Minister on South African Activities in Africa: briefing

This premium content has been made freely available

International Relations

15 February 2000
Share this page:

Meeting Summary

A summary of this committee meeting is not yet available.

Meeting report

FOREIGN AFFAIRS PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE
15 February 2000
AFRICAN BRIEFING BY MINISTER

SUMMARY
Today's session was a briefing by Minister Dlamini-Zuma on what South Africa was doing in Africa and the introduction of Mr Sipho Pityana as the newly-appointed Director General for Foreign Affairs.

MINUTES
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Dlamini-Zuma, made mention of Mr A. Nzo, her predecessor, who passed away recently, before giving a focusing on what South Africa is doing in Africa. The issues that she raised were:

• The Department was working on strengthening the bilateral cooperation agreements (dealing with tourism, political cooperation, trade, and investment) with African countries. They are also involved in multilateral relationships with certain countries.

• With regard to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Council of Ministers had met in Swaziland and undertaken to look into rationalisation, reform and evaluation of SADC work in order to advise the OAU Summit on the future of SADC.

• An agreement existed between the Lesotho government and its opposition that they should appoint an expert to look at an election time table.

• The OAU is preparing for two summits:
An EU summit at the beginning of April 2000 will focus on economic development. The annual OAU summit is in Togo in early July.

• The extraordinary OAU summit in Libya last year had resolved that:
a conference on peace and stability would occur in April/May 2000 in Abuja, Nigeria;
a team would be set up to focus on lobbying for debt relief in Africa;
rulers taking power through military means would not be allowed to attend conferences and they would be encouraged to "come back as democrats".

• Within SADC, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola were involved in conflict. South Africa's approach to these conflicts was that they should be resolved politically because it was impossible to solve them militarily. South Africa should remain neutral in such conflicts. With regard the Congo it tried to speak to all parties concerned in the hope of achieving lasting peace. She admitted the Angolan conflict was very complicated but she was encouraging Angola to find a political solution and not a military one as the longer the conflict continued, the more people would suffer.

• The conflict in Sudan was more than 30 years old and the south people were were fighting for self determination and did not want to live under Islamic rule.

• In Eritrea and Ethiopia, the OAU chairperson was the leader of the peace process. The Ethiopians still had questions to be clarified.

• The United Nations was deploying forces in Sierra Leone.

• There is a cooperation agreement between SA and Rwanda for its rehabilitation after the devastation caused by the Hutu genocide. Rwanda is not a strategic partner to SA. South Africa is merely providing aid to the tune of R6m in areas of agriculture, education, trade, tourism, and infrastructural development.

• Former president, Nelson Mandela, is now the facilitator of the peace process since the death of Julius Nyerere. She noted that this conflict was also not an easy one to resolve.

• Since the flood disaster in Mozambique, SA is assisting by providing helicopters. These were also supplied during the elections.

• In the Comores there is a secessionist group that wants to secede.

She concluded that without peace in Africa, it was going to be difficult to talk about an African Renaissance.

Discussion
Mr C Eglin (DP) requested that the Minister brief the members of parliament regularly on important events and meetings. He said MPs try to keep abreast but the Minister was "active at the coal face". He also complimented the Minister for the energetic role she had played in the Congo.

Ms F Mohomed ANC) asked what the essential problems were regarding the Congo agreement and what was happening with the Joint Military Committee?

The Minister said the problems with the Congo agreement were two-fold. Firstly the neighbours, Burundi and Uganda, had armed groups based in Congo thus creating a military conflict. The major problem foreseen was dealing with the armed groups that were not signatories to the agreement and not committed to peace.

Secondly there was no movement in terms of democratization in the Congo and the people were feeling despondent. She said initially there had been no agreement on who was going to be the facilitator. But now it had been agreed that it should be Mr Masire, the former president of Botswana. He should help to bring together politicians and the members of the civil society.

She said the Joint Military Committee (JMC) was headed by a Nigerian general and he had been slow in getting things done. The agreement gave a peace keeping role to the JMC and the UN. This agreement was still holding but there had been skirmishes involving certain groups.

Mr M Ramgobin (ANC) wanted to reinforce the government position on Zimbabwe. He said there had been no media hype when SA was buttressing Savimbi.

The Minister said it was important to stress that SA could not be an island of peace in a sea of poverty and conflict. Helping Zimbabwe was in South Africa's interest and it was part of an ongoing discussion with Zimbabwe.

A committee member wanted to know if SA had a development programme for the Ivory Coast? Secondly were SA troops prepared for peace-keeping roles?

The Minister replied that the Ivory Coast ruler had said he had no intention of staying in power. There were problems leading to the coup but he was prepared to move towards change. They were looking into the constitution and hoped that elections would occur by the end of October 2000.

She said SA had no experience of peace-keeping but SADC had a programme to train the member countries in peace-keeping. The programme had not been successful as yet.

The Minister was asked for her view on the SADC position regarding conflict prevention as opposed to conflict resolution.

The Minister said there were indicators of possible problems but SADC did not have the mechanism to intervene early. A country might take its own initiative. Everybody recognized the need for such a mechanism.

Another questioner asked what sort of signals were coming from Zimbabwe?

The minister said there were problems around the economy. There was more opposition to the ruling government but this was the nature of democracy. SA had been assured by Zimbabwe that the situation was not a major problem.

A committee member asked what the relationship was between the Portfolio Committee and the Department of Foreign Affairs.

The minister said there should be a close working relationship and the Portfolio Committee should be briefed on major issues. A programme should be set up to advance this close working relationship between the minister and the committee. However the Portfolio Committee should accept the Deputy Minister or Director General in the absence of the Minister. She hoped that the relationship would be mutually supportive. The Portfolio Committee consisted of different parties and differences with regard to foreign policy issues should not create confusion for people outside. She said the concerns raised by Mr Eglin should be looked at.

Mr Sipho Pityana, the new Director General, spoke briefly and said he was looking forward to working with the portfolio committee. He wanted to look at the programme for the year and for the committee to outline its programme.

Audio

No related

Documents

No related documents

Present

  • We don't have attendance info for this committee meeting

Download as PDF

You can download this page as a PDF using your browser's print functionality. Click on the "Print" button below and select the "PDF" option under destinations/printers.

See detailed instructions for your browser here.

Share this page: