@Rob_Smith is a retired diplomat with experience in leadership and international affairs. He’s here on DMC to answer all your questions about his work, from how to maintain relationships with other nations to navigating conflict. Leave your questions for him in the thread below.
As context, I chose a career as a South African diplomat following a year I spent in the USA as an AFS Exchange student in 1976/7. A 17 year-old thrown into the cauldron of American media and awakening American public interest in South Africa, following the 1976 Soweto uprising. I was, and have never been, a card-carrying member of a political party. The year living in the USA exposed me to the challenge of trying to articulate as objectively as possible what was happening in South Africa. Perhaps mission impossible for any 17 year-old. It did however, leave me with the desire to become a professional diplomat. A professional communicator and facilitator of inter-state and multilateral affairs. Acquiring the many skills required to be a credible adviser to the state one represents and country where one serves abroad. One of the oldest professions Man has known. How do states - not political parties - communicate with each other? Diplomats, preferably those who develop professional diplomatic careers (and not political appointees). And the greatest challenge of any professional diplomat is to advise the state he/she represents on how to avoid a conflict or how to end it. I hope this offers some background to my 13 years as a SA diplomat, pre and post 1994 South Africa.
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Very interesting! How was your feedback received by the pre and post democracy governments, and was there any difference? Especially when feedback wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
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I was heartened by both pre and post 1994 governments taking in my assessments of particular international matters. As an example, it is important to note that on my first diplomatic posting to Argentina I was a 3rd Secretary - the most junior of diplomats, yet I received hand-written notes from the President’s PA thanking me for my weekly reports on how the international media saw events in SA at the time, e.g. the State of Emergency, sanctions, civil unrest etc. A senior colleague at the Union Buildings had been forwarding my reports to the President’s office (PW Botha at the time) as an executive summary of SA’s diplomatic missions weekly assessments of international media coverage. No report I ever wrote sugar-coated the ferocity and outrage of how the international media wrote about events in SA. And President Botha, for whatever, reason, appreciated seeing weekly, to-the-point reports from a (relatively junior) SA diplomat working in a far-off SA diplomatic mission. That his PA encouraged me to continue keeping writing these weekly reports remains a mystery particularly as PW Botha was seen to prefer the state security institutions for advice and he had a reputation for not taking SA’s diplomatic advice easily. Another positive experience was the behind-the-scenes influence, a small group of SA diplomats played in convincing the Nationalist government to start the process of withdrawing SA troops from Namibia and move towards the first democratic elections in Namibia. This was not an easy task, especially as SA’s military establishment ran the conflict in Namibia and Angola and generally, didn’t have much respect for SA diplomats. In that period (1980’s), SA diplomats faced two significant challenges - convincing the SA government at the time to move towards ending the conflict and facilitating elections in Namibia whilst engaging in tough negotiations with the Angolan and Cuban military on how to end the conflict. This also involved interacting with the US State Department. It was a master-class in seeing the big picture unfold around the world (the end of the Cold War etc) and balancing competing internal and external interests, whilst pursuing what SA diplomats thought was prudent and right for the country. This aspect of SA’s contemporary history is not fully researched, documented nor appreciated. I believe that SA diplomacy and the success of negotiating with the country’s enemies at the time, gave confidence to influential members of the Nationalist government to commit to engaging in negotiations with the ANC. Post 1994, the new ANC government, embraced much of the institutional memory held by professional SA diplomats, e.g. when President Mandela labelled US aid to the new democratic government as “peanuts” his Cabinet and the responsible minister (Jay Naidoo) relied heavily SA diplomats on how to calm the situation with the outraged US ambassador and State Department. The essence of these examples, I believe is that a country’s international affairs are best served by a professional diplomatic corp, rather than political appointees who simply do not have the skills nor experience to navigate international affairs. They also do not enjoy the credibility that professional diplomats enjoy with host governments and multilateral organisations.
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Hi Rob: Why do you think, Joseph Koni (LRA) has never been captured for ICC prosecution given the alleged efforts of UDF and Americans to capture him? Is this a diplomatic way of saying we don’t want to catch him?
Without insight into the Koni matter, I wouldn’t want to offer any conjecture as to why he has not been captured. But what motivation would the UDF or USA have NOT to capture him?