Neelam Rahim | neelam@radioislam.co.za

3-minute read
18 October 2023 | 17:47 CAT

Image: The New Arab

The South African Anti-Apartheid Conference Steering Committee (SAAACSC) announced today that it is planning an international Conference to launch a global Anti-Apartheid Movement against Israel’s Regime of Settler Colonialism and Apartheid. The conference is scheduled to be held in Gauteng, South Africa, from 10 – 12 May 2024, leading to the 76th commemoration of the Nakba on 15 May 2024.

The International Conference will be the first concrete step in this strategy towards launching a Global Anti-Apartheid Movement in support of the struggle of Palestinians against Israel’s Apartheid Regime.

In 2022, Palestinians joined the first Palestinian National Conference Against Apartheid. This gathering issued a Unified Anti-Apartheid Call, and the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Coordinating Committee (PAACC) was formed as a unifying coalition to coordinate with global partners towards ending Israeli Apartheid.

“The first response to this Call came from South Africa, where the South African Anti-Apartheid Steering Committee (SAAASC) was formed through a process of bringing together a broad spectrum of civil society,” said Roshan Dadoo, the coordinator of the South African BDS Coalition and spokesperson for the Pan-African Palestine Solidarity Network, a coalition of African civil society groups and activists from across Africa mobilising support for Palestine.

According to Dadoo, the conference’s key objective is to mobilise the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement to hold Israel accountable for its crime of Apartheid against the Palestinians and work to dismantle Israeli Apartheid from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Irrefutable evidence and unequivocal analysis from all quarters demonstrate that Israel is perpetrating the crime against humanity of Apartheid against Palestinians.

Under the current openly far-right Israeli government, the decades-long violence and settler-colonial oppression against Indigenous Palestinians are taking more brutal forms with greater impunity.

“The recognition of Apartheid as a crime against humanity and the meaningful global solidarity with the people’s struggle on the ground – particularly expressed in cutting links of state, corporate and institutional complicity in Apartheid – paved the way to freedom and democracy for the people in South Africa and their ongoing struggle to end economic inequalities. The dismantlement of Apartheid in South Africa is today a vital milestone in the global struggle against racism, discrimination and colonial oppression, but it remains “incomplete,” as Mandela said, without fully abolishing Apartheid everywhere around the world, starting in Palestine,” Dadoo stated.

Listen to the full interview on Your World Today with Mufti Yusuf Moosagie.