#Other countries : South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, criticized for his refusal to strongly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, attacked the UN Security Council on Thursday, which he considers “outdated” and not enough representative of emerging countries.
Despite the wave of international condemnations, especially from the West, South Africa has so far refrained from voting the two UN resolutions demanding that Russia immediately halt its military operations against Ukraine.
For the South African president, the Ukrainian conflict “has highlighted the inability of the UN Security Council to fulfill its mandate to maintain peace and security at the international level”.
Cyril Ramaphosa, who spoke to his country’s diplomats gathered in Pretoria, believes that the UN Council has so far mainly been instrumentalized by powerful nations to take catastrophic decisions.
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“The current composition of the UN Security Council is outdated and unrepresentative” of the world, and “disadvantages emerging countries”, he stressed.
He called for reform to “democratize” it, so that it can “really fulfill its mandate and emerge from the paralysis in which a few member states” have installed it.
“We must influence the unilateral actions of these countries to reshape the global political game”, he added, believing that it is “the whole of the UN peace and security architecture” which ” needs to be revised”.
The UN General Assembly is due to vote on Thursday on Russia’s possible suspension of its Human Rights Council, days after the discovery in the vicinity of kyiv of the bodies of dozens of Ukrainians that the Russian army is accused of having massacred.
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Ramaphosa said his country supports the principle that “no UN member state should forcibly attack the territorial integrity of other states”.
Its Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor, clarified that South Africa’s “non-aligned” position “does not mean that we turn a blind eye to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, which violated international law”. .
Ms Pandor criticized the international community’s response to the invasion, saying the conflict had “exposed its glaring double standards”.
“The unilateral imposition of crippling sanctions, and the enormous pressure put on multinationals to withdraw from Russia” are “unprecedented in international relations since the Second World War”, she added, underlining not having “seen such actions in connection with other conflicts” such as the Gaza Strip or Yemen.
She added that she was “stunned” by the behavior of some foreign diplomats stationed in Pretoria, who “attacked our positions in a way that suggests they are there to teach us” what to think about the topic.