commentator RW Johnson was pleased to draw BizNews readers’ attention to another attack angle:
“An organization called Middle East Forum – Islamist Watch claims credit for Rasool’s expulsion. The MEF director, Sam Westrop, wrote an extensive analysis of Rasool’s contacts with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and also his support for the Iranian regime in a December 2024 article for Focus on Western Islamism, as also his membership of the SAAR network in America, which has been investigated by the FBI for its links with international terrorism. This document was widely shared on Capitol Hill and was chiefly responsible for Rasool’s blacklisting by Republican staffers.”
Tellingly, Johnson doesn’t mention two well-known features of the MEF’s reputation: first, Westrop’s payment of £140,000 in libel damages in a British court case after alleging that the founder of the Islam Channel was guilty of terrorism; and, second, as described by the Georgetown University Bridge Initiative,
“The Middle East Forum is a right-wing anti-Islam think tank that spreads misinformation, creates ‘watchlists’ targeting academics, and advocates hawkish foreign policy. MEF provides funding to numerous anti-Muslim organizations and has provided legal services to a number of anti-Muslim activists including Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson.”
The schizophrenia of being in power in sub-imperial South Africa, pressured from the far right while nostalgically remembering ANC relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, can be debilitating. The poorly-muffled squeals of pain from ruling ANC politicians and officials, on the one hand, cannot drown out rising demands for dignity, on the other.
As a final illustration, ignoring appeals by Ramaphosa not to inflame matters, ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula (who often shoots from the hip) used a March 21 ANC publication to make a perfectly sound point about Trump-Musk-Rubio:
“We are under no illusion about the intentions of those who seek to bully us into submission with threats of unleashing economic mayhem on us because we dare forge ahead with actions aimed at unwinding the colonial and apartheid legacy to restore the dignity of our people. These are the authors of neo-colonialism and modern-day imperialism steeped in entrenching racial inequality and disdain for solidarity, equality and sustainability.”
The economic mayhem is partially true – USAID’s demise will be fatal for many – but also self-inflicted due to other dalliances still to be explored in the next article: especially between the ANC government and the International Monetary Fund as well as with corrupt extractive-industry corporations.
Hence confusion arises from a rapidly-modifying talk left, walk right dance within South Africa’s ruling party, one that also prevents some of the world’s great solidarity leaders – like Yanis Varoufakis, Medea Benjamin and more than 100 parliamentarians who make absolutely legitimate points in supporting Pretoria against Washington – from drilling to the next level of analysis.
That’s where the contradictions become severe, such as when in his March 14 webinar appearance, Rasool firmly cautioned against South Africans trying to advance global social progress in the one area that appears to cause Trump the most severe derangement:
“We must avoid actions that cock a snoot at the USA, such as de-dollarization. Not even China is speaking about de-dollarization anymore; Russia certainly isn’t. Not only is it performative, but it’s not practical or economically viable. Even mentioning it could invoke punitive immediate measures.”
For reasons like this, the Sisulu Foundation for Social Justice could confidently offer (on March 22) a critique of Pretoria’s tendency to retreat in the face of Washington bullying:
“The current approach, however, is so compromised that it’s difficult to distinguish between the agenda of the U.S. State Department and the South African Presidency; as it currently stands, it doesn’t look clear. South Africans did not elect their government to serve as a proxy for American interests in Africa.”
Next article: What more damage can Trump do, to African health, the climate and U.S.-South African trade – and might Ramaphosa’s 2025 hosting of the G20 make any difference?
+++
Join us!
Wednesday, March 26, 6:30 pm Delhi, 3pm South Africa, 1 pm London, 10 am Rio, 9am Eastern Standard, 6am Pacific: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82726180745
G20 tree-shakers and jam-makers:
Outsiders and insiders debate elite legitimation
PRESENTERS: Ana Garcia, Univ of Rio; Meshack Mbangula, Mining Communities United in Action; Haidar Eid, Gazan writer; Rev Allan Boesak; Trevor Ngwane, UJ; and other critical scholars and activists
The G20-from-below webinar considers strategies and tactics
The 2025 G20, hosted in the world’s most unequal city, offers a superb chance to understand global elites’ inability – and apparent lack of desire – to address the ‘polycrisis’. But clever local politicians adopted a fine-sounding ‘Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability’ theme that quite tellingly alienates the Trump regime. So 2025 may also witness pragmatic ‘G20 minus one’ insider framings – as was experienced in several 2017-20 summits to address climate crisis – and from outsiders, ‘BDS-USA!’.
Since Washington paleoconservatives are openly sabotaging multilateralism – not only climate but humanitarian aid, healthcare and pandemic management, trade rules, anti-corruption cooperation, etc – and since Trump inherits the G20 in 2026, it’s obvious that this imperialist-subimperialist alliance’s ‘centre cannot hold.’
So can anti-G20 tree-shakers shake loose any ripe fruit for insider jam-makers?
By AFP
March 23, 2025
Washington has accused expelled South African ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of hating President Donald Trump - Copyright AFP GIANLUIGI GUERCIA
The South African ambassador who was expelled from the United States in a row with President Donald Trump’s government arrived home on Sunday to a raucous welcome and struck a defiant tone over the decision.
Ties between Washington and Pretoria have slumped since Trump cut financial aid to South Africa over what he alleges is its anti-white land policy, its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other foreign policy clashes.
“It was not our choice to come home, but we come home with no regrets,” expelled ambassador Ebrahim Rasool said in Cape Town after he was ousted from Washington on accusations of being “a race-baiting politician” who hates Trump.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week Rasool was expelled after he described Trump’s Make America Great Again movement as a supremacist reaction to diversity in the United States.
Rasool was greeted with cheers and applause from hundreds of placard-waving supporters mostly clad in the green and yellow of the ruling African National Congress party at Cape Town International Airport.
“I want to say that we would have liked to come back with a welcome like this if we could report to you that we had turned away the lies of a white genocide in South Africa, but we did not succeed in America with that,” he said with a megaphone after a more than 30-hour trip via Qatari capital Doha.
The former anti-apartheid campaigner defended his remarks about Trump’s policies, saying he had intended to analyse a political phenomenon and warn South Africans that the “old way of doing business with the US was not going to work”.
“Our language must change not only to transactionality but also a language that can penetrate a group that has clearly identified a fringe white community in South Africa as their constituency,” he said.
“The fact that what I said caught the attention of the president and the secretary of state and moved them enough to declare me persona non grata says that the message went to the highest office,” he added.
– ‘Badge of dignity’ –
South Africa, the current president of the Group of 20 leading economies, this week said it considered improving its relationship with the United States a priority.
The United States is South Africa’s second-biggest trading partner and will take over the rotating G20 presidency next year.
Rasool is due to provide a report to President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday.
Pretoria should nonetheless not try to mend its ties with Washington “without sacrificing our values”, Rasool said.
“The declaration of persona non grata is meant to humiliate you, but when you return to a crowd like this… I will wear my persona non grata as a badge of dignity, our values and that we have done the right thing,” he said.
Trump froze US aid to South Africa in February, citing a law in the country that he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers.
Relations have also been strained by South Africa’s case against US ally Israel at the ICJ. Pretoria alleges Israel has committed genocidal acts against the Palestinians in its offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Trump further heightened tensions this month, saying South Africa’s farmers were welcome to settle in the United States after repeating his accusations — without providing evidence — that the government was “confiscating” land from white people.
Trump’s ally Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa under apartheid, has also accused Ramaphosa’s government of having “openly racist ownership laws”.
Ramaphosa said South Africa would seek to engage with the United States by dispatching envoys from the business community and government.
No comments:
Post a Comment