An open letter from Gert Grobler: Stop unprovoked accusations and work together to defeat shared enemies

Gert Grobler is the former Ambassador and acting Deputy Director General for the Americas and Europe of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa.

Covid-19 is a natural disaster that happens beyond anyone’s prediction, and it has become a great threat to the global economy and life safety of people of all nations, yet it’s also a shared enemy confronting everyone of us, which requires the joint efforts of all human beings, regardless of nationality and race.

However, facing the fast and wide spread of the virus, what politicians from certain European and American countries are thinking is nothing about how to fight the pandemic together but a colonial thinking that originated nearly one hundred years ago, accusing other countries unjustly and politicizing the pandemic by force.

This is not only unfair, but also irresponsible. Some politicians, in their efforts to shirk their own responsibilities, even tried to shift the blame to others and threatened the WHO who is leading the global fight against the virus. Such crazy actions will only worsen the situation of global anti-epidemic work. We accuse such actions as shifting blames to other governments and WHO without investigation .

At this critical point of time, we must give priority to stopping those groundless accusations! Stop those acts of politicizing and racializing viruses serving shirking responsibilities!

Mankind has suffered a lot from the differentiation of different races. Therefore, the governments of European, Asian, American, African, and Oceanian countries should unite as one, strengthen multilateral cooperation in the fight against the epidemics, share the combating epidemic experience so as to defeat the devil together! And finally build a safe and sound survival and development environment for our offspring.”