South Africa: Country Condemns Burmese Rights Violations, Defense Minster Says

14 February 2007
allAfrica.com
By John Allen

Cape Town — The South African government, facing a storm of criticism for voting against a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning human rights violations in Burma, today protested that it did not condone the violations.

The country's defence minister, Mosiuoa Lekota, told a briefing of journalists and diplomats in Cape Town: "Without any hesitation and without batting an eyelid, South Africa condemns totally and without reserve the abuse of human rights [and] the arrest of outstanding democrats in Myanmar (the name for Burma adopted by the ruling military junta)." Lekota is the most senior figure in the ruling African National Congress to speak out against human rights violations in Burma since controversy was set off by the Security Council vote on January 12. He is the party's national chair and was a key internal leader of resistance to apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s.

However, Lekota repeated the defence of South Africa's vote offered by President Thabo Mbeki in a television interview on Sunday: that the Security Council was the wrong forum in which to debate the resolution. Lekota suggested that the resolution would more appropriately have been considered by the UN Human Rights Council. "The issue relates first and foremost to global governance," Lekota said. South Africa wanted more nations than those represented on the Security Council to have a say on Burma. "That is in the interests of the people of Myanmar", he said.

South Africa joined permanent Security Council members China and the Russian Federation in voting against the resolution. The United States and the United Kingdom tabled the resolution and were supported by seven other countries, but the vetoes exercised by China and Russia blocked its passage.

The 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, contrasted South Africa's vote with the position which anti-apartheid forces took when the country's human rights violations under apartheid were being debated at the UN. "It is a betrayal of our own noble past," said Tutu, a supporter of Burma's democratically-elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Peace Prize in 1991. "If others had used the arguments we are using today when we asked them for their support against apartheid, we might still have been unfree."

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