19 September 19861
On behalf of the fighting people of South Africa and their national liberation movement, the African National Congress, my delegation is particularly pleased to congratulate the president and his country, Bangladesh, on his taking the helm of the General Assembly at its forty-first session and this special session.2
His unanimous election is eloquent testimony to our collective confidence in his diplomatic skills and ability, as well as his vast experience, all of which will stand the Assembly in good stead during the work of this session and the forty-first session.
We also thank and congratulate Mr. Jaime de Pinies,3 who led the work of the General Assembly at its fortieth session with exemplary competence.
When we ought this year to have been celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Namibian independence, we meet instead in this special session to continue the arduous search for effective ways to accelerate the process of Namibian decolonization. The lack of progress on so pressing an issue is all the more unbearable because we already have, inter alia, resolution 2145 (XXI) of 27 October 1966 and Security Council resolution 435 (1978), which constitute the formal instruments which ought to have assured Namibia's speedy decolonization.
It is not for lack of effort on the part of the Namibian people and their sole authentic representative, the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), that we continue to be confronted with an apparent stalemate. The Namibian people's profound commitment to freedom, their capacity for struggle and their willingness to make all necessary sacrifices under the distinguished and statesmanlike leadership of SWAPO is well known and beyond question. Lack of progress must be attributed not only to the intransigence of the Botha regime but also to the Reagan Administration, which through the policy of constructive engagement continues to invoke and insist upon extraneous and therefore irrelevant issues such as linkage, in order to frustrate attempts to implement Security Council resolution 435 (1978).
As a result of its heinous policies and practices of apartheid, the Pretoria racist regime continues its violently repressive reign of terror over the South African people, its illegal and militaristic occupation of Namibia and its aggression against and destabilization of the front-line States and other States in the region, particularly the People's Republic of Angola.
Even as we speak, the heroic people of Namibia continue to chafe under the massive brutal military build-up and reign of State terrorism instituted by the Pretoria racist regime, which has also transformed their motherland into a vast military barrack and put it to use as a launching pad for its wanton and savage attacks against independent Africa.
Through strategems designed to impose puppet proxies in order to circumvent Security Council resolution 435 (1978) and to perpetuate its illegal occupation of Namibia, the racist regime is also attempting to programme Namibia for civil strife.
In all, as the result of apartheid, the situation in southern Africa continues to deteriorate at an accelerating pace. Left unchecked, the conflict being maintained and fuelled by the Pretoria regime is bound to take a qualitative leap, further escalating hostilities, with disastrous repercussions far beyond the region and with the gravest consequences for international peace and security.
SWAPO has declared 1986 the Year of General Mobilization and Decisive Action for Final Victory. As usual, the Namibian people have responded with all their might to translate that declaration into revolutionary reality. Following the inflexible logic dictated by the violently repressive intransigence of the Pretoria racist regime's illegal occupation of Namibia, mounting resistance by the Namibian people has been accompanied by the deepening and widening of armed struggle.
This has conferred an increasingly significant role upon the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), within the broad and popular Namibian onslaught, led by SWAPO, against Pretoria's illegal occupation and for genuine freedom.
It is against this background that I wish to address special greetings and most heartfelt congratulations to PLAN, which in its 20 years of existence has, through relentless combat action, made Pretoria's illegal occupation of Namibia 20 years too costly.
The twentieth anniversary of PLAN and the launching of the Namibian armed struggle coincides with the further deepening of the irreversible crisis of apartheid. The imposition of virtual martial law in South Africa's black townships through two impositions of a state of emergency in less than two years has signally failed to prevent the collapse of the Fascist ideology of apartheid and the disintegration of its racist political programme.
Nor has it stemmed the multiplication of deep divisions within the ranks of both the leadership and the traditional constituency of the Pretoria racist regime. The people have wrested the initiative from that regime through mass united action on every front. Where they have paralysed apartheid's administrative extensions into black communities, they are replacing them with democratic people's committees and tribunals, which in turn enable them to take control over their destiny and to dispense true justice. Where they have forced Bantu education to grind to a halt, students are replacing it with a new and radical alternative – a people's education whose content is the message of liberation. The workers are today advancing under the banner of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), attacking apartheid through strikes at its points of production and through a consumer boycott at its marketing outlets.
In the townships, the people are creating combat units to defend their revolutionary advances, thus reinforcing the armed offensive of Umkhonto we Sizwe to raise the armed struggle to the level of a people's war and paving the way for the armed seizure of power by the South African people under the leadership of the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC).
The reign of terror imposed by means of states of emergency has failed to reverse the South African people's campaign to render apartheid unworkable and the country ungovernable. Instead, it has stripped the Pretoria racist regime of all pretence of legality and has exposed the narrow limits of repressive military might.
In an unwitting confession of abject failure, the racist regime has resorted to a new and far more sinister strategy. It is resorting to the use of death squads and vigilantes to do its bloody work, thus effectively creating a body of black contras.
Yet, as in the past, because there is no alternative to the destruction of apartheid and the creation of a free, united, non-racial and democratic South Africa, the racist regime is again bound to fail.
At this moment, even with the townships under heavy military siege, the people are rallying to the battle cry, "From ungovernability to people's power". Thus, like the people of Namibia, the people of South Africa confront the same racist army of occupation in the townships. Whether we fight in Namibia under the leadership of SWAPO or in South Africa under the ANC, our struggle is one against a common enemy. Our mutual solidarity is completely natural.
This special session was preceded by the eighth annual meeting of the Central Committee of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). That important meeting of SWAPO's leadership gave appropriate recognition to the development of a political climate in Namibia which is enhancing the prospects of liberation. In particular, it saluted and underlined the importance of consolidating the broad mass unity of Namibian workers, youth, students, women, intellectuals and the peasantry, as demonstrated by the highly successful mass rally called by SWAPO and held in Windhoek last 27 July despite harassment and intimidation by the occupation regime.
It correctly reiterated SWAPO's rejection of the irrelevant linkage of the process of Nambian decolonization to the presence of Cuban internationalist forces in the sovereign and independent People's Republic of Angola. It also reiterated SWAPO's rejection of whatever puppet arrangements the Pretoria racist regime has made or may make in future in an effort to derail the struggle of the Namibian people.
It condemned the Reagan Administration's disastrous policy of constructive engagement, which is also the mother of linkage, if not the code word for military alliance with the Pretoria regime. It also condemned the Pretoria regime's policy of destabilization of the front-line States, especially the People's Republic of Angola, as well as the covert and overt support by the Reagan Administration for UNITA bandits. Most importantly, the final declaration of that historic meeting gave recognition to the fact that, in the new situation, with appropriate and possible forms of principled international co-operation, the Namibian people's struggle, led by SWAPO, stands within reach of victory.
In the spirit of the declaration of the eighth annual meeting of the Central Committee of SWAPO, which was also a most moving expression of principled solidarity with the people of South Africa, led by the ANC, we reiterate our unyielding solidarity with the struggle of the Namibian people, led by SWAPO.
The special session of the General Assembly comes in the wake of several international and intergovernmental conferences on southern Africa and other related issues. Their impressive outcomes are most relevant to the work of the special session and thus merit the most serious attention. We are referring in particular to the World Conference on Sanctions against Racist South Africa held at Paris, France, from 16 to 20 June 1986 and the International Conference for the Immediate Independence of Namibia held at Vienna, Austria, from 7 to 11 July 1986. In the final declaration of the former and in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, as well as in the Appeal for the Immediate Independence of Namibia issued by the eminent persons participating in the latter Conference, realistic and adequate recognition was given to the sad fact that all forms of peaceful persuasion had failed to enlist the co-operation of the Pretoria regime in the quest for lasting peace and genuine freedom in southern Africa. They further underlined the increasingly urgent need to impose meaningful and effective sanctions against the Pretoria racist regime if catastrophe is to be averted. They also underscored the imperative need to render increased and comprehensive support and assistance to the national liberation movements, as well as to the front-line and other independent States, in southern Africa. The final documents adopted at the twenty-second ordinary session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African unity (OAU) held at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and at the Eighth Summit Meeting of the countries members of the Non-Aligned Movement held at Harare, Zimbabwe, reaffirmed and stressed the same positions. They called in particular for the intensification of the global campaign for the imposition of comprehensive and mandatory sanctions against the Botha regime. Both organizations also decided to establish several solidarity funds to aid the victims of apartheid in the whole of southern Africa.
So, once more we have clear-cut evidence that the overwhelming majority of mankind recognizes the necessity of intensifying all-round support and assistance to all the victims of apartheid, as well as the urgent need to impose comprehensive and mandatory sanctions under Chapter VII of the Charter against the Pretoria racist regime. This special session on Namibia should take proper and adequate account of this important fact and use it as a basis for further action. Any other line of action is bound to be inadequate and would only serve to permit a further aggravation of the situation in southern Africa.
We wish at this point to thank the Secretary-General of the United Nations for his relentless efforts to ensure the earliest implementation of Security Council resolution 435 (1978). We are particularly delighted to see him back in good health and at the helm of the Organization.
We also wish to thank and congratulate the United Nations Council for Namibia, and the United Nations Commissioner for Namibia for their selfless endeavours in the most difficult of circumstances in support of the Namibian people's just struggle for freedom.
Finally, we wish to reaffirm our solidarity with all peoples and their national liberation movements or other leadership structures engaged in struggles against oppression, war and want and for a free, humane, peaceful and abundant future for themselves and for all mankind.
1. United Nations document A/S-14/PV.6