In July last year, AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat controversially accredited the apartheid state, upsetting the continental organisation’s two-decade-long policy of boycotting the Israeli state and sparking protests from a number of member states led by South Africa and Algeria. African countries, which had for decades ostracised South Africa for its practice of apartheid against its Black majority and had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Palestinians in their fight against Israeli colonial oppression, publicly embracing an apartheid state to preserve dubious unity is clearly a step in the wrong direction. Even worse is the fact that it is not the first report to brand Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as apartheid. In fact, less than three months prior to the AU’s abrupt U-turn, Human Rights Watch, another venerable global human rights institution, had too concluded that Israel was guilty of apartheid. Excerpted: ‘The AU should not be legitimising an apartheid state’.

Source: Ethiopian News February 16, 2022 02:26 UTC