Print Commentary By Ivor Ichikowitz - - Wednesday, April 5, 2023 OPINION: It has been just over one year since eastern Europe was plunged into one of the most intractable conflicts in recent times – and certainly the bloodiest since Nazi German Panzers engaged their
Russian T34s on the plains of Ukraine. The tragic anniversary should have been a point to pause and to reflect on what we have witnessed in the last 13 months; war crimes, children being orphaned, vital infrastructure obliterated and critically, the sowing of the seeds of a brand-new iteration of intergenerational hate. And that’s just in Eastern Europe. Alliances in the rest of the world have been recalibrated. We stand on the threshold of another Cold War, whose tentacles extend far beyond the boardrooms of
Moscow and the
bomb shelters of Kyiv. Perhaps contrary to popular belief, Africa has borne much of the brunt of these unintended consequences of war.
Ukraine is both the breadbasket of Europe – and as such, the supplier of as much as 60% of our continent’s grain – and, even more critically, the source of almost 80% of the fertilisers Africa so dearly needs to prepare our own ground so that we can feed ourselves.
Russia is also exerting massive influence behind the scenes in countries that feel an umbilical connection to the heirs of the once all-powerful Soviet Union that helped in the armed liberation of much of Africa. That pressure is matched by an equal clamour for support, tugging them in the opposite direction from those same states’ former colonial masters. On top of that is the demand by one of the greatest aid donors and trading partners of them all, the US, to get in line behind the West’s support of Ukraine. Once again, Africa is the proxy battlefield between East and West. It is an invidious position, just as it was during the Cold War - but this is going to get worse and far worse. As the
SNOW and the ice thaw on the great steppe, soon, the tank engines will be revving up to do battle in Eastern Europe. Far from any move to de-escalate the conflict, both sides are preparing for an all-out spring offensive. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has spent the winter successfully asking for more
MILITARY support from the West, winning vital donations of heavy armour and pleading now for high-technology fighter aircraft. On the other side of the impasse,
Vladimir Putin has been rattling his sabre, press-ganging recruits and threatening to unleash his brand new hypersonic super
missile, the Zircon, on both Ukraine and any one of her allies anywhere in the world. The conflict seems intractable, and bloodshed is inevitable. We have seen this before, too - during the previous Cold War, but it is also that Cold War which holds a possible solution to this Cold War: Africa, once again, holds the key. There are many who will scoff at the concept, but the truth is that peace can never be attained if it is just left to the devices of the arch-foes themselves – and their own goodwill. There has to be an interlocutor, an honest broker with the ear of both sides of the table who can bring the warring parties into the room and get them to sit down. We saw this in Africa in the late 1980s.
South Africa might have been a pariah state. Still, its defence force single-handedly kept the communist forces of Angola and Cuba, all supported by Russia, in check, assisted by the US-sponsored Unita, founded and led by Jonas Savimbi. Back within the apartheid regime, South Africa’s security apparatus kept the people penned in the townships while their leaders were exiled on Robben Island off Cape Town. Neither Russia nor the US had any interest in blinking first to end the conflict. Instead, it was left to the indefatigable efforts of a French-speaking businessman, one Jean-Yves Ollivier. At the time, Ollivier was a commodities trader who had worked in
China, the
Middle East and Africa, with a parallel interest as an unofficial diplomat. Fully supported by the erstwhile communist president of Congo Brazzaville Denis Sassou Nguesso, Ollivier brokered tentative talks between South Africa, Mozambique and Angola. This led to the massive and unprecedented prisoner exchange of 133 Fapla (Angolan army) and 50 PLAN (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia) PoWs held by the South African government as well as two European anti-apartheid activists in exchange for the South African special forces captain, Wynand du Toit, who had been captured by the Angolans. That exchange led to the signing of the Brazzaville Accord, as the frontline African states leveraged their relationships with the East and the West to get the Cubans to leave Angola and return home and for the South Africans to withdraw from Angola back to the then South West Africa (Namibia). Shortly afterwards, Namibia itself would become independent and then Nelson Mandela was released from a 27-year jail sentence. Nine years after that first tentative meeting, the one Ollivier had brokered, South Africans went to the polls for the time as a free and fully
Democratic nation – the last in Africa to shed the shackles of colonialism. The world could not believe it. Many still can’t almost 30 years later. It can be done. The greatest lesson from it, though, should be that it must be done. The hurt and the grief of a year of implacable violence and vicious war are impossible to reconcile if it is left to the combatants themselves or to those with a vested reason to back them. Instead, it needs those who understand the true pain of war in all its many guises with all the disruption, chaos and ambiguity that accompany it to do their very best to try to end it. As Nelson Mandela himself reminds us when he addressed the 49th general session of the United Nations: “Our common humanity and the urgency of the knock on the door of this great edifice, demand that we must attempt even the impossible.” Let us never forget either that Africa holds 54 of the 193 votes in the general assembly too. African leaders have both the experience of war – for far longer than just a year – as well as the ears of the most senior individuals in the
Kremlin and Kyiv to break the impasse and attempt the impossible, laying the groundwork for the negotiations that must surely follow between all the major players themselves. And when this happens, as it most surely will, whether now or in five years’ time, it will be important to look to history once again to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The Treaty of Versailles left the defeated Germans resentful and a whole generation primed to be groomed to wreak an even worse global conflagration. Codesa, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, left the victors deflated and their heirs bitter. A lasting peace has to be sustainable - It has to be built on compromise, not fuelled by vengeance and run by retribution. But the most important of all, is that the engines of the tanks have to be switched off, the missiles packed away, and the assault rifles unloaded in Russia and Ukraine now before more people have to die. That must be the first objective. The question is, who will be the Jean-Yves Ollivier and the Denis Sassou Nguesso for this conflict? Will the world let them do what needs to be done? Ivor Ichikowitz is an African industrialist and philanthropist. He chairs the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, which conceptualised and funds the African Youth Survey. Copyright © 2023 The
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