Last week, on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, United Nations members voted on a motion condemning Russia for its aggression and calling on it to withdraw from its neighbour’s sovereign territory. Except for those who didn’t, such as our neighbours, Uganda, and South Africa.
In fact, during that same anniversary, South Africa was carrying out joint naval exercises with Russia, and China, and hosting Russian warships in its ports.
That is all the more horrible for the abandonment it represents of South Africa’s own history, culture and values, as well as its negation of the Geneva Convention, United Nations pledges, and international law.
For, as South Africa now aligns with the world’s most totalitarian states, it does so as the legacy of its former leader Nelson Mandela, who, for many of us, embodied the fight for freedom from oppression.
Indeed, it was Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, who, 26 years ago, produced the report ‘The Impact of War on Children’, which mobilised the world in preventing grave violations of children during the war.
Yet Russia is now committing those violations, killing, maiming and abducting children: even parading one huddled group in a Putin rally last week, before a stadium filled with more than 80,000 spectators, as ‘rescued’ from Mariupol.
Those children don’t appear to have been given the option to go be ‘rescued’ by their own families.
Indeed, reports over the last week confirm that a minimum of 6,000 Ukrainian children, some taken away in buses from waving parents purportedly to two-week holiday camps, are now in Russian ‘re-education’ camps, being ‘rescued’, and then adopted by new, Russian parents, with new Russian identities.
It seems to be just one more example of wartime behaviour that Europe had only ever previously seen from Adolf Hitler, with his forcible abduction and Germanisation of 200,000 ‘racially desirable’ Polish kids.
Ukrainian children are also now racially desirable, set against Russia’s plummeting Slav population.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Poland has this week launched a programme with the EU to track down these children and get them returned. But it’s hard to get back stolen children.
One Russian spokesperson described tearful Russians giving these children homes. Yet, if you were a child, removed from your Mum for a holiday never to return, what is the one thing you would want more than anything?
I wonder how many of those super-kind Russian families say: would you like us to try and get your Mum by phone, so you can speak to her?’
But, of course not, that’s not what you do with stolen children: as presumably South Africa and Uganda can now explain to us all in their new global value system.
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