It is said that it took 158 meetings, spanning two years, before parties to the Korean War could reach an armistice.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa and a few other leaders of African states jetted off to Ukraine and Russia on a peace mission this weekend, they were obviously not expecting an immediate ceasefire.
It is tempting to laugh off the entire trip — especially given all the unnecessary drama surrounding the ill-fated SAA plane carrying presidential bodyguards and journalists to Poland — as an exercise in futility.
DA leader John Steenhuisen is already dubbing it a “failed diplomatic PR stunt” and Ramaphosa’s “ego trip to Europe”.
Predictably, he is preparing his troops to fire off a series of parliamentary questions “to determine the full cost to the people of South Africa of this shambolic political stunt”.
Given that Wally Rhoode — the president’s chief watchman — is at the centre of the trip’s security arrangement disaster, expect the relevant ANC politicians to run helter-skelter as if the DA questions are as deadly as missiles raining on Kyiv.
But the fiasco at Warsaw Chopin Airport in Poland should not prompt us to dismiss out of hand what Ramaphosa and his peers are attempting to do.
In the long run, the peace mission could prove to have been one of the few important steps towards the resolution of a conflict that is, as Ramaphosa put it, “affecting Africa negatively” as it has interrupted the steady supply of fertiliser and grain to parts of the continent.
As we were reminded a few weeks ago at the conclusion of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, the two sides are at some stage likely to accept the need to negotiate. The contact group is made up of more than 10 countries that are providing military and financial support to Kyiv in its efforts to repel the Russian invasion.
Addressing journalists after the meeting, Gen Mark Milley, chair of the US chiefs of staff — said: “This war, militarily, isn’t going to be won by Russia,” before adding that Ukraine was also unlikely to capture “all the territory it lost to Moscow” in the near term.
“That means fighting is going to continue, it is going to be bloody, it is going to be hard. And at some point, both sides will either negotiate a settlement or they’ll come to a military conclusion.”
Though geographically far from the conflict, in some respects our vulnerable continent is feeling its knock-on effects more acutely than other regions.
A speedy and peaceful settlement, though not immediately likely, is in the continent’s interest and African leaders are justified in asking that the process starts now rather than later.
Ramaphosa seems to have been careful in his recruitment of leaders to join him on the trip. It would have been impossible to get all 53 AU member-countries involved, so he engaged a few.
South Africa, Senegal, Uganda and Congo-Brazzaville were among the countries that failed to endorse a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. Egypt, Zambia and Comoros, on the other hand, had no qualms doing so.
This would have given Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky some assurance that he wasn’t meeting Russian stooges who had embarked on the journey solely to help Moscow look less like the aggressor. But the composition of the delegation on its own is not enough. What really matters is the behaviour of the member countries of the peace mission in future, especially South Africa.
If Pretoria’s actions and pronouncements continue to cause doubt about its professed non-alignment, then the whole exercise will be discredited and will turn out to have been futile.
The seven African countries are not the first to call for talks between the two sides, and they will not be the last. At some stage, no matter how many delegations and years it takes, Russia and Ukraine will be forced to the negotiating table.
When that happens, the glory will probably go to superpowers such as the US and China, who would have acted as facilitators, but history will record that among those who sued for peace were seven African counties.
Such a contribution is not something to scoff at.
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