The South African government recently trapped thousands of people underground in an old gold mine. After the mine was decommissioned from regular use, poor people with no means of earning a living began sneaking in to extract minerals that they could sell to meet their basic needs. To put an end to this, the government decided to secure the entrances and stop the flow of supplies, forbidding even family members from bringing food and water to their loved ones.
As reported by CBS News, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, the government official in charge, said: “We will not send help to criminals. We are not sending help. We will smoke them out. They are not to be helped but persecuted. We didn’t send them there, and they didn’t go down there for the good intentions of the country, so we cannot help them. When they come out, we will arrest them.”
Of course, many will likely never come out. According to that same news report, volunteers who have helped bring some of the weakened miners to the surface have also carried up letters from those still underground saying they simply don’t have the strength to exit from below. They have also found decomposing bodies in the mine.
The South African Human Rights Commission released a statement criticizing the government for violating the basic right to life of those holed up in the mine. That’s in addition to violating their right to dignified treatment and due process of law after declaring them criminals without even a trial.
South Africa’s regard for the human rights of its own citizens stands in stark contrast to its concern for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Since last December and with tremendous fanfare, South Africa has led a legal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa submitted a petition in March demanding that the ICJ order the Jewish state to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza … by ensuring the provision of adequate and sufficient food, water, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation.”
According to South Africa, while desperately poor people who break the law by entering an old gold mine in an effort to survive can be starved and persecuted in their own country, the human rights of Gaza residents must be fulfilled. Israel, South Africa claims, is guilty of war crimes and genocide when Gaza civilians are not adequately cared for, and the necessity of fighting Hamas as it fires missiles from urban areas and hides hostages in tunnels can be no excuse.
In light of a recent report from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, this is not surprising. The report finds close connections between South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and Hamas, along with its main sponsor Iran. The report even alleges that Iran paid South Africa tens of millions of dollars to bring the ICJ case by covering South Africa’s legal expenses and paying off unrelated debts of the ANC. Iran’s purpose was to use South Africa—with its history of overcoming apartheid—as a more credible face for the international legal campaign against Israel than it and its other allies could be on their own.
Of course, this hypocrisy is nothing new. We are all prone to it on a personal level, and it is a hallmark of international relations. While South Africa’s treatment of the miners is condemnable, the reality is that no country has a sterling record on human rights.
The tragedy here is that by exploiting access to the ICJ and its low evidentiary requirement for the issuance of temporary orders, South Africa has managed to popularize a narrative that Israel’s human rights and humanitarian compliance are somehow much lower than those of other countries. South Africa strives to falsely make it seem as though the suffering caused by the war in the Gaza Strip is somehow much worse or more tragic than all other wars, or that Israel’s human-rights shortcomings are unusually severe.
As the South African government attempts to starve thousands of illegal miners shows, we live in a world in which human rights are constantly trampled. Israel has made significant efforts to protect civilians in Gaza. While one can debate, criticize and point out ways that Jerusalem could have done better, South Africa is hardly in a position to make such accusations. As thousands starve to death below ground at the behest of its government, Israel’s record on human rights may stand as much better than theirs.
