Re: [A-List] South Africa: far right resurgence

["Patrick Bond" <bond.p@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A pretty trivial blip on the graph. Just back from lunch with Trevor Ngwane, who is Soweto's naughtiest activist. He chuckled about it, and was happy that the state security apparatus - which regularly locks him up for socialist activism - is clamping down on the bastards.

But like the muslim bombers in Cape Town a few years ago, and George W. Bush about 14 months ago, this kind of incident is a boon to the ruling party...

>>> michael.keaney@xxxxxx 11/07/02 02:32PM >>>
Is this the end of the rainbow for South Africa?
Bombings, arms caches, arrests... A far-right plot to overthrow the state is
sending shock waves through the 'new' South Africa. Are reports of
apartheid's death exaggerated? John Carlin investigates
The Independent, 07 November 2002

The headlines from South Africa have been sneaking their way, ever more
alarmingly, into our consciousness. The most recent - "White extremists set
off bombs in Soweto" - came only last week, but the trend had been
developing for months - "Ten charged with plot against Pretoria", "Afrikaner
arms cache seized", and so on. In isolation, each might be shrugged off as
part of the background noise of global strife. Together, they raise a
question that the world never imagined would have to be asked again: is the
ghost of apartheid stirring? Will a resurgent white right attempt bloodily
to turn back the clock and destroy the dreams of Nelson Mandela's "rainbow
nation"?

The answer is amazing, somewhat disturbing, and more than faintly farcical.
There has indeed been a white plot afoot which, while limited to the borders
of South Africa, was ambitious to an extent worthy of a bin Laden. The ideal
for which the plotters have been striving is so plainly evil that it makes
the old apartheid dream of total racial separation seem modest by
comparison. According to information obtained by the police, they drew their
inspiration from the Ku Klux Klan and September 11.

While the danger is not yet over - the Soweto bombers are presumed still to
be at large - the plot appears to have been foiled. On Monday the police
caught one of the alleged ringleaders, a former army officer called Tom
Vorster, who had been on the run for six months and is believed by police to
have been in contact in recent years with white supremacist groups in the
United States. Having made two other arrests late last week, the police
believe they have caught all the conspiracy's main leaders.

A farmer, an ex-policeman and a former university lecturer, Dr Johan "Lets"
Pretorius, all of them right-wing Afrikaners, were the first to be arrested,
back in April. The alleged plotters seem to have struck back within a month
when a man believed to have been a traitor in their midst, a suspected
police informer, was found dead at a shooting range with nine bullets in his
body. But the counter-terrorist unit in charge of the investigation, named
Operation Zealot, has since notched up success after success, unearthing a
cache of bombs on a farm, seizing a truck loaded with thousands of automatic
rifles and launching a manhunt that has led so far to the arrest of 18
suspects, three of them serving members of the South African National
Defence Force. Vorster appeared in court on Tuesday on charges of terrorism,
high treason and sabotage. All 18 are due to face trial in Pretoria in May,
and police say that they are expecting to make more arrests shortly.

The prosecution has indicated that much of its case will rest on more than
200 pages of documents found among the suspects, all members of an outfit
calling itself Boeremag, or "boer force". The documents are reported to
reveal that the plotters had been inspired by the attacks in the United
States on September 11 to identify heavily-populated targets, so achieving
what in the old apartheid security establishment they used to call "high
terror value".

The objectives of the plot were to overthrow the government of South Africa,
set up a white junta and drive the black population into the sea. The means
to an end that had eluded successive apartheid governments were the
following: recruit a rebel army; assassinate white "traitors" and black
cabinet ministers; free jailed Boer heroes; cut off power supplies; and
seize control of - among other things - airports, radio stations, gold mines
and abattoirs. But the success or failure of the Boer counter-revolution
rested above all on a radical new concept in the history of coups d'Ttat, a
strategy codenamed "Push and Suck".

It may all be academic now. Thanks to Operation Zealot, 10 of the alleged
plotters have been charged - exactly as Nelson Mandela was nearly half a
century ago - with high treason. But examination of the fantasies that
appear to have driven the Boeremag reveals at least three interesting
things: how mad the dregs of the apartheid far right are; how stable South
Africa has become since the historic elections of 1994; and how right Marx
was when he made that crack about history repeating itself, the first time
as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Push and Suck was the guts of the conspiracy. It was the means by which a
rebel army whose numbers would swell to 4,500 (about 0.01 per cent of South
Africa's total population) would set about the task of ethnically cleansing
40 million black people (90 per cent of the population). The final solution
contemplated was not, however, genocide. It never was in South Africa; while
some have described apartheid as moral genocide, as the deliberate attempt
to exterminate the spirit of an entire people, not even the worst of the
"volk" ever seriously contemplated mass murder. What was on the agenda was
mass incarceration. And mass forced removals. Which is what Push and Suck
was all about.

The master stroke of a plot "planned down to the finest detail", in the
words of the prosecutor in last month's trial (a man with the proud Boer
name of Louis Wiese), would have been to expel black South Africans not out
of "white areas", as in the old days, but out of South Africa altogether.
First, all black people would be forced out of what used to be called the
Northern Cape, the Free State and the Transvaal (an inland area about twice
the size of Great Britain) towards the coastal provinces of KwaZulu Natal,
the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape. This would be done by a combination
of force and inducement. They would be pushed out by straight military
means, but also sucked out - and here is where the "Boeremag Ten" appeared
to have believed the genius of the strategy to lie - by placing large
amounts of food along the roads leading out of the centre of the country.
The key, of course, lay in letting it be known to the black masses that if
they would only be so kind as to abandon their ancestral homes and join the
great exodus to the sea, their reward would be unlimited quantities of free
grub. Which helps to explain the plotters' resolve to seize abattoirs as
well as radio stations, but serves also to reveal that the group belonged to
a species of white South African (a happily endangered species, as it turns
out) so unevolved as to persist in the belief that black people are not
fully qualified members of the human race, but animals to be hunted down
exactly as one would wild game.

The millions upon millions of black refugees from the three big central
regions having been duly displaced to the coast, part two of the operation
would involve closing off the new borders, except for whites fleeing inland,
and forcing the economic collapse of the coastal provinces. At which point
the new military junta would launch a series of punishing military attacks.
The upshot of the inevitable victory would be the unconditional demand that
every last black man, woman and child go north with their belongings into
Africa. Once South Africa was entirely lily-white, once the Boeremag had
pulled off the miracle that had eluded the old National Party during the 40
years of apartheid, plans would be set in motion to disband the junta and
recreate a new, whites-only political dispensation - presumably based, as
the apartheid system used to be, on the Westminster model.

Before getting there, however, before putting Push and Suck into practice,
the coup plot required the implementation of three preliminary phases, as
revealed in the document captured by the police.

Phase one involved recruiting and intelligence-gathering. The plotters, at
least three of whom are army officers, initially sought to enlist members
and obtain secrets from the South African National Defence Force. It was
also considered vital to obtain information on how to take over the workings
of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and close down parliament.

Phase two was unleashing "chaos" on South Africa. This would involve
carrying out misleading decoy actions of the type favoured by the South
African security forces during the apartheid era to create mayhem in the
black communities. One plan was to stage a spectacular attack on a white
target - an unspecified action codenamed Lima One - which would be blamed on
Muslims or Jews. Another was for a death squad unit composed of 50
individuals to carry out assassinations and blame them on black people.
(Among the apparent targets were the former premier FW de Klerk, the
perceived father of all Boer sell-outs, and right-wing leaders such as
General Constand Viljoen, who participated in the 1994 elections.) There
were also plans afoot to stage jailbreaks for Eugene de Kock, a former
security-police assassin described by his own colleagues as "prime evil",
and for Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus, the two men responsible for the
assassination of the African National Congress (ANC) leader Chris Hani,
whose death in April 1993 caused such rage that the country came the closest
it ever did to racial war.

The third phase would have been the coup d'Ttat itself, the essential part
of which would be "taking out" the entire cabinet and selected MPs. The
airports and the abattoirs having been seized, power stations would be blown
up and a 10-day blackout would be imposed. Military installations would be
seized, the government in Pretoria (those among them who remained alive)
would be left with no choice but to surrender and a revolutionary army,
bounteously provisioned, would set forth boldly to push, suck and conquer.

And one final thing. Once the country had been, as they used to say,
successfully "unblackened", the fledgling Boer democracy would seek strong
ties, as the captured Boeremag document confidently anticipates, with the
the government of the United States.

Which is perhaps not the most ludicrously outlandish of the objectives the
Boeremag plotters set themselves, though, as a number of the former ANC
revolutionaries who now run the government of South Africa have pointed out,
it would be a mistake to underestimate the capacity these people had to
inflict cruel suffering. As South Africa's top policeman, Commissioner
Jackie Selebi, said upon the discovery last month of a clandestine home-made
munitions dump on a farm in the northern Limpopo province, the intention of
the plotters had been to carry out massive terrorist actions against
civilians. Selebi, himself branded a terrorist in the apartheid era,
revealed that the captured arsenal included 16 metal cylinders, each
weighing about 40lbs, that would have provided casings for bombs that could
have killed scores of people if detonated in a busy shopping centre. Along
with the cylinders, police found 22 buckets of ammonium nitrate powder (the
raw materials for the bombs), as well as alarm clocks converted into bomb
timers, hand-grenades, and eight boxes containing a variety of ammunition.

What drives these people? Why would a group of well-fed farmers, well-paid
army officers and, in at least one case, a doctor go to the hare-brained
extreme of wishing to slaughter innocent people in the furtherance of a
manifestly impossible cause? What do they have inside their heads? The
answer is this: a combustible mix of ancient myths and terrors and present
fears - fears that are understandable because they are based on tangible
day-to-day dangers.

The best-known incident in Afrikaner history, and one which has coloured the
thinking of whites on relations with their black compatriots ever since,
concerns the fate that befell the leader of the Great Trek of 1836, Piet
Retief. Lured by the Zulu king, Dingaan, into the royal kraal for peace
talks, Retief and 70 of his trekkers were foully betrayed. Dingaan's
"impis" - Zulu regiments - slaughtered Retief's party and then fell on
nearby trekker encampments, massacring men, women and children. The lesson
has been taught to Afrikaner schoolchildren of succeeding generations ever
since, entrenching the clichT in the Boer mind: "Never trust a black man."

Add to that a heavy component of unacknowledged guilt, and it is not hard to
see why the prevailing nightmare of white South Africans for a very long
time, at least since the Great Trek, has been of a black hand reaching up
from under the bed in the middle of the night with savage intent. An
Afrikaner farmer's wife deep in the Karoo offered me a more complex
variation on that theme one day eight years ago, just before the elections
that would bring Nelson Mandela to power, when she described a dream she had
when she was nine years old. "I was up a tree," the woman said, "and I
looked down and saw a black man. He was wearing a green military uniform and
he had a rifle. I was frightened. I knew he was looking for me. But he
couldn't see me because I was hiding behind leaves. Then suddenly his face
was right up against mine. But God saved me. He made me invisible to the
black man. And then in the dream God told me that one day the black people
would want to kill all the whites in South Africa - but we would be saved
because he would make them all blind."

Blind to the injustices, presumably, that white had perpetrated on black
ever since the appalling retribution exacted on Dingaan after the death of
Retief: the killing of 3,000 Zulu warriors on the banks of Blood River at a
cost, thanks to the technological superiority of the rifle over the spear,
of three trekkers lightly wounded. That guilt, combined with a dread sense
that black South Africans must be seeking revenge, explains why, in 1990,
three months after Mandela's release from prison, the rumour spread around
the white neighbourhoods of Pretoria that 10 April 1990 had been declared by
the ANC to be "Kill a White Day".

That the rumour, so utterly implausible to anyone with any serious
understanding of Mandela or the ANC, was widely believed reveals how deep
the ancient terrors ran then. They still do. The Boeremag might perhaps have
restrained their revolutionary urges, might have quietly snuffed out their
ancient terrors, had it not been for the fact that, in the wide open spaces
inhabited by the more conservative, less worldly, less politically
sophisticated members of the Afrikaner tribe, it has been "kill a white day"
every three or four days since the world celebrated the triumph of democracy
and the ascent to power of Mandela in May 1994. This has nothing to do with
Mandela, but everything to do with the raw, primitive form of apartheid that
prevailed for decades in dry, dusty places like Limpopo province, previously
known as the Northern Transvaal.

The shocking statistic is this: since 1994 more than 600 white farmers have
been murdered in South Africa, compared to 25 in Zimbabwe. And they have
been murdered by their black neighbours. One of the 10 alleged plotters who
has been charged with high treason, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques Olivier, has
revealed in court that he was at a meeting on rural safety last year where
an angry man cried out: "For each attack in which a farmer or his family is
murdered, a taxi should be attacked." A taxi, in this case, is a van with
about 10 seats (but often carrying more people); it is black people's
favoured means of transport.

It is easy to condemn such vengeful, racist sentiments but, as a
liberal-minded journalist who lives in a fortified "gated community" in
Johannesburg said to me the other day, it is not fun to live out there on
the farms if you are white. Not fun at all. With apologies to the victims of
New York and Bali, the threat al-Qa'ida poses to the citizens of the western
world is metaphysically remote compared to the clear and present menace
South Africa's white farmers live under every day. Which is why they are all
heavily armed, and have created paramilitary vigilante groups that keep in
permanent radio contact.

Who can blame them? These far-flung regions of South Africa have not
succumbed to the Mandela magic. The ancient grievances remain. A sharp edge
remains in relations between black and white. The accumulated fears and
hatreds have not gone; and, from the point of view of the black people of
the countryside, few of whom have seen any change in the appalling material
circumstances of their lives, it is not difficult to see why.

The underlying absurdity of the Boeremag conspiracy to drive all the blacks
into the sea derives from their incapacity to see that their sad little
world is an anachronism; that things have changed in the big cities; that
while you may perhaps be able to lure one or two of your impoverished black
Limpopo neighbours down a road with the promise of free corn on the cob, in
Johannesburg there are black men in large offices with white secretaries,
and black women driving Mercedes-Benzes and spending large amounts of cash
in garish shopping centres that rival Las Vegas. And these and other black
men and women, even those who do not have white secretaries and Mercs, have
nice houses now, with gardens and maids, and they are just as afraid of
being robbed and killed in the middle of the night by a poor black person as
the white people who, quite possibly, live in the same gated villages.

This point will have been brought home to three of the plotters charged with
treason when, in Pretoria last month, a judge turned down their request for
bail. The judge's name was Dikgang Moseneke. Ten years ago Moseneke, then a
talented lawyer, was the number two of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), an
organisation - substantially more radical than Mandela's ANC - whose slogan
was "one settler, one bullet", and whose declared intention was to "drive
the whites into the sea".

The PAC is also an anachronism these days. Their abysmal performance in the
1994 elections brought derisory cries from ANC supporters of "one settler,
one per cent!" The PAC's white counterparts, the Afrikaner Freedom Front,
did better in the 1994 poll, but after five years of Mandela their vote was
halved in the second democratic elections of 1999. Just a shade over 1 per
cent of voters still entertained the notion of dividing up South Africa
along racial lines. Meanwhile, the likes of Eugene de Kock had been jailed,
as had Eugene Terreblanche, former leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner
Resistance Movement (AWB), who used to threaten with such bluster that he
would "level the gravel" with the ANC.

All of which helps to explain why, outside the more sensationalist recesses
of the Afrikaner press, most South Africans seem relatively relaxed about
the arrest of the Boeremag plotters. This is in contrast to the time, 40
years ago, when another 10 "terrorists" - Mandela and nine others - were
brought before a judge in Pretoria, in what became known as the Rivonia
Trial. Then, even though Mandela's plans were neither as ambitious nor as
life-threatening as those of the Boeremag, the story attracted massive
attention, in South Africa and around the world. That was because everybody
knew that Mandela's revolution had justice and history on its side. The
failure of the ANC's armed wing to effect change then, in the early Sixties,
was a tragedy. The failure of the Boer plotters today is farce. Most South
Africans see them as malevolent clowns. Albert Venter, a politics professor
from Johannesburg's Rand Afrikaans University, said last week: "I think most
people in South Africa, be they white or black, realise this is a lunatic
fringe."

This also helps to reveal the extraordinary political success - unmatched by
any other society in transition anywhere on the globe - of what turned out
in the end to be Mandela's peaceful, negotiated revolution. A string of
right-wing bomb attacks that killed 30 black people just before the 1994
elections failed to stop the newly enfranchised from turning up massively to
vote.

The explosions in Soweto last week were the twitchings of an amputated limb.
While certainly a concern as a police matter, in terms of the potential they
hold for further loss of life they will barely register as a pin-prick on
the body politic. Because South Africa has demonstrated once again that, for
all the challenges that lie ahead in overcoming poverty, crime and Aids, the
nation's one great, indisputable triumph has been the cementing of its
political foundations. In the eight years since the most celebrated
political prisoner in history became president of all South Africa, black
and white, the country has enjoyed - and continues to enjoy - a measure of
stability not seen since the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652.