 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Chris Batlako, who is with the South African Peace Initiative and also a member of the Central Committee of the South African Congress Party. Chris, good to see you in India. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, bro. South Africa has now become the de facto, if not the leader of the African Union on the question, on various questions facing the African continent, particularly the kind of military issues that have come up. Libya, Mali, earlier Somalia, also called the war. How does South Africa see the African Union responding to the kind of challenges that is being faced today by various states in Africa? Thank you very much. Maybe where we should begin is to recognize that on this day, on the 18th of July, is the birthday of Nelson Mandela. He's turning 94 years. And we're making the point just to wish him a happy birthday, but also that he's become some kind of icon in the world, and in particular also on the African continent. And we think the issues that we're going to discuss will also have some relevance into what would be a Mandela legacy, what it would mean for the continent, and etc. But also over the last couple of days, South Africa has been honored by members of the African Union who elected and endorsed South Africa's candidate to lead the AU Commission when the former foreign minister and minister for health, Zaminizouma, was elected AU chair. We see this as a very important responsibility. And in particular, we think since South Africa has been playing some part in an endeavor to try and resolve some of the challenges and the crises that have manifested on the continent. South Africa has invested significantly towards what it calls the resolution of military crisis on the continent. And as a South African peace initiative, we welcome that. But it has a flip side to it. That's where the kind of some other unintended perspectives come in. When South Africa, and in this instance we're referring to democratic South Africa, when it seeks to engage on the continent, it might come across that it is a new hegemon on the continent. But we would rather want to say differently. Our argument is that South African capital, which has not significantly transformed itself, even 18 years into the democracy, is a beneficiary of the democratization process in South Africa. We think the South African government and the democratic forces in South Africa must, of course, they are doing that now, but they must entrench a particular value system even into the realm of business in South African capital, so to speak. So the South African capital, in whatever way it seeks to engage on the continent, does not come across as an agent of the reproduction of the apartheid values, the apartheid ways of doing things, etc. There's a potential for that to happen. And therefore, we had sponsored in the ANC policy conference recently a view that says the South African government must consider certain regulations and punitive actions that would streamline South African capital's engagement on the continent. So South Africa has two aspects to it. One, as you said, Mandela's legacy, fighting imperialism, a certain kind of very brutal colonialism that, of course, has existed in Africa, and also the fact that it is the most developed capital in Africa today, and therefore the risks of that capital also being like all capital predatory with respect to its neighbors and larger South African, the larger African continent. But coming specifically to, for instance, the African Union's response to what has happened, Libya, the African Union did not want a NATO intervention. In fact, it wanted a peaceful negotiations between the Benghazi-led groupings and Gaddafi. It went to mediate. It actually NATO turned it down and said, we are not going to allow this to happen. We'll take military action. When African Union wanted in Somali intervention from outside, that was not accepted. But they really said, no, that's not something for us to do anything about. Then again, we had to quote the above, France really intervening militarily and to, you know, intervene in what was an electoral dispute at that point. So the question is already military interventions from outside are taking place in Africa and seems to be increasing. More failed states are coming into being. So more and more Africa seems to become destroyed states, states which are failing on one hand, and these resources are being grabbed by outside forces. So what should be the role of African Union at this stage and what should be South Africa's role in this context? One, the transformation of the continental body from the Organization of African Unity, which we want to argue had a component of being progressive in it, because among other things, it argued for the cause for national liberation. Now in a post decolonized continent, there are new challenges that have emerged. But we want to argue, is the EU a better organization in the way in which it is structured now? So the role of the African Union is contradicted to the extent that it seeks to organize itself similarly to the European Union and the challenges between Europe and African continent are totally different. And speaking particularly about what the EU had wanted to do in respect of the Libyan crisis, we can make the point here that the EU led by South Africa and the president of South Africa had wanted to intervene and actually facilitate the continent's engagement around that matter. Seven days before the Security Council passed the resolution, the EU had actually, among other things, spelled out a framework of engagement and dialogue for all the political forces in the Libyan question. All of that was overlooked. And of course, we now understand that imperialism had actually wanted to do its own designs not only in Libya but in the whole of the North African region. And part of it related to the fact that imperialism was overtaken by developments in North Africa. It had not expected that. Referee to Arab Spring and Egypt. Yes, yes, Arab Spring and what happened in Tunisia and etc. So the role of the African Union is important in terms of the continent itself. And we want to argue that the leaders of the countries of Africa have to assert themselves more forcefully. And they should do that. But again, it has to do with the extent to which imperialism undermines the African continent and African countries through a whole range of interventions. If you look at West Africa, for example, the West African countries don't really have fiscal policy instruments in their hands. France basically determines foreign policy in that part of the land. They've got currency called the CFA. But for all intents and purposes, it's packed to France's fiscal policy measures. But what we have seen in the last period is the increase in the interim imperialist rivalries with the entry of more forcefully of China on the African continent and etc. The bogey of the dragon eating up the continent is now and again even... It's flat, it's flat. But France continues to hold on to West Africa using the fact that language, culture and all of these things are the connectors between much of West Africa, which is Franco-phone and France itself. Chris, do you think the fact that ex-colonial powers, still sub-colonial powers in effect, have not really owned up to the responsibility of colonialism in Africa, which has been particularly brutal. Right now, the KQ Mao Mao rebellion is being discussed in the courts in London. And similarly, Algeria has always raised the issue about the kind of atrocities the French committed against the Algerian liberation movement and against the Algerian people. Similarly, in other parts of Africa, do you think the fact that colonial powers have really never owned up to their record of really torture, killings, mass murders, that all this contributes to their ability still to legitimize their influence on the African continent? Really, I think that's the one reason that imperialism continues to engage the continent because one of the things that it seeks to do is to make us forget history. It wants to create the impression that in the post-colonial Africa, it has good intentions. However, good interpretation of history will give you a different set of understandings. For example, in the Libyan case, one cannot forget the fact that Italy, France and Britain had wanted to carve out that country into three different components. And in the post-Qaddafi era, that matter is coming up, including the using of the old colonial flag. And it's important to know these days. It's important to factor in the issue of the history of the people. The Americans, for example, had waged war in the Mediterranean region as early as the 1800s. In fact, one of their war songs is about the pay of Tripoli. There's a song they sing in the US military that raises the issue of Tripoli and when they ran over Tripoli. And guess what? Tripoli is the capital of Libya. So this is a part of this historical memory which the African continent seems to have lost. And it's still there in, if you go to the countries, of course, it's very much there amongst the people. But in public narrative, public discourse, this seems to have disappeared. So what do you think the peace on solidarity movements, different kinds of progressive movements can do in order to create that history back? If you take the situation in Mali today, where the Turaq and those extremists are basically trying to, among other things, reverse history by attacking very important historical sites such as Timbuktu. I don't have the words to describe it, but it's part of wanting to undermine that historical base. I mean, Timbuktu represents a particular civilization for the African continent. Very key, very important in a way in which it created the being that is the African person. And we must, among other things, bring these things into a set of issues upon which we can then mobilize people into an activism. And therefore, you would understand why our entry point, among other things, is peace and solidarity movement is to oppose imperialism. And our type of engagement in an anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly, anti-capitalist platform basically envelopes all of these aspects so that we create a real genuine mutual coexistence between the peoples across the world. Slavery, for example, meant that African peoples were taken to the Americas. So there is a connector between ourselves and the Americas. In the case of South Africa, one southern part of the African continent has a huge component of people taken from India and the Asian continent. And they became an appendage of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. So when the tricameral parliament was created so that they leave out African peoples, part of it was essentially to do that. So for us, it's all of these things together so that we are able to realize the humanism that is in us, but also expose imperialism's paradigm of this new endeavor to seek to appropriate humanitarianism. So when they use the term humanitarianism in their war propaganda, part of it is to basically appropriate and steal the term and take off all of the progressive elements that are contained in the conceptualization of the term itself, humanism and humanitarianism. So we must engage around those things, bring them back, make them have meaning, make them connect to ordinary peoples' lives and contribute to a sustainable, equal and more mutually reinforcing human existence. Last question, Chris. The fact that South Africa itself has taken to partially neoliberal economic policies, does it not weaken this kind of struggles? Well, and that's the reason why some of us are over and above members of the South African Peace Initiative, members of the South African Communist Party, so that we can make a contribution to ensure that South Africa's transition goes all the way to what many people in the world had anticipated it will be. It was unfortunate that in the first 12, 13 years of our democracy, experimentation with the neoliberal paradigm became very endemic, but we are undoing all of that and seeking now to place the country and its trajectory in such a way that it is able to contribute towards a progressive development. And that's why you see South Africa as part of BRICS in a very progressive way. And South Africa's outlook, both in the continent and internationally, is very different to when one former president was the president of the country who was hailed and loved by the West. Thank you, Chris. It has been a pleasure having you with us. I hope to see you again. Thank you very much.