(The following is the text of a speech delivered at a meeting in
the House of Commons by Barney Desai, President of the South
African Coloured Peoples Congress.)
Recent developments
During the period 1962-64, the ruling white oligarchy conducted its most successful onslaught--against the broad spectrum of the opposition forces within South Africa.
On the eve of launching massive attacks on police stations and military installations, the South African security forces intervened success=fully and arrested over 5,000 members of the Pan-Africanist Congress (Poq 0), breaking the back of the operation even before it had commenced. This was followed by the detention of hundreds of members of the Corgress Movement and the dramatic arrest of its leaders at Rivonia. The High Command of Umkonto we Siswe was now in captivity after having directed nationwide sabotage. Shortly thereafter, the Natal Regional Command of Umkonto was uncovered and mass trials of A.N.@. leaders in Port Elizabeth, its strong point of organisation, commenced. Leaders of the Coloured Peoples! Congress, Indian Congress, Trade Union Congress, were detained, jailed, banned. Their organisations grinding to a standstill in face of vicious suppression, Less than six months after the life sentences were imposed on the Rivonia leaders, the S.A. Security forces announced the capture of the new High Command of Umkonto. Five of them were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The National Liberation Front collapsed with the jailing of Dr. Alexander and ten others - its leadership.
Socialist and left wing members of the Liberal Party,organised under the banner of the African Resistance Movement, made a powerful but short lived appearance. They had successfully conducted sabotage operations against rail and electrical installations. Like all the other organise ations, they produced members who were to break down under solitary confinement and torture. The organisation could not survive against the full weight of police terror. The defection of its leaders, who became state witnesses, was the nail in the A.R.M. coffin.
The Communist Party of South Africa is presently engaged in a grim battle for survival. The defection of Central Committee member Piet Beyleveld is indeed a grave blow to this Party. It is significant that even before the present Fisher trial, Beyleveld, in his evidenee for the State, recalls that the Central Committee of the Party had considered "going dormant" in the face of the crushing setbacks that were being :wiit= fered by itself and other liberation forces. The various elements of the _ Non-European Unity Movement have been silenced by bannings and vicious restrictions on its leadership.
During the period 1963-64, over 1,000 persons have been sentenced to a total of over 7,000 years' imprisonment, twenty-one have been executed, thousands more are either going through the process of trials or are awaiting trial in prisons. The em@gency regulations are still in force (since 1960) in the Transkei. Hundreds of peasant leaders are detained there.
Progressive newspapers have closed down, the remaining ones are in the process of winding up.
The Whites Move to the Right
Far from "seeing the light and mending their ways", or what Archbishop Hurley, President of the Institute of Race Relations, S. Africa, ca}ls "a change of heart", White South Africa is stampeding into the Verwoerd camp. After all, the English and Afrikaans speaking whites have always agreed on white supremacy = they fall out on how to effectively maintain this race domination and super exploitation - whether it was to be through deceit and cunning or through naked, brutal force. As the oppressed non-= white mass, with heightened political consciousness, can no longer be kept at bay through more "benevolent" methods = the entire white population has opted for force to maintain the status quo.
The arms build up continues at an alarming rate. In 1964 alone, South Africa allocated £150 million for defence and security expenditure. Large numbers of civilians, including high school youth, are being trained in the use of fire arms. Vorster stated on September llth, 1963, that 27,250 women belong to pistol clubs where they received instructions from police officers. In November of 1963, Professor Le Roux, Vice President of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, stated that South Africa was developing poison gases known to be capable of massive devastation.. He said, "We appreciate that these poisons are capable of being delivered in vast quantities by aircraft and longerange missiles, and they can have a destructive effect similar to that of a nuclear bomb of 20 megatonse. These gases are ten times more poisonous than any other substance you can name." (Reuters, 7th November, 1963).
No doubt encouraged by this information, Dr. Donges, Minister of Finance, boldly proclaimed that South Africa could cope with any "Army of Liberation" which did not receive financial and military support from at least two great powers. (Cape Times, 18th September, 1963.)
The "economic boom" has no doubt favoured the extravagant military budget. The white population have also benefitted materially from the "boom". White incomes have soared, resulting in the prices on consumer goods rocketing. Non-white wage rates remain pegged and efforts to make ends meet become impossible,
The South African immigration policy of recent years has met with great success, in 1964, a record total of 40,000 white immigrants entered the country. Of this figure, some 12,600 were British.
Despite the officially proclaimed Boycott of South African goods by over 52 countries, South Africa's export trade showed an improvement in 1964 of over £10 million on the 1963 figure. Trade with Britain, West Germany, U.S.A. and Japan maintained a steady level or else showed an increase.
Imperialism and the Status Quo.
A third of British overseas investments are located in South Africa. She has a favourable balance of trade and receives an annual return from
British firms alone, some £30 millions in dividends on branch profits. Despite the declared impog,tibnof an arms embargo by the U.K., there remains an uninterrupted, undeclared flow of armaments to Verwoerd. In Jan~ vary of this year (1965) Britain agreed to supply South Africa with three submarines valued at £13m. The order has been justified, rather ominously, on the grounds of the existence of "secret clauses" to the Simonstown Agreement between Britain and South Africa. The Bucaneer contract was honoured in the interest of business and at the expense of $18 oppressed nonwhites. It has not gone unnoticed that South African? St? € receive training in the U.K., that ICI has been allowed to invest millions in partnership with De Beers, for the setting up of arms factories in South Africa, that British technical experts have been flown out to give the necessary advice and services for the manufacture of weapons which will be used for the merciless suppression of the militant struggle of 134 million nonwhites.
The least we are entitled to expect from the British Government the socialist administration - is an unequivocal assurance that there will be no circumvention of the arms embargo. It is our contention that the Simonstown Agreement must be terminated if the arms embargo is to be effective. We cannot agree that the U.K. is morally bound to honour existing contracts with a regime that has been castigated by British represent=atives at the United Nations as "indefensible and abhorrent".
The United States is second on the list of South Africa's major trad-= ing partners. U.S. investors have also found South Africa a source of substantial revenues. Earnings rose from $50 million in 1960 to $86 million in 1963. A rough indication of the relatively high yields obtained from investments in South Africa may be seen in a comparison of the ratio of South African to total United States direct investment overseas. In 1963 these ratios were 1.9% and 1.0% respectively. (UN Report A/5 825 December 8th, 1964). Apartheid pays. The U.S. announced an arms embargo of South Africa in December, 1963 - with the important qualification that "all existing contracts for the supply of ground to air missiles" would be fulfilled. A U.S. Navy spokesman said that co-operation would be maintained with the South Africén Defence Forces for "strategic reasons".
West Germany has become an important factor in South Africa almost overnight. West Germany is not only the third most important trading partner but her investments in South Africa take third place after the U.S. ‘Her co-operation with Verwoerd's aggressive war plans is cause for grave alarm.
In July, 1961, J.J. Fouche, S.A. Defence Minister, negotiated secret defence agreements with Bonn. The task of implementing these agreements on behalf of Bonn has been entrusted to Major General Friedrich Wilhelm van Mellenthin - former member of theGeneral Staff of Hitler's Wehrmacht. The General's presence in South Africa is justified under the guise of his position as General Manager of Lufthansa Airways. He is a strong proponent of the idea of a South Atlantic freaty Organisation (SATO), which would include within its framework Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia - to defend colonialism.
Herman Abs, Chairman of the Board of Deutsche Bank and described by
the United States as one of the "industrial Bosses who exercised the greatest influence on the direction of Hitler's policies", in the autum of 1963 visited South Africa and had long conversations with (overnment Ministers. Abs, who is also a leading member of the Atomic Commission of West Germany, took part in talks with Minister Diederichs who bears chief responsibility for the S.A. Atomic Energy Board. It is suggested the talks were connected with measures necessary to commence the large scale production of fissionable material for nuclear bombs, following the successful completion of tests on the production of nuclear grade uranium sa and reactor material in the pilot plant at Pelindaba near Johannes~
A leading theoretician on the S.A. Atomic Energy Board is Dr. Heinz Verleger, former government counsellor (in the Nazi era) in the Physical- Techical Reich Institute in Berlin. Twenty million pounds have already been set aside for nuclear power plants to be built for Escom. If the plant is to have a capacity of more than 100,000 kilowatts South Africa is well on the way, with German assistance, to producing the A-Bomb.
Earlier, I referred to Professor le Roux's electrifying announcement about the development of poison gases It is now clear that the expertise for the production of poison gases comes from a group of scientists formerly employed by IG Farben. They are headed by Gunther Pruss, who served in a leading position in the poison gas research department of the Nazi Wehrmacht. The production experience and licenses of the former IG Farben trust were made available to the specialist group by Dr. Felix Prentzel, formerly ministerial director in the West German Federal Economics Ministry under Ludwig Erhard. Today he is the Director General of Degussa, a nuclear concern, of which Abs is the Chairman.
The evidence of involvement is overwhelming and if there was still doubt of the real sentiments of the West German leaders, we need only refer to the statement of Dr. Heinrich Lubke, President of the Federal German Republic who said, in 1959, after a visit to South Africa, "The problems (of the natives) are in good hands with the Government". (Information Sudafrika, April, 1959).
The Road Ahead
There had been the belief in recent years that the intransigence of the Verwoerdian regime could be broken down by a short, but intensive struggle on all fronts. To be sure, some leaders had held before the people the prospect of constitutional change by the white supremacy government under pressures from imperialism. To both beliefs therehas emerged a negative answer. The Verwoerd Government, backed by western imperialism, is powerful and has the capacity to conduct. a long struggle in defence of the status quo and, secondly, imperialism will only intervene to stabilize the situation in order to protect their investments. This action might well take the character of staving off the revolutionary conflagration.
It appears that where some organisation sought to coerce the Verwoerd Government to bring about changes, by a resort to force, the Government not only suppressed their violent attempts ruthlessly, but in addition,
were assisted by Western countries in this suppression. The lessons that we have learned vis-a-vis Imperialism's intertwining interest with White supremacy, are being assimilated by our people. The result will be that the struggle for political equality and economic justice is going to be resumed on a higher level, taking not only an anti-Verwoerd, but an out andout anti-imperialist turn. In such a confrontation force will decide the outcome.
It is now widely predicted that "chaos and barbarism" will be the out come of such a revolution. ‘Je reject this prophesy. "Chaos" will be the order of the day for the mine owners, industrialists and land barons. The revolution of the oppressed, dispossessed, disenfranchised, non-white chattel, will be its own authority. It is our prophesy that barbarism will come from the privileged whites, who are presently arming themselves with modern weapons and poison gases to challenge the ideas that are ripe for South Africa.