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239 CHAPTER 12 South Africa–North African relations Revisitingthebridgingofacontinent Iqbal Jhazbhay INTRODUCTION Some eight years have made a radical difference in the context of relations between South Africa and the North African Maghreb. In an earlier analysis of South Africa–North African relations, published in 2004, I showed that the regional backdrop in the north of the continent was a stable one characterised by long-established autocratic regimes.1 These included the monarchy in Morocco, alienated from the rest of the African Union (AU) by contestation over the Western Sahara; an Egyptian regime under President Hosni Mubarak that was only nominally committed to Africa; the autocracies of Zine al-Abidine Ben-Ali in Tunisia; and the eccentric leadership of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi presiding over the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika made every possible effort to advance Algeria’s Africa and Arab credentials .2 Out of this constellation, South Africa’s closest relations were – and continue to be – with Algeria, a country that had undergone a similar colonial-settler experience and liberation struggle and one which had, as a result, been at the forefront of supporting the liberation struggle in South and Southern Africa. What most of these countries had in common in their ruling tendencies and Arab/Muslim affinity, from the Maghreb to the Levant in what is termed the MENA (the Middle East and North Africa), was the autocratic nature of their governments, governments that had experienced long-term stability under militarised and/or military-backed authoritarian security regimes. With democratic oppositional challengers and militant Islamists alike ruthlessly suppressed, the only challenges these regimes confronted post-9/11 were Al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgent groups advancing a global jihadist agenda. Post-9/11 jihadism only reinforced regime authoritarianism and repression throughout the MENA. What follows, in terms of a South 240 CHAPTER 12 African foreign policy review audit, is an updated analysis of the situation in 2011 as it pertains to relations with North Africa. The events of 2011 have introduced an entirely new landscape to the MENA expanse joining the Maghreb and the Levant. The jihadist challenge has been overtaken by a regional transnational democratic popular uprising beginning in Tunisia with the overthrow of Ben-Ali and followed by the fall of Mubarak in Egypt and the controversially NATO-backed ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. North Africa, therefore, has been in the vanguard of the so-called ‘Arab spring’ or ‘Arab awakening’ (sahwa/yaqza) alongside still unfolding upheavals underway, at the time of writing, along the Red Sea of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, across from Somalia and Eritrea, and in the Persian Gulf in Bahrain as well as in the MENA ‘northern tier’ in Syria. If, in 2004, the narrative of South Africa–North African relations was one of how a newly liberated, post-apartheid government under the African National Congress (ANC) was going to build bridges of connectivity between the north and the south of Africa, the narrative eight years later is how these bridges can be reconstructed on a new terrain of incipient post-autocratic regimes in transition to elected governments representing mixed readings of secular and religious claimants to representative democracy. This chapter will assess South African foreign policy under these radically different North African circumstances and attempt to examine how Pretoria has managed and is managing to adapt to this new Arab transnational oppositional dynamic in the north of the continent. This is happening , moreover, at a time when South Africa itself is under a different – its third – post-apartheid administration, that of President Jacob Zuma. For purposes of continuity, it will be necessary to summarise what has transpired under the three presidencies as this pertains to foreign policy generally and to relations with North Africa in particular. To a large extent it entails revisiting the pattern of relations that prevailed and how these relations are changing under the rapidly unfolding panorama of the Arab awakening as South Africa – as do governments elsewhere, the world over – attempts to readjust policies to the new realities. This includes revisiting the ‘Cape to Cairo’ dimension of reconstructing bridges already built but taking on new meanings through an accelerating pace of interregional economic integration as the link between Africa south of the Zambezi and the Limpopo and the North-Northeast African Nile (Comesa-EAC-SADC).3 This terrain is being further reshaped by peripheral but important events in the Horn of Africa that are central to the extent of the geopolitical -geoeconomic bridge...

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