MEDIAVERKLARING DEUR PRAAG

National Liberation Movement heroes of South Africa and Zimbabwe

Photo: President Robert Mugabe meeting President Thabo Mbeki

at Harare airport, 18 March 2002 © Popperfoto/Reuters

Thabo Mbeki, 11 August, 2000: “In our situation, because of the colonialism of a special type, the victory of the national liberation struggle did not result in the departure of the foreign ruling class.”

Robert Mugabe, 12 December, 2000: “Let us bring it home to the commercial farmers of the CFU that they have declared war on the people of Zimbabwe who have every determination to win."

Comrades Mbeki and Mugabe share the same ideology. What else do they share?

Bilateral relations with Libya, Iraq and Cuba

Disregard for the Rule of Law and the Courts
.
Tichaona Jokonya, Zimbabwe’s permanent representative to the United Nations, 27 August, 2002: "The problem with the rule of law is that it respects property rights as opposed to the rights of the people. Countries have their national laws, which relate to the needs of the people."

Gilingwe Mayende, Director-General of Land Affairs, South Africa, 13 September 2002: "Property rights are protected by our constitution, but the constitution says these property rights must be balanced against the public interest and the nation's commitment to land reform.".

Disregard for national food security

Source: Central Statistcs Office, Harare

Source: Agri SA

Disregard for national health and human development

Source: World Bank

Source: United Nations Development Program

National Liberation: the next best thing to Stalinism?

In both America and Britain, there is currently a lively discussion after the publication of novelist Martin Amis’s book on Stalin, Koba the Dread. In it the author laments the way in which many Westerners ignored the killing of twenty million people by Stalin. Fortunately, Joseph Stalin is long dead. Or is he? A humanitarian and political catastrophe is brewing in Southern Africa manufactured by two ex-Soviet clients who have become self-styled “national liberationists” intent on the ethnic cleansing of minority groups in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has made rapid progress with his revolution or Chimurenga, the Shona word for Uhuru. He has been in power for an uninterrupted twenty years in which he has caused every social indicator to plummet (see above graphs). Very soon inhabitants of both Zimbabwe and South Africa will have a life expectancy last seen in the nineteenth century, i.e. below 40 years.

Thabo Mbeki’s maverick views on AIDS, which did not acknowledge the existence of HIV, retarded South Africa’s response to the disease. Having since abandoned these under international pressure, the effect on the country’s health may still be discerned in the radical decline in life expectancy (see graph above).

When asked whether they were going to implement the Pretoria Supreme Court order compelling government to provide nevirapine to HIV-positive pregnant women at state hospitals with the capacity to do so, the Ministers of Justice and Health in South Africa made the following statements:

Penuell Maduna, Minister of Justice South Africa , 25 March 2002: "This is the decision of just one court and purely on the basis of our legal system it is not binding on the rest of the country."

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Minister of Health, South Africa, 24 March 2002: "No, I think the courts and the judiciary must also listen to the authorities — regulatory authorities — both from this country and the United States."

Zimbabwe is a relatively small country, whereas South Africa represents the biggest and most vibrant economy on the continent. Its coming demise is therefore going to spell disaster, not only for the region, but for the continent as a whole. Currently, Mbeki supplies Mugabe with fuel and electricity on credit. Two South African companies, oil-from-coal concern SASOL and the electricity utility ESKOM, are under pressure by the SA government to liberally supply energy to Zimbabwe with little hope of any payment in return. SASOL, for one, has been writing off such debt, thereby shifting Mugabe’s energy bill onto its shareholders. As SASOL intends listing on the NYSE, potential US shareholders should perhaps take note that they will be subsidising a corrupt African dictator bleeding his country dry and practising ethnic cleansing against a minority white farming community.

The Libyan connection

Another supplier of oil to Zimbabwe has been Libya. Mugabe and Mbeki invariably turn up together at international gatherings where they harangue the West for its past sins under colonialism, and keep up good relations with the world’s rogue states known for their human-rights abuses and support for terrorism, such as Cuba, Libya, and Iraq. South Africa has also hinted at military cooperation with Libya, a country which currently finds itself under a United Nations arms embargo as a result of past support for terrorism, including the Lockerbie aeroplane bombing. After a press statement issued by Libya to this effect, South African government spokesman quickly massaged the statement to mention “exploratory talks” between the countries on military cooperation. In a “Joint Communiqué Between the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and South Africa”, issued on 14 June 2002, His Excellency Thabo Mbeki and Brother Colonel Muammar Al-Qaddafi, Leader of the Great Al-Fatah Revolution in the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya congratulated each other on the excellent relations which existed between the two countries, exemplified by “the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya South Africa Joint Bilateral Commission”.

During this communiqué, they also “cautioned against equating struggles for self-determination with terrorism”, and asked for a UN-led definition of “terrorism” which will presumably exclude bombing civilians in the name of national liberation.

The Iraqi connection

An Iraqi government delegation that included the Iraqi Deputy President attended South Africa’s first Presidential inauguration in Pretoria during 1994. During October 1995 an official Iraqi delegation attended the UNCTAD Conference in South Africa. During the visit, informal discussions were held with the desk.

The first official visit to Iraq by a South African delegation took place during November1996. The Iraqi Deputy President, Mr Taha Yassin Ramadan, Foreign Minister Mr Al-Sahaf as well as the Senior Under Secretary, Mr Nizar Hamdoun, attended the NAM Conference that was held in Durban during September 1998. During the conference, Deputy President Mbeki met with Mr Taha Yassin Ramadan. Diplomatic relations with Iraq were concluded during November 1998 when Deputy Minister Pahad led the first significant business delegation consisting of 30 South African companies to Iraq during November 1999.

SA Deputy Minister Pahad visited Iraq and the region in April 2001, and most recently Tariq Aziz reciprocated with a visit to South Africa, as reported by a Johannesburg newspaper on July 5th, 2002:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

JOHANNESBURG

Iraq, SA to improve ties

Posted Fri, 05 Jul 2002

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and President Thabo Mbeki on Thursday discussed the strengthening of bilateral relations between the two countries on a political and economic level.

The meeting took place at Mbeki's Pretoria residence.

Mbeki's spokesperson, Bheki Khumalo, said: "Iraq is interested in South Africa's industrial capacity including electricity, agriculture as well as railways."

Khumalo said a cooperation agreement was signed on Thursday between Eskom and the Iraqi Electricity Committee "which we hope will be able to ensure that South African companies will bid for projects in the energy sector (in Iraq)."

He said they also discussed the possible establishment of a joint ministerial committee between the two countries as well as the situation in the Middle East with specific reference to Palestine.

Aziz, heading a six-man delegation, arrived in South Africa on Wednesday from Baghdad, via Damascus and Khartoum and was given a red-carpet welcome at Waterkloof Air Base outside the capital.

The visit, at the invitation of Deputy President Jacob Zuma, will include trips to Durban and Cape Town.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Education - the Cuban connection

The immediate post-apartheid education system was dubbed "Curriculum 2005" and was similar to the abortive Goals 2000 in the USA. The educational method was one that Prof Peter McLaren (UCLA) refers to as "domesticated OBE - sit around and talk about your feelings".

This has recently been replaced by "Transformational OBE" - an uncompromising system of mind control where "transformation" is newspeak for "revolution". The theoretical basis is directly linked to Marxist revolutionaries and educators such as Paulo Freire, Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro, and schools in the USA that lean towards this approach complain that they receive ongoing attention from the FBI.

The new system imposes a severe interfaith multiculturalism intended to dismantle all relationships of authority in society except the hegemony of the state. The family is a prime target. Fresh legislation enforces the system also in private and home schools.

The implementation of this system was initiated by the retrenchment of more than hundred thousand teachers to create a shortage that is now being filled with training personnel recruited in Cuba. Several dozen Cuban instructors are already engaged, and reports indicate that the number will increase by hundreds in the near future.

Mbeki's double game

While Mbeki is garnering Western and American support for NEPAD (New Plan for African Development) he is strengthening ties with Iraq, Libya and Cuba. This duplicity extends to his policy in relation to his ethnic minorities, Afrikaners and the rest of the white, Asian and coloured (mixed-race) population.

The confiscation of farmland by Mugabe has received a lot of international attention, but attacks and murders on farms are actually far worse in South Africa, as can be seen from the above graphs. More than 1300 people have been killed on farms in South Africa so far, a figure which is in excess of civilian killings in the ex-Yougoslavia under Milosevic which prompted NATO intervention. More than 6 000 people have been injured in such attacks. Whereas the official explanation for such attacks has been to ascribe them to “crime”, government has been skilfully cultivating anti-white and anti-farmer sentiment. Teams from the so-called South African Human Rights Commission have been visiting farms and encouraging workers to lodge complaints against their employers. Under the South African Constitution, “hate speech” is forbidden. Upon receiving a complaint from Mr. Fanie van Heerden of Pretoria about the slogan “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, the South African Human Rights Commission declared it to be “freedom of speech” and closed its file:

SOUTH AFRICAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Entrance 1

Wilds View

Isle of Houghton Private Bag 2700

Boundary Road Houghton

Parktown, Johannesburg 2041

21 February 2001

Mr Fanie van Heerden , PO Box 2418, ROOIHUISKRAAL , 0154

Dear Mr van Heerden

RE: YOUR COMPLAINT

We refer to the complaint you lodged with us, and would like to apologise for the delayed response which was occasioned by a shortage of resources on our part.

Please note that the Commission has previously dealt with complaints concerning allegations of hate speech by some political activists and/or public figures. After conducting an investigation into these allegations, the Commission reached a finding that such statements as 'Kill the boer, Kill the farmer' fall within the category of the freedom of expression and do not constitute hate speech as described in section 16(2) of the Constitution.

Nonetheless the Commission believes that public figures have a responsibility to promote the spirit of the Constitution, tolerance between communities, human dignity and respect for the law. It will thus continue to monitor their conduct with the view to ensuring that their public utterances are of such that they do not unnecessarily offend sections of South African population.

Do not hesitate to contact the Commission should you have complaints of human rights violations in future. Under the circumstances we are closing our file.

M. C. Moodliar

Head: Legal Services

“Kill a Boer, kill a farmer”

As a National Liberation Movement, Mbeki’s party, the ANC, has long advocated violence against civilians. On 20 May 1983 it planted the notorious Church Street bomb in a busy Pretoria thoroughfare, which killed 19 people, and injured 219. After De Klerk’s hand-over of power to the ANC in 1994, it supposedly espoused Western-style democracy, just like Mugabe pledged to do in 1980.

However, official party ideology sees the transition to universal suffrage as the beginning of a “National Democratic Revolution” which must culminate in a crypto-communist “Social Revolution” which will remove the propertied classes from the scene.

Armed with an equally noble array of other slogans, such as “transformation”, “black empowerment”, “non-racialisation”, etc., Mbeki’s government has been putting pressure on business to hand over huge chunks of equity to so-called black-empowerment groups run by a nomenklatura closely connected to a nepotist administration. Robert Price from Oxford University notes the growing prominence of race in South African politics and is concerned about "the increased reliance on group rather than individually based notions of rights and rewards." (1997 'Race and Reconciliation in the New SA' Politics & Society 25(2): 149 -178.)

Recently, the Minister of Mines indicated that no new mining licenses or renewal of existing licenses will be granted in future unless the applicant has a “black empowerment” shareholding of 30%, after a leaked report that suggested 50% caused a melt-down in mining stocks. Whereas listed companies can use some of their muscle and international clout to fight off government advances, individual farmers living out in rural areas with their families and workers are easy game for intimidation, violent attacks and, of course, murder and ethnic cleansing.

The genocidal slogan “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” has been chanted at more than one ANC meeting, especially when ANC Youth League leader, Peter Mokaba, was still alive. At the latter’s funeral on 15 June 2002 after he had succumbed to what was presumed to be AIDS (but hotly denied by party members), a crowd of party youth chanted the words “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” in front of Mbeki and just about his entire cabinet, an incident which was later relayed on television. When consternation broke out among farmers and the rest of the Afrikaans-speaking community, it took Mbeki four days to grudingly admit that Boers, Afrikaners and farmers “were Africans and welcome to stay in South Africa.” Mugabe as it happens, has the same reassuring message to white Zimbabwean farmers after every farm attack.

This was all the more unconvincing in the light of Mbeki’s famous statement that “in our situation, because of the colonialism of a special type, the victory of the national liberation struggle did not result in the departure of the foreign ruling class.”

In short, Mbeki considers Boers, Afrikaners and other whites who have lived in South Africa for 350 years, sometimes in areas where there was no black settlement of any kind, as “members of a foreign ruling class.”

Language discrimination

The new South African constitution, adopted in 1996, provides for an unwieldy eleven official languages. During the time of the negotiations, the ANC was in favour of only one language, English, which would exclude South Africa’s other major language, Afrikaans. The eleven-language policy was therefore seen as compromise.

Since taking power, the ANC has simply ignored the South African constitution, and imposed its original wish for a unilingual country. The country has only 3 million mother-tongue speakers of English, out of a total population of 42 million. However, even Parliament has only English signs, and apart from odd snippets in other languages printed on coins for example, one would be hard pressed to see official evidence of any other language. As the Kenyan scholar, Ali Mazrui, has remarked, “With the end of political apartheid in South Africa, the English language has made the clearest gains. Although South Africa has declared eleven official languages (theoretically reducing English to one-eleventh of the official status), in reality the new policy demotes Afrikaans – the historic rival to English in South Africa.” (The Power of Babel – language and governance in the African experience, 1998, p. 205)

Wherever possible, the Mbeki government has been waging a campaign against Afrikaans. Its zealous Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, has on more than one occasion threatened Afrikaans-language schools and universities, forcing them to adopt English as a medium of instruction in technical subjects like medicine and engineering, for example. In a supreme act of ethnic domination and humiliation, he compelled the rural Afrikaans University of Potchefstroom to appoint the current President of the ANC Youth League, the organisation that first expounded the “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” philosophy, onto its Board. A bit like Eichmann being appointed to the Board of the University of Tel Aviv.

Elsewhere in the civil service, Afrikaans has been eradicated, in some instances by means of death threats to those who tried to continue employing the language in writing or in conversation at work.

The point about language discrimination is that it may function as an early-warning system against ethnic conflict. According to the American expert on ethnicity, Ted Gurr, “the language and lifeways of a minority in a society with a dominant, culturally distinct majority are inevitably under pressure. Of the 275 groups included in my survey [on minorities at risk], about half speak a common language different from that of the majority. […] For all these linguistically distinct groups, and especially those who speak a single language, its preservation is one of the keys to maintaining the collectivity’s viability as a social entity.” Other experts have contended that in over half of all ethnic conflicts some form of language issue lies at the root of the problem.

The hostility of the Mbeki government towards Afrikaans does not portend well for the future, and South Africa is entering a rather grave period in its history. Instead of democratising, the country is fast sinking into the quagmire of racial and linguistic polarisation, with the potential of further sliding into ethnic cleansing and even genocide.

Scenarios of what may lie beyond “National Liberation”:

Rwandan-style genocide

Over the past twenty years, the African continent has seen at least two major genocides in which more than a million people died in each instance. In 1985 under Mengistu Haile Miriam ethnic minorities in Ethiopia were herded into camps where they were either killed or died of starvation and disease.

The so-called “food gap” monitored by United Nations officials in Harare, Zimbabwe currently stands at 70% in that country. During the Ethiopian famine caused by Mengistu in the mid-eighties, the food gap stood at only 10% in that country. The outlook for Zimbabwe’s population is therefore severe. Many of the hungry will flee to South Africa, thereby adding to tensions in the latter country. According to the SA Minister of Home Affairs, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, there are already between 2 and 4 million illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe in South Africa, which means that up to 40% of Zimbabwean citizens may already be living South of their own border.

The most recent genocide in Africa started on 6 April 1994, when Rwanda’s Interhamwe consisting of Hutu extremists went on the rampage and killed more than a million members of the Tutsi minority, using appeals on the public radio to spur their followers on.

Mbeki and his party have effective control over South Africa’s sophisticated public television and radio network and is reinforcing that control by means of new legislation. Increasingly, the remaining white journalists at the South African Broadcast Corporation are only allowed to translate items written by black journalists sympathetic to the régime, and may not contribute any editorial content themselves. In terms of the ideology of “transformation”, or replacing whites with blacks, Mbeki has also taken control of the South African Defence Force command structure. The majority of soldiers now come from previous “liberation armies” trained by the former East Germany and Soviet Union, such as Umkhonto we Sizwe and APLA (Azanian People's Liberation Army), who are known for such military exploits as spraying members of a church congregation at prayer with AK-47 machine gun fire.

Using the public radio and TV, and backed up by its liberation army, on which billions of dollars in new armaments are being spent, any leader with less than benign intent could therefore easily incite the entire black population to go out and avenge themselves on their white counterparts, driving them off their land, out of their houses, where unsuspecting members of a white minority could face a nasty end, similar to those of the Tutsis.

The phrase “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” might be broadcast to millions of people, accompanied by suitable images of evil whites. Hordes of “war veterans” were thus incited by Mugabe to drive white land-owners off their property and to slaughter them.

Over the past few months, Mbeki has been issuing a steady stream of presidential pardons for convicted murderers, rapists and other violent offenders who are being released from prison. The release of over 600 such individuals in South Africa has fanned fears that these thugs might be used to play the same role as Zimbabwe’s “war veterans” to invade farms and other properties.

Ethnic cleansing of farmers

On the other hand, there may be “only” ethnic cleansing of Afrikaner farmers which may cause the deaths of millions of people through starvation as agriculture collapses, and famine ensues as is happening in Zimbabwe right now. In a recent statement South African Director General of Land Affairs declared that:

"We do have a target of redistributing 30% of all agricultural land in the country by the year 2015." Gilingwe Mayende, Business Report, 15 September 2002

The salient element here is that South Africa is classed as a semi-arid country in which only 8% of all land is arable, with a further 7% suitable for grazing. Farming in South Africa is dominated by ethnic Afrikaners who over the centuries have developed ways of utilising land that in other countries would be considered worthless, such as sheep farming in the Karoo which resembles the Arizona desert. Depending on which 30% of the land the Director General is talking about, this may result in driving all Afrikaners off the land, and stopping commercial farming altogether.

Currently, about 30 000 commercial farmers with a shrinking pool of labour as government has made it hazardous to employ farm labourers without giving them rights as tenants - sometimes in perpetuity - produce food for 46 million people in South Africa. Ethnically cleansing those 30 000 farmers will add many millions more to the 15 million people already facing starvation in Southern Africa, mostly as a result of Mugabe’s own policy of disrupting commercial farming by whites.

The South African Constitution guarantees property rights. However, as in Zimbabwe, this is is subject to other principles, such as “land reform”:

According to Gilingwe Mayende, Director-General of Land Affairs, South Africa, on 13 September 2002: "Property rights are protected by our constitution, but the constitution says these property rights must be balanced against the public interest and the nation's commitment to land reform."

Civil war

Mbeki is making a serious miscalculation in assuming easy domination and ultimate expulsion of minority groups, as achieved by Zimbabwe's Mugabe and Uganda's Idi Amin. Minority groups are far more numerous in South Africa, organised as well as armed with more than two million licensed small arms in the country. Current population numbers for the country are:

Presumably, non-black minorities will not indefinitely adopt a friendly attitude to being driven off the land and out of South Africa, as seems to be Mbeki’s intent. In Zimbabwe white farmers called each other on two-way radios and urged neighbours to “stay calm and not to provoke anyone”. This remarkable display of self-control did not prevent many from suffering a dreaded end, sadly.

Since Independence in 1980, almost 300 000 whites have left Zimbabwe for other countries, mainly South Africa, and only a few thousand are left after this latest bout of ethnic cleansing. A persecuted white in that country may still cross the border at Beit Bridge and arrive in a country with a functioning economy, fully-stocked supermarket shelves, fuel at the pump, etc. He may also still buy a ticket on the next available flight to England or Australia. Once ethnic cleansing starts in South Africa, and some people believe it has already started, there will be no way out as the two countries to the North, Zimbabwe and Namibia are controlled by anti-minority Presidents-for-life such as Mugabe and Nujoma who will not allow the quarry to escape through their countries.

Either South Africa's non-black minorities will accept having their assets confiscated without resistance like their Zimbabwean counterparts, or they will fight, thereby triggering a civil and racial war that may ultimately engulf the entire sub-continent as Nujoma and Mugabe may be itching to enter the fray. Current newspaper reports of so-called “right-wing plots”, discovery of arms caches and so on in South Africa are not indicative of the presence of neo-Nazi or ultra-nationalist ideology among Afrikaners or white farmers; rather such incidents point to defensive attempts to mobilise after years of farm murders and extreme violence experienced by rural communities, to which the Mbeki government has been turning a blind eye.

The result of a civil war in South Africa will probably be a partition along racial and cultural lines, in which those of African and European or other descent may still trade with each other, but will live in separate territorial enclaves. Again, Ted Gurr lists South Africa as one of the countries that is a "candidate for political fragmentation at the onset of the twenty-first century." (Peoples versus States, 2000, p. 82)

Can conflict be stopped?

Mbeki’s double game is becoming less and less credible. While courting international investors, making pro-democracy statements and propagating NEPAD, government spokesmen inside the country are clearly advocating “land reform”, a Mugabean euphemism for forcing productive commercial farmers off the land and replacing them with people whose interest in farming is, at best, academic. A recent article in the liberal South African Sunday Times focused on how available land held through the traditional communal system in the Eastern Cape was being tilled by aged black women only, with their children and grandchildren preferring to live in squatter camps on the outskirts of towns and cities, finding farming unattractive. Since the days of traditional subsistence farming in South Africa, the black population has grown from about 2 million to 32 million, making it impossible for everyone to “live off the land”. The massive migration to cities underscores this quite spectacularly.

The aggressive “land reform” moves currently planned for South Africa by Mbeki, as well as the continuation or escalation of farm murders – being a farmer in South Africa is already the most dangerous profession in the world – will engulf the country in a spiral of violence that will inevitably lead to one of the three outcomes: genocide, ethnic cleansing, civil war, or a combination of two or more of these.

Clearly, Mbeki, Mugabe and other radical Africanists must be stopped from bringing further catastrophe to Southern Africa. Fifteen million people are already facing starvation, and without South African infrastructure to channel aid to them, not only will they perish, but millions more will be placed at risk. More effective sanctions must be imposed on Zimbabwe to force Mugabe out, and South Africa must be threatened with sanctions as well if she continues her overt and covert support for his régime. Amnesty International’s campaign against Mugabe is therefore a worthy one to support.

Given the failure of a simple one-man-one-vote-system to address South Africa’s ethnic and racial tensions, which have steadily worsened under Mbeki, as well as his government’s disregard for property and language rights enshrined in the Constitution, the international community will have to press for a devolution of power to allay minority fears of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Under the triumvirate of ex-communists turned National Liberationists, Mbeki, Mugabe and Nujoma, Southern Africa is already courting disaster as the Zimbabwean economy collapses, famine takes hold and ethnic tension rises.

The writing is on the wall in Southern Africa. The world must act now to prevent another African tragedy that so many will mourn after the fact, as in Rwanda, Ethiopia and elsewhere.

This document has been issued by PRAAG. Address any enquiries by e-mail to inlig@praag.org.

Hierdie dokument is ook in Afrikaans beskikbaar. Stuur 'n epos aan inlig@praag.org of besoek ons webwerf by http://www.praag.org .