
South Africa
Chris Merritt

President F W de Klerk is a man with an international media image as a
moderate democrat. However, while the world has reacted with the lifting
of boycotts and sanctions, violence aimed at disorganization of the
African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP),
and their trade union ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions
(COSATU) has reached such proportions that it has been described as a
pre-emptive coup.  Since February 1990 South Africa has experienced an
apparent freedom of expression unknown since the 1950s. In the initial
euphoria the situation was accepted by many as a genuine change of heart
on the part of the National Party government. It has since become clear
that this was a skilful public relations job. There is plenty of evidence
that the authorities are still employing methods developed during the
emergency years to suppress opposition.  On assuming office, President de
Klerk abolished the National Security Management System (NSMS), a security
force shadow government which had underpinned the State of Emergency. The
Harms Commission set up to investigate the covert military action arm of
the NSMS, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) revealed a programme of
arson, intimidation, murder and sabotage, often using criminals, amounting
to a covert war against anti-apartheid organizations in terms of Low
Intensity Conflict theory. This was develo ped by the US army as a method
of fighting wars abroad where political sensitivity ruled out the use of
large numbers of American ground troops. In Southern Africa this method of
warfare has been used so often against the surrounding states as to make
it instinctive for the South African army to turn it upon its own
population once threatened at home. The NSMS in fact had merely been
replaced by the National Coordinating Mechanism (NCM), a new, almost
informal, system with a simplified chain of command avoiding the need for
a large bureaucracy. The NCM is the mechanism linking the top levels of
governm ent to what Nico Basson, an ex-Military Intelligence officer,
calls a Third Force. The nature of this army, which can be seen as the son
of the CCB, is of a diverse and seemingly out of control array of =D4bad
apples=D5 within the security services, ex-state security personnel, extrem=
e
right wingers, Inkatha, criminal gangs and mercenaries. These diverse
elements allow the State to distance itself from actions carried out by
groups which the State refuses to disarm. The new flexible structure by
its nature al lows the State to deny responsibility for actions carried
out by these groups. Thus the occasional operation directly controlled by
the NCM becomes lost amongst the arbitrary violence committed by agents
implicitly linked to the State let lose on the civilian population. During
1991, hit squads were responsible for 60 deaths and 45 people injured;
vigilantes for 2011 killed and 2604 injured; and right wingers for 21
deaths and 178 injured (figures supplied by the Human Rights Comm-ission).
Politics can be manipulat-ed and enemies undermined behind a facade of
=D4democracy=D5 which replaced the more overt apparatus of the State of
Emergency. The state is weakening the ANC without being directly connected
with the agents who are fighting the war on its behalf. The atmosphere of
officially sanctioned lawlessness created by the 1985-90 Emergency has
become an integral part of the military's strategy in the new South
Africa. Naturally the agents the state uses in its dirty war are also
beneficiaries of the situation in their own right. Inkatha and the KwaZulu
government particularly so. Inkatha Inkatha has an ideology based on
ethnicity, reverence of and subservience to leaders, and collaboration
with the apartheid regime, although it has shrewdly held out against
'independent' status for KwaZulu. It has required oaths of loyalty from
public ser vants, employed a rhetoric of threatened violence, and
practised human rights abuses orchestrated by highly placed officials. Its
political objective is regional hegemony and recognition in the national
negotiation process. It is now clear that Inkatha has had a relationship
with Military Intelligence since the mid-1970s. During the
Pietermaritzburg civil war of March-April 1990 Inkatha was aided by acts
of commission and omission: large, well-armed bodies of men thousands
strong could hardly have operated without security force compliance.  In
the South Coast region of Natal around Port Shepstone the security forces
in collusion with Inkatha have acted as if the ANC were still banned, and
routinely raided meetings or placed restrictions upon them. When the ANC
was launched in Northern Natal in February 1991 only the chairperson and
secretary were named: this is the slowest growing region in the country,
venues are hard to obtain, and activity is almost clandestine. In mid 1992
the ANC in the Bulwer area of the Natal Midlands was obstructed b y
persistent denial of township venues. Inkatha is being openly described as
a potential South African Renamo (the Rhodesian organised terror group
used to destablise Mozam-bique). Apart from its military trained
operatives, it has a security police organization (commanded by Jac
Buchner, who, when he headed the security police in Pietermaritzburg
during the emergency, was reputed to be one of the government's experts on
the ANC) and the support of the KwaZulu Police, virtually a military wing
of Inkatha. The latter's potential for banditry res ts on its
ethnocentrism, devotion to a strong leader, lack of internal democracy,
absence of clear ideology and an increasingly marginal national role. The
'Third Force' Nico Basson and other commentators placed Military
Intelligence at the centre of township violence, either through its own
operatives or via conservative black groups funded, trained and directed
by shadowy official agencies such as Creed. Human rights mo nitors have
noted a pattern of increased violence whenever a significant point is
reached in the negotiations process. Inside information such as that from
Basson and Mbongeni Khumalo, former leader of the Inkatha Youth Brigade,
as well as evidence on the
 ground, show that the State of Emergency continues in a new form.  The
methods of the 'Third Force' vary from random slaughter on trains, to
targeted assassination. Chief Mhlabunzima Maphumulo, leader of the
ANC-aligned Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA),
and a man who had showed admirable even- handedness to people of different
political persuasions in the Table Mountain area, was assassinated in the
middle of Pietermaritzburg on the 25th February 1991. A tape recording of
the confession of the chief's killer, implicating the security forces, wa
s confiscated by police from The Natal Witness, Pieter-maritzburg's daily
newspaper. In March 1992 an inquest court found that Maphumulo was killed
by 'persons unknown', a throwback to standard verdicts passed down by
magistrates in the days of hardline a partheid. By this time (8th
February) Skhumbuzo Mbatha Ngwenya, an Imbali ANC official and a pacifist,
had been gunned down outside a Pietermaritzburg restaurant. On the 27th
October he was followed by Reggie Hadebe, ANC Natal Midlands deputy
chairperson assassinated as he was driving from Ixopo to Richmond after
peace talks. There is a consistent pattern: elimination of influential
anti-apartheid figures (including some from Inkatha) heavily involved in
the peace process. The police and security forces, ruthless in tracking
down cadres of the liberation movement in the 1980s, have proved
suspiciously inept at basic detective work in these cases.  The George
Goch hostel near Johannesburg was named as Inkatha's operational base on
the Reef, a depot for arms channelled by the SADF from Mozambique. Those
present at assaults on vigils and trains noted that attackers spoke with
Natal accents. When thirt een people died at a vigil at Alexandra
(Johannesburg) on the 27th March 1991, amaSinyoras (members of a criminal
gang) from Durban were blamed. It is well known that they have close links
with the military and immunity from the police: one member was see n
wearing a SADF uniform. Disinformation. A state agency called COMOPS
(Combined Operations) was set up to channel funding to phantom groups and
run disinformation projects.  Some of its suspected activities are the
boosting of Inkatha's image in the same way as the Democratic Turnhalle
Alliance
 (DTA) had been assisted in Namibia; creation of bantustan parties (such
as Oupa Gqozo's African Democratic Movement in Ciskei); encouragement of
tribalism; and the launch of a 'moderate', multiparty front named the
Christian Democratic Alliance (CDA). The SA Special Forces. This is made
up of four SADF reconnaissance units, 32 (Buffalo) battalion, 44 parachute
battalion, Military Intelligence, the Police 'Askari' unit (of turned
Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters), and the ex-CCB. They have absorbed Koevoet,
the most vicious of the destabilizing units in Namibia; use mercenaries,
including some forcibly conscripted after abduction from Mozambique; and
have strong ex-Rhodesian and Renamo connections. A defector from 5 Recce,
Felix Ndimene, described how his unit was involved in one o f the
Johannesburg train massacres.  Other Agents There is also overlap with the
ubiquitous and trigger happy private security industry which is teeming
with ex-Rhodesians of special forces origins. Recent evidence shows that
KwaZulu paramilitary forces numbering about 200 men were trained by
Military In telligence in the Caprivi Strip, and also in Israel during
1986, before being based at Mkuze in Northern Zululand. Vigilantes in the
Eastern Cape calling themselves Ama-Afrika were similarly trained. With
their deep involvement in the ivory trade and gun running, such groups are
specially active in the Eastern Transvaal and Northern Natal in
collaboration with Renamo. Africa Confidential has pointed out that these
units, characterised by lack of accou ntability, immunity from
prosecution, and increasingly embittered by the trend of national
political events, could get out of control. Renamo, after all, is a
classic example of a Rhodesian fashioned pseudo-terrorist operation which
ran amok. The Mozambic an government found great difficulty negotiating
with it, simply because it is a bandit organization with no discernible
political objectives. Overview At present extra-legal methods of political
control are gaining the ascendancy. Other forms nevertheless remain
extremely powerful. Apartheid legislation, educational inequalities,
security legislation, publications control, official secrecy, limitations
on journalists, and defamation law are significant restraints. The
'independent' bantustans have their own security and emergency legislation
which is wielded with gusto, as seen in spectacular fashion in Ciskei and
Bophuthatswana. The censorship of silence, traditional in South Africa, is
implicit in the ambience of the 'new' South Africa as recognised by the
writer Breyten Breytenbach: "...authority [is] now attempting to stifle
the needed debate on public ethics by pretending tha t apartheid was not,
and is not, the crime against humanity as experienced by the majority of
South Africans". In Hugo Young's celebrated phrase, President de Klerk and
his supporters "... have seen the light, not of righteousness but of
survival". The ri ght media images are thus crucial to them. So too,
apparently, is protection from prosecution for human rights crimes,
judging from the speed and ruthlessness with which a Further Indemnity
Bill was forced through the legislative system in October 1992 ag ainst
furious opposition from all parties to the left of the Nationalists. It is
all too probable that indemnity is required for current and past members
of de Klerk's government. When security legislation was amended in 1991,
the Democratic Party put forward ludicrous claims that South Africa had
embraced the rule of law and individual freedom, joining the ranks of free
nations. This sort of misrepresentation has earned South Afri ca a totally
unjustified liberal image, reinforced by the result of the referendum
which has virtually deified De Klerk. The latter and his supporters in the
business community and across the centre-right political spectrum have
adopted a new orthodoxy in
 the 'new' South Africa. This argues that apartheid is dead, South
Africans must forget the past and pull together towards a glorious new
future in which private enterprise will swiftly iron out the inequities in
society. Those who challenge this amoral a nd ahistoric approach are
increasingly marginalised. The NCM mechanism creates outrages to provoke
splits in the ANC which cannot be traced back to the state. The Chris Hani
assassination was the perfect example of this, it greatly weakened the
ANC=D5s authority in the townships and was blamed on the far Righ t. The
outside world receives this image of =D4dark forces=D5 creating chaos and a=
n
image of the increasingly acceptable, white, South African state. These
are the unedifying tactics used by the National Party as it strives for
renewed power within a conserv ative coalition. Behind a facade of
'normality' a covert war is being waged against the ANC. Its leaders can
behave like national politicians at negotiations, but at grassroots level
destabilisation is having a serious effect on the movement's ability to
organise as a political party, attract members after thirty years as a
banned organization, and win an election.

Christopher Merrett works at the University of Natal and has published on
a wide range of human rights issues; he was an activist with the local
Detainees Support Committee during the State of Emergency. He is presently
writing a book on the history of ce nsorship in South Africa.


