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Title: PW & Pinochet Author: Michael Schmidt Date: June 29, 2009 Language: en Topics: Chile, neoliberalism, South Africa, authoritarianism, democracy, Pinochet Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/13598 Notes: This article was written by Michael Schmidt, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, South Africa, especially for the journal Hombre y Sociedad, which was established in Santiago, Chile, in 1985. It was kindly proof-read by José Antonio Gutierrez Dantón, “Hombre y Sociedad” editor 1997–2003, and co-founder of the Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios (FEL) and in 1999 of the Congreso de Unificación Anarco-Comunista (CUAC), which led to the establishment of today’s Organización Comunista Libertaria (OCL), Chile.
In June 2009, one of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s most renowned
accusers, Judge Juan Salvador Guzmán Tapia, visited South Africa on a
speaking tour. Dean of the Law School at the Universidad Central de
Chile in Santiago, and also a lecturer in human rights at the School of
Journalism at the Universidad de la República, Guzmán was originally a
Pinochet supporter, but turned against him after being selected by
judicial lottery in 1998 to hear the 186 criminal charges against the
man who, until his death in 2006, cast such long shadows over Chilean
political life.
For those Chileans who took to the streets of their poblaciones in the
early 1970s and mid-1980s to demand the release from Robben Island of
Nelson Mandela and for an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa,
the rightward shift of the African National Congress (ANC) with its
embrace of anti-working-class neoliberalism is likely to be confusing.
How did the world’s most celebrated new democracy come to be marred by
ongoing violent protests by the poor against “their” government, faced
down by police as bloody-minded as before, by continued housing
evictions and mass forced removals so evocative of the depths of
apartheid [1]? This analysis shall attempt to explain the trajectory of
South African “democracy” and the failure of the “South African
Revolution” by comparison to the Chilean experience of the popular
overwhelming of Pinochetist reaction – in which the Left found itself
fundamentally defeated, even as it attained its cherished victory.
& THEIR IMPERIAL RELATIONS
The southernmost countries of the South American and African continents
were wild frontiers, both forged by bloody race-war, Chile from 1541 and
South Africa a century later from 1652. Despite incidents of multiracial
resistance to colonial rule (by Khoekhoen and Malay slaves and Irish
sailors together, for instance), and of fraternisation and intermarriage
between Europeans and Xhosas during the Frontier Wars, racial domination
set the tone for the South African colony’s (mal)development: I’m sure
similar processes occurred during Chile’s Indian Wars. Chile gained
independence from Spain in 1818, but South Africa only nominally in
1910, and then still under the aegis of British imperialism. With a thin
veneer of respectability coating the naked rule by force of a tiny
elite, by the 1980s, both Chile and South Africa had descended into
military dictatorships, redoubts of anti-communism whose guns were
trained inwards on their own people.
The origins of the parallel – and mutually respectful – dictatorships of
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and of Pieter Willem Botha (better known simply
as “PW”) lay in diverse concerns, however. For Pinochet, Salvador
Allende had unintentionally opened a Pandora’s Box of working-class
self-management with his electoral road to socialism, behind which the
paranoid reaction discerned the hand of Moscow. For PW as he was known,
there was an equal concern with “communist” expansionism, but unlike
Chile where the proud and combative Mapuche (who had once made Chile for
the Conquistadors “the Spanish cemetery”) had been reduced to a minority
of the population under white and mixed-race mestizo rule, in South
Africa, the various tribes of the Bantu remained a growing majority, the
sheer numerical dominance of which threatened to swamp the white settler
elite. José Antonio Gutierrez Dantón says that by comparison, “Chile is
not a case of [white] settler-colonialism like South Africa, since 70%
of the population is [of] mixed heritage – although settlers did exist
and played some important role in Chilean politics (Spanish in the
16^(th) Century and then British and German in the 19^(th) Century).
This probably explains the reasons why Chile could have more of a
democratic space than South Africa for most of its history”.
On the origins of the Chilean state, according to Gutierrez Dantón,
during the three-century-long Aurauco War – a partial corollary of the
century-long Xhosa Wars in the Cape – “there was eventually an
acceptance by the Spanish of both the border and [of] Mapuche autonomy,
when by the late 17^(th) Century they realised that the Mapuche were not
to be conquered. The real conquest of the Mapuche only happens in 1880,
when the Chilean state, already at war with Peru and Bolivia, invaded
and occupied Mapuche land which they gave largely to a few German
landlords in order to enhance the ‘race’.” This has some remarkable
parallels with the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 in which the British recovered
from defeat at Isandlwana to crush the Zulu nation and divided its
territory under the stewardship of loyal chieftains, and with the
British-expansionist Anglo-Boer Wars of 1880–1881 (won by the Boers) and
1899–1902 (won by the British).
Despite Chile’s chequered experience with bourgeois democracy, scarred
as it was by the dictatorships of Carlos “Paco” Ibáñez del Campo and
Gabriel González Videla, Allende had been popularly elected. In South
Africa, however, there had never been any semblance of majoritarian
democracy – precisely because of the race question. Whereas the settlers
had once shot out as “vermin,” almost to extinction, the indigenous
population of the Khoekhoen and Bushmen (as they prefer to call
themselves), white settlement encountered waves of Xhosa resistance and
it took an outside force, imperial Britain, to subdue the militaristic
Zulu nation.
Imperial Britain, the friend of the Chilean elite, many of whom still
consider themselves the Britons of South America, was no friend to the
South African elite, however: its concentration camp and scorched-earth
policy during the Second Anglo-Boer War deeply marked the drive towards
Afrikaner self-determination that would give the South African situation
its unique character. First among African countries in terms of the
mining-based infrastructure that drove higher levels of white settlement
than anywhere else in the continent including Algeria, South Africa
remains alone among the countries of Africa in the post-liberation
period for having retained its white population. The reason is simple:
they largely view themselves as African, not European [2].
So the elites’ reason to resort to dictatorship varied: backed by
Britain, the Chilean ruling class tackled the spectre of Cold War
statist “communism” as an internal ideological enemy; self-isolated from
Britain, the South African ruling class tackled “communism” as an
internal racial enemy. Both enemies were largely working-class, however.
But though the coming into being of Pinochet’s and PW’s dictatorships in
1973 and 1984 respectively has been amply documented by the Left, there
has been little comparative analysis of how and why these dictatorships
managed their own “transition to democracy” – and it is here that the
similarities between the Chilean and South African experiences are
striking. For if war is the pursuit of politics by other means, so too,
these experiences have shown, is politics the pursuit of (class) war by
other means.
In both countries, racial ascendancy was ritualised in national
celebrations: the Day of the Vow on December 16 in South Africa (which
recalls the Battle of Blood River defeat of a superior Zulu force by the
Boers); and the Day of the [Hispanic] Race on October 12 in Chile and by
“all of the Hispanophile elites in Latin America,” in Gutierrez Dantón’s
words. The comparison of how this attitude was worked out in terms of
sheer brutality is telling: under both Pinochet and PW, several thousand
opponents of their regimes were murdered or “disappeared”. For us South
Africans, PW was “our Pinochet” (not “our Hitler” as claimed by the
Johannesburg-based Sunday Times after PW’s death: far too extreme a
comparison which denatures the Holocaust in which 15-million were put to
death).
Neither dictatorship was explicitly neo-Nazi, but both PW and Pinochet
had clear Nazi sympathies in their early days, an affinity that,
combined with their natural narrow-minded militaristic views of the
world, left a visible brown stain on their periods of rule while
distinct neo-Nazi elements linked to their ruling cliques attempted to
push their regimes in a more distinctly fascist direction: the Patria y
Libertad group in Chile; the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) in South
Africa.
Both countries had seen their working classes brutally disciplined in
the early 1900s: the 1907 Santa María de Iquique Massacre of up to 3,600
striking nitrate workers and their families in Chile at the hands of the
army; and the 1922 Rand Revolt which saw the first use of aircraft to
bomb civilian areas in peace-time and left more than 200 dead. And yet
Chile was in the 1920s-1940s a stronghold of the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW), which survived until it merged with other syndicalist
forces in 1951, and in similar vein in South Africa in 1917,
syndicalists of all races had founded the first black union in British
colonial Africa, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) along IWW lines
[3]. In 1920, many of the IWA’s militants founded a
libertarian-syndicalist Communist Party of South Africa, the first such
“party” on the African continent which advocated the Chigago IWW’s
anti-electoral, direct action politics. It was challenged the following
year by a Leninist party by the same name, and changed its name to the
Communist League (this process was not unique: libertarian-syndicalist
“communist parties” were also founded in France and Brazil prior to the
founding of their Leninist competitors). The Soviet state-sanctioned
CPSA initially included in its ranks only one black militant, the
syndicalist Thomas William “TW” Thibedi (later purged as a Trotskyist)
but in 1928, it adopted the two-stage “native republic” line forced on
it by the Comintern which stressed a “national democratic revolution” in
a cross-class alliance with the blacks-only ANC before socialism could
be implemented [4]. This compromise would have far-reaching and damaging
implications for the liberation movements.
In South Africa, as in Chile with its putschist Vanguardia Obrera
Nacionalista, (Nationalist Workers’ Vanguard) a range of fascist-styled
movements arose in the 1930s, primarily among Afrikaners and among the
German population in South African controlled South-West Africa, notably
the Ossewabrandwag (Oxwagon Sentries), Grey Shirts, and the New Order,
which supported Nazi Germany during the war, but which tended to prefer
home-grown fascist “Christian nationalism” to outright Nazism. Many of
these fascists were interned in camps during the war because South
Africa joined the Allies, and this experience (which to their mind
recalled the British concentration camps of their grandfathers’ day),
confirmed in some nationalist Afrikaner leaders their far-right
politics. Many Italian Fascist prisoners, detained in South Africa and
released after the war, elected to stay in the country, swelling the
ranks of the white right (as would occur again with Salazarist
Portuguese fleeing Angola and Mozambique in 1975). Within two years of
coming to power in 1948 (first Prime Minister Daniel Malan had a few
years earlier told parliament that national socialism was the wave of
the future), the National Party (NP) had outlawed the CPSA, reserving
for themselves the right to ban and restrict all opponents as
“communist”.
The frost of the Cold War set in and South Africa was firmly in the
anti-communist camp, becoming a key London and Washington ally thanks
largely to its reactionary strategic alliances – including Pinochetist
Chile – to its mineral resources and to its strategic position
straddling the Indian-Atlantic shipping lanes. In the same period in
Chile, the 1950s, Ibáñez was back in the saddle, and his support for the
military enabled the unimaginative Pinochet to climb through the ranks
(although let us not forget the near-victory of 1956 when the
syndicalist-dominated Chilean Workers’ Central which had absorbed the
old IWW was offered power by a frightened Ibáñez – only for the nascent
revolution to be undercut by Chilean Communist Party capitulation. This
stillborn revolution for the people must have scared Pinochet no end)
[5].
Pinochet, born in 1915, supported Nazi Germany as a youth and in his
heavily plagiarised “great work” Geopolítica (1968) lauded the “German
school of geopolitics” including such thinkers as Karl Haushofer who had
contributed the concept of lebensraum to Mein Kampf. Born in 1912, PW
was an Ossewabrandwag supporter in his youth. South Africa under
apartheid was not only in substance a racial state (as with the Nazis),
but also in form a Pinochetist-styled military state rather than a
Nazi-styled police state. The differences are perhaps subtle to those
who suffered, but in all countries the police are designed for internal
repression yet are compromised and subornable simply by virtue of living
within their communities, whereas the military by profession disdains
internal repression (their rationale being external aggression), yet
live in isolated barracks and this can make them more brutal and less
sympathetic to the people.
Not all types of reaction are as identical as the Left often likes to
paint them. So to claim, as the CPSA communist Brian Bunting did in his
The Rise of the South African Reich (1964) – which remains very
influential in ANC intellectual circles – that South Africa was a
full-scale fascist state was incorrect [6]. There were indeed some
international fascist contacts: in the 1960s Sir Oswald Mosley of the
British Union of Fascists visited the South African cabinet several
times, while Adolf “Bubi” von Thadden of the Deutsche Reichs Partei
(successor of the outlawed Sozialistische Reichs Partei and fore-runner
to the moderately successful electoral Nationaldemokratische Partei
Deutschlands) maintained close ties with leading Nationalists.
Regionally, Pinochet’s secret police, Dina, was involved in the
anti-communist Operation Condor death-squad network; South Africa’s
Security Branch had extremist killer allies in white-ruled Rhodesia, the
Belgian Congo, and Salazarist Mozambique and Angola. Yet while it
retained some strong elements of fascist culture, South Africa under the
NP still had a parliament, however compromised by its skewed racial
composition, and allowed a degree of independent trade union (and
business) organising – things no fully-fledged fascist state would
tolerate. By comparison, Gutierrez Dantón notes, “in the period of
Pinochet, formal democracy in any form was abolished to establish a firm
military dictatorship,” a dictatorship clearly backed by “the hegemonic
imperialist force” of the USA which had dominated Chile since World War
I. Apartheid South Africa, independent of the Commonwealth since 1961,
was likewise backed as an anti-communist bulwark by the USA.
As Patrick J Furlong puts it, while Afrikaner nationalism embarked on
the large-scale racial engineering of “Grand Apartheid,” multiplied the
number of state corporations, eroded the rule of law to allow for de
facto martial law if needed, curbed the press and black trade unionism,
purged the military and civil service of English-speakers, outlawed
communists and fellow travellers, dramatically extended detention
without trial, and flirted with anti-Semitism, it “made no attempt to
create a fascist-style corporate state, with parliamentary
representation along professional and occupational lines, as in
Mussolini’s Italy, and with overarching umbrella organisations for both
employers and employees, replacing trade unions and employer
associations, as in both Germany and Italy” [7].
Thinking like Bunting’s however, was to have tragic (and presumably
unintended) consequences in the 1970s when the ANC cold-shouldered
independent black trade unions as “fascist” simply because they were
allowed by the state – despite the involvement of ANC rank-and-file
militants, mostly Zulu women, in establishing such trade unions.
The National Intelligence Service may have adopted the wolf’s hook
symbol of the pre-war Dutch Nazi movement as its secret emblem, but
despite the fact that every single NP head of state up to and including
PW had been pro-Nazi as youths, the notorious security policeman who
wore a Waffen-SS helmet when firing on black insurgents in Soweto in
1976 was the exception rather than the rule (this was demonstrated
numerically when the minority AWB split from the NP in 1973) [8].
It is often forgotten also that substantial portions of the black
population (the homeland elites, quietist religious conservatives,
ethnic chauvinists like the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and others)
were won over to varying degrees to the apartheid vision of “separate
development”. Thus for a few (the state, the AWB and the Pan Africanist
Congress, for example), the battle was a race-war, but for the majority
it was between reactionary and progressive social and political
traditions. The real battlefield, however, was not only in the realm of
ideas, but in that of the economy, and from 1973, the tactics on that
front changed dramatically, in both Chile and South Africa.
RATIONALE BEHIND REFORMS
1973 in Chile was of course, the year of the infamous CIA-backed
Pinochet coup against Allende. In South Africa, the port city of Durban
(visited in the about 1987/8 if I recall correctly by the goose-stepping
Chilean Navy) was wracked by a series of strikes by black workers that
spread across the country, the first such unrest since the 1948 miners’
strike, despite the fact that in real terms, black wages had remained
the same between 1910 and 1961. The deeper reasons behind both actions,
different as they were, was the onset of global recession from the early
1970s, and the response of both Northern and Southern elites was
neoliberalism, the by-now recognised enemy tactics of: the privatisation
of public assets; cuts in state expenditure on public services and
infrastructure; the disembowling of entire industries though exposure to
a rapacious market that values profit before people; labour
“flexibility”, or the return to precarious near-slavery by the workers,
peasants and poor; and last, but not least, the strengthening (not
weakening as Trotskyists and other Leftists falsely argue) of the
coercive functions of the state.
And so we have the rise of a phenomenon that is too often misunderstood
by those “newly-liberated” – and deliberately obscured by the brutal
nouveau-riches whose greed has driven the process, the turbo-capitalists
who strip the people’s industries and infrastructure down to the bare
bones as vultures do, selling off equipment at fire-sale rates (the
transition from gangster state-capitalism to gangster private capitalism
in Russia – and the resistance of some communities and factories, taken
over by their workers – is exemplary).
So what exactly happened in Chile and South Africa? Marny Requa in The
Bitter Transition chapter of The Pinochet Affair (2003), which covers
the crucial 1990–1998 period in Chile, has offered one of the most
cutting insights into the Chilean “transition to democracy” and it has
strong echoes for South Africans, for a very similar process of
deception of the masses occurred here [9]. The fact is that, pressurised
by the global economic downturn, the lack of domestic growth
opportunities, and increasingly by insurrection, isolation and
sanctions, PW Botha’s regime began the democratic and neoliberal reform
processes in South Africa.
If that seems strange to Chileans, don’t forget that you experienced a
similar “guided transition”: do you recall the plebiscite in 1988 that
saw Pinochet outvoted 54% to 43%? [10] There was a similar unprecedented
plebiscite of the (white) South African electorate in 1992 under PW’s
successor FW de Klerk that also voted convincingly 68% to 31% for
change, though the nature of that change, as in Chile, was deliberately
kept vague.
Even before FW, however, significant economic and political reforms had
been begun under PW and by his predecessors – only to be alarmingly
embraced by the new democratic dispensation – and that is the core of my
argument. There was the legalising of black trade unions in the wake of
the ’73 Strikes that finally led to the consolidation of the Congress of
South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985, shadowing the 1983
formation of the leftist National Workers’ Command (CNT) in Chile.
Cosatu aligned itself with the ANC against stiff internal opposition
from rank-and-file syndicalists (disdainfully called “workerists” by the
Communist Party) [11]. The ANC and Communist Party until today remain
alarmed at any sign of the resurgence of such tendencies, precisely
because rank-and-filers clearly appreciate the class-compromise threat
that the ANC leadership represented and still represents. It is worth
remembering, as an aside, that the watershed 1976/7 Uprising was a
popular revolt before it was even a Black Consciousness (BC) backlash,
and that at that time, the ANC was remote, insignificant, sidelined and
as out of touch as the BC leadership would be in exile after the
crack-down of 1976/7 [12]. It would take the creation of a “Charterist”
movement a decade later that adhered to the moderate social-democratic
1955 Freedom Charter – plus the secret endorsements of PW’s regime – to
rescue the ANC from obscurity. Lastly, in an vain attempt at reform,
PW’s regime instituted the white-Indian-coloured Tricameral Parliament
of 1983, which gave “representation” to all but the black majority, and
which as a result stoked the fires of the 1984–1990 Insurrection.
“GUIDED” TRANSITION
The Insurrection had its roots in widespread resistance to both the
Tricameral Parliament and specifically to the system of Black Local
Authorities established under it to which a minority of black
conservatives voted in apartheid-approved councillors. As in 1976, the
spark to revolt began on the economic terrain as the widely hated Local
Authorities raised municipal rates and service charges and as PW’s
regime instituted a new housing programme (the provision of tiny
two-roomed “matchbox” houses to try to buy off black anger) – while
municipal public properties including bars and community halls were
privatised and sold to the puppet councillors.
An explosion of popular organising saw a rash of civic associations
formed as dual-power alternatives to the Local Authorities; alongside
them, street committees, often dominated by youth, established physical
control of neighbourhoods, making life dangerous for the councillors,
the informers and the police. The United Democratic Front (UDF),
consisting of some 575 organisations adhering to the Freedom Charter
(and thus opposed to Black Consciousness), was formed as a broad
resistance umbrella grouping, including civics, NGOs, church
organisations, political formations (including the Communist Party,
albeit in disguise), human rights organisations and others. The UDF was
legal, though many of its members were jailed and constitutent
organisations subsequently outlawed [13].
This period corresponds to the rise in Chile of the broad Popular
Democratic Movement which embraced the Communist Party, Socialist Party,
Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), and human rights groups like
the Committee for the Defence of the Rights of the People (Codepu) and
May, June and July 1983 saw the first mass protests in Chile against the
regime (spurred by economic recession). Between 1983 and late 1986,
local community committees were formed in urban areas, and as in South
Africa where leftist guerrillas of formations like the ANC/SACP’s
Umkhonto weSizwe operated in the townships, the Chilean Communist
Party-linked Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front guerrillas were active in
the poblaciones [14].
A mass anti-rent and anti-Local Authorities stayaway on 3 September 1984
led to mass dismissals by employers but only served to spread the
insurgency into the ranks of the workers. Meanwhile, then Prime Minister
PW Botha had in July 1984 ordered Justice Minister Kobie Coetsee to
begin secret negotiations with jailed Nelson Mandela. But Mandela’s
refusal to renounce armed struggle made PW dig in his heels. A year
later and by then state president, he rejected a radical speech prepared
for him by Foreign Affairs Minister Pik Botha (today an ANC member) that
would state: “The government is … abolishing discrimination based on
colour and race and is promoting constitutional development with a view
to meeting the needs and aspirations of all our communities”. All
detainees would have been released.
Instead, Botha gave his notorious hardline “Rubicon” speech and by mid
1985, the apartheid authorities had declared a state of emergency in
many districts of the country. In Chile, likewise, by 1984, the reaction
saw the detentions without trial, internal exile and the establishment
of isolated detention camps. State proxy armed forces – Inkatha’s
Self-Protection Units and Chilean Anti-Communist Action spring to mind –
emerged in both countries. In South Africa, the state of emergency was
extended to the entire country in 1985 and lasted until 1989 (1990 in
the province of KwaZulu-Natal), with unprecedentedly violent clashes
between residents, workers and the authorities and their proxy forces.
This insurgency is well documented but I do need to stress the
grassroots nature of the struggle: with hundreds of multipartisan
community, youth, labour, political, church, human rights and other
organisations working together within the broad UDF and other similar
initiatives aimed at the overthrow of apartheid by the masses
themselves.
Despite escalating violence, detentions, torture, murders and
disappearances, behind the scenes, the forces of white and black
nationalists were striking back-room deals, with NP and ANC intelligence
operatives meeting in Geneva. In September 1985, a group of white
businessmen and newspaper editors led by Anglo-American Corporation
chairman Gavin Reilly met the ANC leadership led by president Oliver
Tambo at its headquarters in Lusaka. Some aspects of petty apartheid
(like the prohibition of mixed marriages) were repealed and by February
1986, the SACP’s Joe Slovo declared the party would accept a negotiated
settlement while Pik Botha stated the country could one day have a black
president.
Three months later, Pieter de Lange, leader of the Broederbond, the
secret Afrikaner power-clique that steered grand apartheid strategy,
having met with the ANC’s Thabo Mbeki in New York, was urging PW to
negotiate with the ANC. The hard realities laid out by de Lange to PW
are believed to have centred on saving the economy: ending the damage
caused to the economy by isolation and sanctions; growing the
manufacturing skills base by dropping the colour-bar which deliberately
underskilled black workers; and growing the domestic market by paying
black workers well enough for them to afford housing bonds and luxury
consumer goods. In Senegal in 1987, 61 Afrikaner intellectuals, led by
liberal Progressive Federal Party leader Frederick van Zyl Slabbert met
17 ANC members led by Mbeki, and on 5 July 1989, PW met Mandela (then
still a prisoner) in secret talks.
PW suffered a stroke in 1989 and by the end of the year had been
supplanted in a palace coup by FW de Klerk who accelerated the secret
negotiations process. While Pinochet clung to power in name, he too was
outmanoeuvred by another faction within his own military in 1988 after
he lost the plebiscite and wanted to impose a by-then unpalatable state
of emergency.
I’m not privy to the secret negotiations process in Chile (for surely,
secret talks like the 1998 pact between Pinochet and the conservative
Christian Democrat Andres Zaldivar preceeded open ones) [15], but what
is clear is that the first major round of talks was between the centrist
Concertación, the right wing and the military, with the Left out in the
cold, and outright neoliberal Carlos Caceres appointed by Pinochet as
Interior Minister in charge of the talks.
In South Africa, the trajectory of secret talks was: first the spies,
then the businessmen, then the commissars, then the intellectuals, then
the politicos. Both sides of the nationalist war were running
death-squads by this stage and engaging in outright torture and
terrorism aimed at the civilian population [16]. There was never any
popular forum of discussion, not even when the open negotiations process
began in 1991: after all, the ANC had unilaterally, anti-democratically
forced the disbandment of the UDF in March 1991 to prevent the
grassroots challenging its elitist conception of power (an illegitimate
move given that the UDF was not an entirely ANC formation).
In such conditions, South Africa’s transition to democracy was doomed to
be tainted by dubious agendas. One of the strangest involves Operation
Vula, the SACP’s plan to insert underground leadership into the country
which was exposed in July 1990, with a range of arrests including that
of leading communist Mac Maharaj who, a US spy claimed (repeated with
caution in a classified US Embassy signal from Pretoria to Washington
DC), told him the fall-back plan of Operation Vula was to assassinate
Mandela to provoke a “national insurrection” [17]. The signal makes it
clear that ambassador Bill Swing was aware the state was trying to drive
a wedge between the ANC and the communists, a position that reflected
the US attempts in Chile to sponsor the moderates to the exclusion of
more radical options as change in the regime gradually became a given.
JUSTICE?
The crimes committed by the two dictatorships are well-documented, in
part because of the constant monitoring of their internal situations by
international human rights groups (Amnesty International having been
founded in 1961), and because both countries ran inquiries into their
pasts: the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Chile
(1990–1991) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
(1995–2003). Both commissions were deeply compromised by political
horse-trading including the endorsing of significant blanket amnesties
to perpetrators of human rights violations, and it is probably accurate
to say the Afrikaner nationalists were encouraged by the success of the
Chilean right-wing in covering up their crimes to embark on their own
exercise in telling the “truth”.
In the case of Chile’s commission, the initial figure of 2,025 dead and
“disappeared” was revised upwards after further investigation in 1996 to
3,197. Roughly 4,000 were killed in South Africa during the states of
emergency from 1985–1990 (an exact figure is impossible to ascertain, in
part because many of the killings were black-on-black and irregularly
recorded). Certain experiences of repression were similar in both
countries, notably the practice (carried out in Argentina under the
Galtieri dictatorship also) of dropping dissidents to their deaths from
aircraft into the ocean. In South Africa, the trial of former chemical
warfare chief Brigadier Wouter Basson revealed the most notorious series
of such death flights.
According to the testimony of Colonel Johan Jurgens Theron – accepted as
genuine by the trial judge – captured Swapo guerrillas were flown, naked
and bound, from a remote airstrip to a location about 100 nautical miles
off the Skeleton Coast, where they were dumped into the ocean from an
altitude of about 3,6km. The indictment against Basson, accused of
supplying the drugs to dope the victims, cited only 24 death flights
between July 1979 and December 1987 (I have eyewitness evidence that
Basson was involved in drugging Zimbabwean detainees who were then
thrown from an aircraft over Mozambique as early as 1978, a charge he
denies). Theron admitted the total number of disappeared “must have been
hundreds”: the indictment cites a rough total of 200 disappeared in this
fashion [18].
In 1999, in a twist of justice, Basson was cleared of the Swapo mass
murder on the grounds that a blanket amnesty had been granted to all
South African security forces operating in South-West Africa just prior
to it gaining independence in 1990 (an event used by the NP as a test
case for a smooth transition to black majority rule). In Chile,
similarly, an amnesty law passed in 1978 when conditions in that country
were starting to change, exempted from prosecution security forces who
had committed human rights violations between 1973 and 1978, covering
the deadliest period of the dictatorship.
South Africa had its torture centres like Vlakplaas south of Pretoria,
just as Chile had its Villa Grimaldi, and its version of Sergio Arellano
Stark’s “Caravan of Death” which swept the Chilean countryside summarily
executing opponents of the regime were the Vlakplaas death-squads of
Eugene de Kock. And in both countries it was only these few relative
middle-rankers of the old regime who were hung out to dry for the sins
of the dictatorships they had served (Stark’s superior officer was only
tried and convicted because he had committed an act of terrorism on US
soil, while the South African generals were all acquitted with Basson
remaining in state employ – and sweeping amnesties for hundreds of
killers left both Chilean and South African victims embittered).
Neither leader ever distanced themselves publicly from sacrificial lambs
of this sort, which ensured they were ringed about by a hard core of
loyal defenders. That some of those defenders, however, should be drawn
from the ranks of the opposition surprised many – but should not have.
In Chile, the Concertación’s first successful post-dictatorship
president, in 1989, was Patricio Alwyn, who had backed the Pinochet coup
in 1973. His contribution to the secret transition was an unspoken pact
not to prosecute Pinochet and his coterie – and the circumscribed Truth
Commission which ignored the fate of the tortured, detained and exiled,
hinting that the coup was inevitable (and thus justifiable). Alwyn’s
successor Eduardo Frei did his best to ensure the military and the
right-wing remained untouched.
The entrenched strength of the Chilean right made compromise by the new
government in favour of neoliberal transformation, perhaps, inevitable.
It cannot be said, however, that in South Africa, where de Klerk’s NP
was forced by the overwhelming ANC victory in 1994 to enter into a
“government of national unity” compromise with the new black elite, that
Mandela was purely a creation of the right, or that a similar process of
corruption by the former dictatorship occurred (despite the NP trying
its damnedest). No, in South Africa, the dominance of the ANC under
Mandela, initially in seven of nine provinces, and later in all nine,
ensured that while the NP had initiated the neoliberal process, it was
the ANC itself which took up the torch with steely resolve – and callous
disdain for the majority who had been seeking economic as well as paper
freedom.
It has been forgotten by all but a few that an almost carbon copy of
PW’s reformist housing policy that saw the townships rise in revolt in
the 1980s was reintroduced as the housing policy of communist Housing
Minster Joe Slovo in the 1990s. The basic concept of undercutting black
demands for self-governance by nominal economic concessions – designed
to draw the black majority into the market, under increasingly lean
neoliberalism and privatisation – remained the same. Slovo’s
sugar-coated poisoned pill would become the hallmark of ANC governance
into the 1990s and 2000s, the harbinger of bitter things the working
class, peasantry and poor were forced to swallow.
Cultivated by PW, then FW de Klerk and the old military-racial-corporate
establishment and backed by Washington and London, the ANC subtly
renounced socialism, with Mandela’s early 1990s demand for the
nationalisation of industries replaced in the late 1990s with a call for
privatisation instead. In government, its moderate socialist
Reconstruction and Development Programme was swiftly supplanted by the
neoliberal Growth, Employment And Redistribution (Gear) programme in
1996 [19]. Likewise, in Chile, the “transition” was marked by the entry
of Allende’s denatured, disembowelled old Socialist Party into the
centrist Concertación alliance which then, cap in hand, flirted with
Pinochet and the right-wing National Renovation Party to win a seat at
the neoliberal feast: a sorry end to even Allende’s compromised vision
if ever there was.
One bizarre project demonstrating the ANC’s deep involvement with the
right-wing was the 1996 Mosagrius Agreement signed between Mandela and
Mozambique’s Joaquim Chissano in which white right-wing South African
farmers would be allowed to expropriate black peasants in Mozambique,
much in the manner the British had forced the Zulus into penury as
labour tenants by enclosing their land in the 19^(th) Century [20].
What precipitated this remarkable rightward shift? Well, the ANC was
directly funded by some exceptionally shady sources: in 1990, the
notoriously corrupt Saudi dictator King Fahd donated $50-million; in
1994 and 1995, Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha, responsible for
repression against the anarcho-syndicalist Awareness League and the
judicial murder of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, donated £2,6-million and
$50-million respectively; and worst of all, Indonesian neo-fascist
dictator Mohammed Suharto, responsible for the bloody pogrom that
resulted in the murder of well over 1-million communists, Chinese and
other people, donated $60-million, for which services, Mandela awarded
him our country’s highest honour, the Star of Good Hope, in 1997 [21].
It says much about the international Left that Mandela has not been
condemned to pariah status for his venality. He who pays the piper calls
the tune.
In South Africa, in the final analysis, the National Party itself
initiated the reforms that led directly to the end of apartheid, a
system that had to end for economic more than social reasons. This is
not to argue that the transition was uncontested: roughly 2,000 people
died every year between 1990 and 1994 in political violence, largely
between black communities – large-scale massacres and assassinations,
much of it provoked by proxy forces like the IFP in Zululand and the
Witdoeke in the Cape, or secret “Third Force” death squads armed by the
state.
These “armed negotiations,” fought by the white and black nationalists
over the corpses of the people, may have seen the NP’s hoped-for “sunset
clause” on special protections for whites evaporate, but by the time
they handed over power in 1994, the main structural elements of grand
apartheid remained unchanged: well into the new millennium,
ANC-controlled municipalities would continue to build matchbox homes for
the black poor according to apartheid geography – on the other side of
the railway tracks from the goods, services, jobs and amenities of the
old white suburbs where a few fortunate blacks were able to settle.
Perhaps the last word should go to right-wing General Constand Viljoen,
whose reputation as a “soldiers’ soldier” allowed him to shelve advanced
plans for an anti-ANC armed putsch on the very eve of democracy in 1994,
enabling the ANC to take the reins of power relatively smoothly. In a
telephonic interview with the now-retired general in 2007, Viljoen
expressed, in echo of Pinochet congratulating his supporters with the
words “mission accomplished,” that he was happy “communism” had not
triumphed in South Africa.
PW and Pinochet died within days of each other in 2006, PW on October 31
and Pinochet on December 10 [22]. Neither dictator was ever under real
threat of being brought to trial and both died content that, in
Pinochet’s words to his troops, their anti-communist mission had been
accomplished and their right-wing neoliberal reforms entrenched in their
country’s new, qualified democracies.
[1] According to the Freedom of Expression Institute, there were 11,000
protests in South Africa in 2006 alone, while a report by the University
of the Free State classed 30 of these revolts, often against a lack of
municipal service delivery, housing evictions and water and electricity
cut-offs, as “serious,” involving violence, burning barricades and
sometimes loss of life at police or vigilante hands. The FXI’s website
is at:
See Democracy’s burning issue, Michael Schmidt, Saturday Star,
Johannesburg (May 28, 2005) in which I note that the both the
intelligence community at its National Security Conference and the
radical social movements agreed that the existence of a permanent
underclass remained the biggest threat to the new bourgeois order.
[2] For a great overview of white settlement in Africa and the
exceptional case of the white South Africans, read The White Africans:
from Colonisation to Liberation by Gerald L’Ange, Jonathan Ball
Publishers, Johannesburg & Cape Town (2005).
[3] For the libertarian/syndicalist origins of the South African left
and the country’s first black, coloured and Indian trade unions, read
“Bakunin’s Heirs in South Africa: race, class and revolutionary
syndicalism from the IWW to the International Socialist League,
1910–1921,” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies,
volume 30, number 1, by Lucien van der Walt (2004). Notably, these
unions were built by militants of all colours.
[4] Those who believe in the ANC’s anti-racist credentials conveniently
forget that from its origins as the South African Native National
Congress in 1912, the ANC was a racial-exclusivist organisation, only
deracialising fully 73 years later on 25 June 1985 when it finally
opened its ruling National Executive Committee to all races.
Segregationist repression cannot fully explain this: after all, the
anarchist and syndicalist movement was and remains multiracial while
legislation outlawing multiracial political parties was only introduced
in 1968. The fact that a simplified form of race-classification remains
in place today (applied even to children born after 1994), is sure to
sow dragons’ teeth for the ANC in future, regardless of the fact the
government uses race to track transformation. Notably missing from the
four official racial categories of white, coloured, Asian and black is
any for indigenous peoples like the self-described Bushmen (who consider
themselves “yellow” people).
[5] In 1983, the Coordinadora Libertaria Latino-Americana recalled the
stillborn revolution so, starting in 1953 when the anarcho-syndicalist
General Confederation of Workers (CGT), which had been founded in 1931
and which absorbed the Chilean IWW in 1951, united with the communist
and the socialist factions of the Confederation of Chilean Workers
(CTCH): “in February the Chilean Workers’ Central (CUT) is born. The
National Committee consists of Clotario Blest (President – an
independent left-wing Christian), Baudilio Cazanova and Isodoro Godoy
(Socialists), and Juan Vargas Puebla (a Communist). The National Council
of the CUT consists of two Christian Democrats (a reformist
Church-supported party), seven Socialists, a Phalangist, a Communist and
four anarcho-syndicalists (Ernesto Miranda, Ramon Dominguez, Hector
Duran and Celso Poblete). The unification of the labour movement is
followed by a period of unity and action. Manual workers, intellectuals,
campesinos [peasants], students and professional workers join up with
the CUT. The workers are developing a consensus towards a confrontation
with the bosses and the State. This is reflected in a 15-point program
drawn up by the National Council. The CUT develops a campaign of partial
work stoppages, preparing for a general strike. The workers are
demanding changes that are social and political as well as economic.
1956: It is in this social climate of rebellion that the national
general strike of July 1956 takes place. For 48 hours nothing moves in
Chile. Ibáñez threatens to resign and give the responsibility for
running the country to the CUT. However, 70 percent of the leaders of
the CUT are of the Marxist parties. Ibáñez calls upon the left-wing
parties for a solution to the crisis. The parties of the left ask the
leaders of the CUT to call off the general strike. A committee is set up
by the CUT, headed by the CUT president, Clotario Blest. When the
committee presents a list of demands to the Ibáñez government, Ibáñez
demands that the workers return to work before he will respond. With the
Communists, Socialists and Radicals supporting this proposal, the
general strike is called off. The four anarcho-syndicalists on the
National Council protest that the strike should not be called off
without first consulting the rank-and-file, but they are overruled. The
return to work creates disorientation and demoralization. Having gained
nothing, Chilean workers cannot understand why they should return to
work. 1957: A new general strike is called, to back up the original
demands made during the July 1956 general strike, which had not yet been
fulfilled. This strike is a failure and the government responds with
strong repressive measures. After this experience, the four
anarcho-syndicalist members resign from the National Council. The 1956
general strike, and its aftermath, demonstrated the destructive role of
the political parties, which prevented revolutionary unionism from
accomplishing its work of social transformation. The interests of the
political parties were successfully imposed above those of the workers.
After 1957, the CUT became a fish pond, with the parties fighting for
control of the unions. Under the government of Allende, the CUT
continued as an arena for the manipulations of the Marxist political
parties, and the Christian Democrats perfected their competition for
control, as well.”
[6] The Rise of the South African Reich, Brian Bunting (1964), available
online at:
[7] Between Crown and Swastika: the Impact of the Radical Right on the
Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (1991), Patrick J
Furlong, Wesleyan University Press, London (1991).
[8] A photograph of this policeman in action is on display at the Hector
Petersen Museum in Soweto.
[9] The Bitter Transition 1990–1998, Marny Requa, Chapter 5 of The
Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice, Roger Burbach, Zed
Books, New York & London (2003). I have drawn heavily on this book and
Requa’s chapter in particular for my understanding of the transition in
Chile.
[10] José Antonio Gutierrez Dantón suggests that Pinochet’s real support
in the plebiscite was “inflated in order to give some legitimacy to
Pinochet’s legacy (which is up to the present virtually untouched). Real
votes for the dictator I assume would have been around 25%, that is, the
votes of the traditional right wing in most elections”.
[11] On Jeremy Cronin speaking about the rank-and-file “syndicalists” in
Cosatu, read Fat-cat Nationalism vs. the Ultra-hungry, Michael Schmidt,
Zabalaza, Johannesburg (June 2003), online at:
[12] For a great libertarian socialist critique of the 1976 uprising by
one of its leading participants, Selby Semela, read Reflections on Black
Consciousness and the South African Revolution, by Selby Semela, Sam
Thompson & Norman Abraham, Zabalaza Books, Johannesburg (1979, 2005),
online at:
[13] For a critique on the politics of the UDF, other resistance
organisations and the compromises they struck, read Lessons of Struggle:
South African Internal Opposition, 1960–1990, by Anthony W. Marx, Oxford
University Press, New York (1992).
[14] The MIR included Trotskyists and an anarchist component from its
founding in 1965 until the anarchists left in 1967. In 1987, the armed
wing of the Chilean Communist Party (PCC), the Manuel Rodriguez Popular
Front (FPMR), split from the party and went it alone, attracting a new
generation of anarchist guerrillas into its ranks. Ironically, the CUAC
was founded in 1999 by a core of ex-MIR and other guerrillas and a new
generation of militants. In a twist of fate, acting for the Anarchist
Black Cross (South Africa), I visited former MIR militant Jaime
Yovanovic Prieto – known as Profesor Jota – jailed in South Africa’s
Modderbee Prison in 2002, prior to his extradition to Chile to face
charges of having assassinated the military governor of Santiago. See
[15] Gutierrez Dantón says: “The pact you mention between Pinochet and
Zaldivar in 1998 has to be put in context (for it is not directly linked
to the 1985–1986 secret dealings for the transition to democracy). At
that stage both the Concertación and the right wing wanted to bridge the
useless divide put [up] by the 11^(th) of September (useless for their
purposes), so they decided to eliminate the national holidays that ended
up in protest anyway, and declared it a sham day of national unity,”
much like how Boer-supremacist Day of the Vow in South Africa was recast
by the ANC-NP government of national unity as the Day of Reconciliation.
[16] For a timeline of the secret negotiations in South Africa in the
1980s, go to:
[17] Madiba ‘death plot’ revealed, Michael Schmidt, Saturday Star,
Johannesburg (June 11, 2005). The declassified signal was dated July 26,
1990, from Ambassador Bill Swing at the US Embassy in Pretoria to
Secretary of State James Baker III at the US State Department in
Washington. Maharaj said the claim was government disinformation
intended to drive a wedge between the ANC and the SACP, something Swing,
in the signal, considered plausible. Swing claimed not to remember
sending the signal when I interviewed him, however.
[18] No final solution to SA’s worst war crime, Michael Schmidt,
Saturday Star, Johannesburg (February 26, 2005).
[19] For a comprehensive overview of how the right wing’s neoliberal
agenda was rescued by the ANC, read Elite Transition: From Apartheid to
Neoliberalism in South Africa, Patrick Bond, UKZN Press, Durban (2005).
Also read Gear versus Social Security by Lucien van der Walt, South
African Labour Bulletin, Volume 4 Number 23, Johannesburg (June 2000),
online at:
[20] For a critique of Mosagrius, read Exporting Apartheid to
Sub-Saharan Africa, by Michel Chossudovsky, Ottawa (1996), online at:
Also, read The ANC and the South African White Right in Mozambique,
Michael Schmidt, Workers’ Solidarity, Johannesburg (1998), online at:
[21] For more detail on Mandela awarding the Star of Good Hope to
Suharto is the following, from Human Rights Watch’s 2000 report on South
Africa
For an overview of political party funding in South Africa, go to:
“Mandela will sell arms to Indonesia ‘without hesitation’,” Electronic
Mail and Guardian, www.mg.co.za/news , July 15, 1997. On the same
occasion, Mandela visited imprisoned East Timorese resistance leader
Xanana Gusmão, marking the first time that Xanana, imprisoned since
1992, had been allowed out of detention to meet a visiting dignitary.
The visit thus helped give an enhanced international profile to Xanana’s
plight. In November 1997, however, Mandela conferred to Suharto the
Order of Good Hope. In 1995 Mandela admitted that Indonesia had given
financial support to the ANC. José Ramos Horta, “Mandela must take a
stand on East Timor,” Sunday Independent, (Johannesburg), May 10, 1998;
“Gaffes almost sink Mandela’s peace initiative,” SouthScan, vol.12,
no.28 (August 8, 1997); Stefaans Brümmer, “Mandela’s strange links to
human rights abuser,” Mail and Guardian, (Johannesburg), May 26, 1995,
and Gaye Davis, “Mandela placates East Timorese from his bed,” Mail and
Guardian, (Johannesburg), September 20, 1996. Another link is at
PoliticsWeb:
Two of the ANC’s biggest donors, in the 1990s, were Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi of Libya and President Suharto of Indonesia. Not only did
Mandela refrain from criticising their lamentable human rights records
but he interceded diplomatically on their behalf, and awarded them South
Africa’s highest honour. Suharto was awarded a state visit, a 21-gun
salute, and The Order of Good Hope (gold class). In April 1999 Mandela
acknowledged to an audience in Johannesburg that Suharto had given the
ANC a total of 60 million dollars. An initial donation of 50 million
dollars had been followed up by a further 10 million. The Telegraph
(London) reported that Gaddafi was known to have given the ANC well over
ten million dollars. Here’s a Reuters photograph of the event:
[22] Read my obituary Ghost of PW haunts George, Michael Schmidt, Sunday
Argus, Cape Town (November 5, 2006), online at:
PW certainly did not like me very much because I repeatedly exhumed the
skeletons in his closet: the last time I phoned him at home in
retirement, he was outraged that I compared his luxury lifestyle in his
multi-million-rand mansion De Anker to those of the poor coloureds
living on the other side of the lagoon at Wilderness. For a more
standard obituary, read