“May they live side by side.” South Africa asks countries to defend 2 states

“A South Africa urges the international community to support, with practical measures, the establishment of two States that live side by side in peace and security”, said the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of South Africa at the opening of the summit’s ministerial meetings of MNA at the Speke Convention Center in South Kampala.

Naledi Pandor added that the MNA has a historic duty of international solidarity to play a leading role in helping this conflict in the Middle East and said that this group of countries cannot ignore the situation of the Palestinian people.

“We are witnessing what South Africa considers to be a genocide of unprecedented proportions and that is why our country has referred the situation in Palestine to the International Court of Justice [TIJ]”, said the head of South African diplomacy about her country’s case against Israel.

For Pandor, it is important that the MNA defends the “independence of all oppressed peoples”, including that of Western Sahara.

The summit, whose objective is to improve members’ cooperation in the face of international crises, began last Monday with preparatory conferences for the meeting of heads of state and government, scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

Since the creation of the MNA in 1961, this is the sixth time that the 120 member states have met in an African country, after summits in Zambia (1970), Algeria (1973), Zimbabwe (1986), South Africa (1998) and Egypt (2009).

This time, the forum will take place at the Speke Convention Center, a bucolic hotel on the banks of Lake Victoria, with an auditorium with capacity for 4,400 people and 12 conference rooms.

In this southern corner of Kampala, leaders will discuss issues such as global security, the international fight against terrorism, migration, humanitarian crises and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, among others, under the theme “Deepening Cooperation for Wealth Global Sharing”, announced the Ugandan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jeje Odongo.

It should be noted that the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, will be the new rotating president of the MNA, a position held since 2019 by his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev.

Uganda will host leaders from around the world, although there is no official list of participants yet.

The MNA, one of the largest organizations of States in the world, is made up of 53 countries in Africa, 39 in Asia, 26 in Latin America and the Caribbean and two in Europe.

The summit comes at a time when, faced with international crises such as Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip or Russia’s conflict in Ukraine, the Global South demands a greater voice in international bodies, including the UN Security Council , for which they ask for restructuring.

The South African executive has historically been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has often associated this cause with its own fight against the segregationist apartheid regime (1948-1994).

Read Also: EU rejects involvement in genocide trial. Member States can