By Richard Baker
ANTI-APARTHEID veteran Ronnie Kasrils has called on President Joe Biden to correct America’s foreign policy “double standards.”
Speaking at the launch of Jeremy Corbyn’s Project for Peace and Justice, Kasrils highlighted the irony between “America, the leader of the free world” and “America, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
The South African was a key figure in the African National Congress during the time of vicious apartheid in his country.
“If Biden is to commit to democracy, his America must quit the double standards of previous administrations and apply the vision of a Franklin D. Roosevelt or Martin Luther King Jr. He needs to apply but significantly extent the New Deal project,” Kasrils said.
After President Donald Trump’s four-year presidential term expired on Wednesday, Kasrils warned of the need to now break away from the foreign policy tactics employed by Trump in his time in office.
He slammed the Trump Peace plan which sort “normalisation” between Israel and what Kasrils labeled the “utterly corrupt Arab fiefdoms” of UAE and Bahrain.
Kasrils said: “He (Biden) must commit to world peace, in recognition of the national and human rights of all peoples, including Palestinians and those of the West Sahara.”
He urged the new President to “uphold international law and the writ of the United Nations.”
America has “systematically ignored,” international treaties and norms argued the former Minister under Nelson Mandela.
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Kasrils also blasted previous US administrations for their “sanguine cool promotion of their military interventions, their neo-colonial coups, their punitive sanctions.”
“Venezuela, Cuba, so many in line in the name of that democracy”, he added.
Kasrils also highlighted the need to learn of the repercussions of colonial conquests in order to understand the challenges the world faces today.
“The challange is to know the world in order to change it
“To do that we must not ignore the consequences of colonial conquest which was the prelude to the rise of the capitalist era.
“The hangover from that colonial past exists, make no mistake, in power relations between peoples and nations, between global North and South. ”
Featured Image: Gage Skidmore @Flickr
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