In its maiden vote on the United Nations (UN) Security Council, SA came out against a resolution calling on the Burmese military junta to ease repression. Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu has called this a “betrayal of our own noble past”, and justifiably so.

Many human rights activists who supported the struggle against apartheid are mystified and outraged by SA’s siding with veto wielders Russia and China on the resolution. SA was the only country on the council to side with Russia and China on the matter. Even Indonesia, a fellow member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, decided it wanted to deliver a message and abstained.

In attempting to explain SA’s decision, Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad insists that SA is deeply concerned about human rights in Burma, but that this is not a matter for the security council. Burma, he says, is not a threat to international peace and security. The resolution would have compromised the UN’s efforts to bring about reform and the matter should be left to the UN Human Rights Council, he says.

It is difficult to justify these arguments and neither Pahad, nor our UN ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, have gone to sufficient lengths to substantiate their statements. By any measure, the situation in Burma is a threat to international peace and is thus a matter for security council action. While there is no precise definition of what constitutes “a threat to the peace”, a case-by-case evaluation of security council action provides a list of factors that clearly amounts to a threat to peace. Such an analysis was conducted for a report, titled Threat to the Peace: A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in Burma, which was commissioned by Tutu and former Czech president Vaclav Havel.

The report outlines various criteria applied to situations that have in the past been deemed a threat to the peace. These include: the overthrow of a democratically elected government; long-running and violent conflict with ethnic groups; widespread internal humanitarian and human rights violations; a substantial outflow of refugees; and other cross-border problems such as drug trafficking.

One or more of these factors was present for the passage of resolutions on Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Rwanda, Liberia, and Cambodia.

The report convincingly argues that all five factors are substantially present in the case of Burma. A military regime overthrew a democratically elected government in 1962 and in 1990 they disregarded the result of elections. National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has for the most part been under house arrest since 1990, and the regime has been trying to suppress ethnic groups seeking autonomy. Burma’s human rights violations can be compared in scale and brutality to those committed in other countries that have been condemned by the council. Not only does the country have more than a thousand political prisoners but, due to appalling conditions in Burma, more than a million refugees have fled. Finally, Burma presents a substantial problem as one of the world’s largest producers of heroin and other illicit drugs.

SA’s two other arguments also fall flat. Contrary to SA’s view that the resolution would undermine the UN’s work to bring about change, the resolution would have shown new resolve after years of effort. And while Burma should be reviewed by the UN Human Rights Council as SA suggests, it is debatable how useful this would ultimately be.

Considering the hollowness of SA’s arguments, the question is whether there was a political element to the decision, such as a deal with Russia and China. Or was it just an attempt to stymie the US? Whatever the case, the vote was a poor start to what many had hoped would be a worthwhile, even inspiring, tenure by SA on the council.