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It looks as if we’re on a collision course with the new Obama administration over human rights interventions, writes former DA leader Tony Leon
BARACK Obama, the 44th president of the United States, provides a symbol of hope for a nation filled with fear, for an uncertain world battered by the worst economic crisis in 80 years — and faces an array of vexed international challenges.
Obama offers the opportunity for the US and the world to look for rights-based and multilateral solutions to the global crises. South Africa should be a willing and vigorous partner in the plan to reinvigorate a more just world order.
But our recent votes and voice in international forums, such as the UN , have placed us on a potential collision course with a more enlightened White House and put us in the company of the world’s rights-delinquent nations and authoritarian regimes.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that South Africa refused to support a declaration by the U N General Assembly calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. What we practise at home, in our Constitution, we contradict abroad for fear of offending some of the world’s most retrogressive and authoritarian countries.

Shortly before Christmas, South Africa’s foreign policy was again in the news in Washington — and again for all the wrong reasons.
Under the headline, “South Africa’s Crime”, the highly influential Washington Post decried our government’s enablement of Robert Mugabe’s “destruction of neighbouring Zimbabwe, at the cost of thousands of lives”.
What inflamed The Washington Post — a reliable barometer of liberal, Washington opinion, and required reading by all members of the new US administration — was South Africa’s continued refusal to pressure Robert Mugabe to step down as a first step in ending the humanitarian crisis that he has inflicted on his own country.
South Africa’s blocking last month of a US-British initiative to put Zimbabwe back on the UN Security Council agenda was widely portrayed as another instance of our temporising with tyranny .

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