Mind the U.N.-A.U. Gap

JOHANNESBURG — President Jacob Zuma of South Africa gave an unusual speech at the U.N. Security Council last week. In a plea for better relations between the United Nations and the African Union, he blamed the West for the weakness of the ties between the two organizations. Citing the intervention in Libya last spring, he accused NATO of running roughshod over the African Union’s preferences for how to prevent and resolve conflicts in Africa.

It was a remarkable address for being clear and largely correct. But it failed to acknowledge the African Union’s and South Africa’s own shortcomings. Zuma’s handling of his country’s foreign policy has also undermined those relations, as well as the African Union’s effectiveness.

Zuma argued last week that NATO forces had “largely abused” Resolution 1973 — the Security Council’s decision last March to sanction a no-fly zone over Libya at the height of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s crackdown — and instead had favored bombing the country. Even when Zuma criticized the African Union for failing, in the first instance, to tackle a geopolitical challenge in its own backyard, he qualified the point by suggesting that the West’s continued “interference in Africa” contributes to “the hesitance of [African] countries to take whatever decisions are needed [for] the A.U. to function.” The implication was that somehow the West is partly to blame for the African Union’s shortcomings.

Zuma’s analysis sweeps under the carpet uncomfortable truths about South Africa’s, and Africa’s, foreign policy weaknesses. For one thing, South Africa voted in favor of Resolution 1973 knowing that the decision allowed NATO to use “all means necessary” to protect Libyan civilians. South Africa’s team at U.N. headquarters in New York made clear to Pretoria that aerial bombings might ensue, but Zuma nonetheless gave the green light.

Zuma’s criticism that such interventions by the West undermine the African Union is bizarre. The organization is weak not because the West’s clout undercuts it but because its more powerful members, like Nigeria and South Africa, don’t contribute to it enough. The African Union had no peacekeeping forces on hand to pick up the Libya job from NATO — much less intervene in the first place. A more honest self-assessment by Zuma would have identified how the organization is hamstrung by its own foibles. It might also have conceded that given the African Union’s weaknesses, NATO’s intervention in Libya was necessary.

And a more honest self-assessment of South Africa’s forays into international affairs would have identified its ambiguous performance as a self-professed champion of Africa’s interests. South Africa still punts the narrative of “African solutions to African problems,” a phrase that became popular on the continent after the West failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Pretoria wanted an A.U. plan for Libya not because it is anti-West but because it is for African self-sufficiency. That was a fine objective, only South Africa mangled its execution.

The A.U. plan last spring was to send a delegation to broker a compromise between Qaddafi and his opposition and set up an interim governing structure while a new constitution was negotiated. By May, A.U. diplomats had succeeded in convincing Qaddafi to sit out any new regime in liberated Libya — a fact little known in the West — but they failed to implement the roadmap fully. Their very decent proposal was lost to South Africa’s communication failures and poor public diplomacy.

Zuma never made clear, for example, that he saw no role for Qaddafi in a democratizing Libya, which left some foreign diplomats to assume that he still backed the man. And he never articulated what African solution he proposed for this African problem, creating the impression that South Africa simply was being anti-West or, worse, contrarian or incoherent.

South Africa needs to communicate its foreign policy thinking more effectively. It also needs to stop blaming others for the African Union’s ineptitude. Turning the African Union around is Africa’s problem, not the United Nations’ or the West’s.