JOHANNESBURG — President Obama’s tribute to Nelson Mandela Tuesday included a sharply critical swipe at the sort of “leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.”
More than a few of those leaders, of course — including Cuban President Raul Castro — were right there at the former South African leader’s memorial service to hear Obama’s slam.
The event itself drew attention to an awkward aspect of the relationship between the United States and the anti-apartheid movement Mandela led: some of his most fervent international supporters were leaders of countries sharply at odds with America.
While President Barack Obama got an invite to address the high-profile celebration of Mandela’s life Tuesday, the relatively short list of other leaders called to the stage to speak hardly read like a who’s who of America’s staunchest friends.
It included Castro — not one of the world’s great powers, but representing a government steadfast in its support for Mandela’s African National Congress.
Castro drew Obama into a handshake that grabbed the spotlight, given the long-chilly relationship between the United States and the island nation, under communist rule for more than five decades — and the Cuban government hailed the move as a hopeful and potentially significant sign, writing on its website: “May this… be the beginning of the end of the US aggressions?”
Also on the speakers list: China’s Li and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, both hailing from countries looking to challenge America’s superpower status.
During Mandela’s time as head the ANC, he also formed other alliances with controversial leaders who claimed to support national liberation movements, like Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi.
In his speech, Obama suggested there was a degree of cynicism and hypocrisy on the part of some who lined up with Mandela’s movement but stray far from its ideals.
“There are too many people who happily embrace Madiba’s legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality,” Obama said. “There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.”
But if some of Mandela’s backers waffled on their principles, the U.S. government was also hardly a loyal friend to the anti-apartheid movement. U.S. intelligence agencies cooperated with the South African government and there are persistent reports that the Central Intelligence Agency aided in Mandela’s arrest in the 1962.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pursued a policy of “constructive engagement” under which the United States continued to cooperate with the South African government, while prodding them to dismantle apartheid. Reagan administration officials cited the Soviet threat and the fear that South Africa might become a client state of Moscow if the then-government in Pretoria was ousted.
The fear was not an outlandish one. Mandela briefly joined the South African Communist Party in the 1950s, and remained close with its members in the decades that followed.
Obama may have steered clear of discussing U.S. support for the apartheid regime because acknowledging it would have offered a difficult choice: publicly repudiate those decisions and risk stirring up another round of Republican criticism branding him as “apologizer in chief,” or offer no opinion on them and appear to bless them. He chose instead simply to leave aside the role the U.S. government played in propping up apartheid by backing the South Africans.
Whether prominent Republicans would have jumped on Obama for expressing regret over U.S. decisions in the apartheid era is hard to predict. Such criticism would be in line with other critiques the GOP has offered, but several party leaders issued their own statements praising Obama. Republicans are also trying to rebrand the party to make it seem more welcoming to minorities — a drive which might counsel against an attack that could reflect poorly on Mandela.
Former President Bill Clinton, who was close to Mandela and attended Tuesday’s memorial service, acknowledged in an interview last week that Mandela’s experiences in the struggle for equal rights in South Africa sometimes led him to overlook misdeeds of some of his backers.
“Mandela developed a fanatic loyalty to the people who supported him and the ANC during the prison years,” Clinton said told American Urban Radio Network’s April Ryan. “Even if they themselves weren’t democrats — small ‘d’ — and they didn’t support democracy and they did bad things, they had enabled him and his supporters to do great things, and for black South Africans to be freed for the first time in 300 years and to actually cast ballots He believed he had to honor their sacrifice and service.”
“There’s something to be said for the kind of dogged loyalty he felt,’ the former president added. “He understood it was a political process that set him free and he was grateful for those that enabled him to survive until the politics took hold.”
And in some cases, the U.S. enmity for leaders Mandela embraced is not widely shared. While Cuba has been repeatedly criticized by numerous countries for human rights violations under both former president Fidel Castro and the new president, his brother Raul, no other country imposes the type of broad embargo on trade with Cuba observed by the United States.
“The world looks very different if you’re not American,” Clinton explained in the radio interview.
Mandela"s friends often at odds with U.S.
