After a complaint by PRAAG, an Afrikaner NGO, the Commonwealth of Nations is to probe human rights violations currently being committed in South Africa against Afrikaners, foreigners and other minorities.
According to a response from the office of Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma, PRAAG’s complaint has been referred to the Human Rights Unit for further investigation.
Dr. Dan Roodt, director of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, has expressed his satisfaction that the Commonwealth responded within two to three weeks from the date of lodging the complaint. “Until now, we have found international organisations such as the UN and the International Criminal Court slow to react to South Africa’s growing human rights crisis. We have high hopes that the Commonwealth and Queen Elizabeth II will address our concerns as quickly as possible.”
South Africa is a founding member of the Commonwealth of Nations, regrouping 54 English-speaking states around the world. As a member of the Commonwealth it is bound by international human rights standards as well as the 2009 Affirmation of Commonwealth Values and Principles.
In its letter to the Commonwealth, PRAAG complained of the persecution, discrimination and extra-judicial killings taking place against Commonwealth subjects in South Africa, such as Malawians, Mozambicans and Zimbabweans. However, regarding Afrikaners, PRAAG averred that there was a “systemic violation of human rights”, including “racial discrimination in jobs, education and access to capital; language and cultural discrimination; murder, extra-judicial killings and ethnic persecution; rape of Afrikaner women and girls; displacement from traditional Afrikaner lands and farms; as well as the forcible transfer of children from the Afrikaner group to the South African group through anglicisation, indoctrination and assimilation”.
PRAAG is also concerned about “interference in traditional Afrikaner schools and educational practices so as to break them down and prevent the transmission of the Afrikaans language, culture and identity to the next generation, vandalism directed against Afrikaner heritage, museums, literature, arts and historic sites through neglect, lack of funding or willful destruction, as well as name changes of towns, streets and places to eradicate Afrikaners’ heritage and historical presence in South Africa”.
The Commonwealth has suggested that PRAAG should also raise these issues with the South African Human Rights Commission. But Dr. Dan Roodt is skeptical about the bona fides of the SAHRC. “In our previous dealings with the SAHRC we have encountered ethnic bias from that organisation. It is not taking Afrikaner complaints seriously. But for the record we will lodge the same complaint with the SAHRC so that there can be no doubt that it was aware of these human rights violations against foreigners, Afrikaners and other minorities,” he said.
The Commonwealth had previously taken steps against South Africa when it imposed sanctions against the country in 1986, upon the recommendation of Bishop Trevor Huddleston of the Anglican Church. Commonwealth sanctions eventually led to regime change in South Africa.
The Commonwealth had also suspended Zimbabwe for its human rights violations in 2002, after which the country withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2003.