11 October 19881
In the year of United Actions for People's Power the leadership and membership of the African National Congress and of our revolutionary army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, as well as the fighting people of South Africa, extend the warmest and most fraternal greetings to all present at this meeting.
In the same vein, we would also like to register our profound gratitude to Mr. Joseph Garba2 and to the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, Mr. Satiros Mousouris, for the dynamic and action-oriented leadership they continue to give to the United Nations Special Committee and to the United Nations Centre against Apartheid, respectively. We wish likewise to express sincere thanks to those two great bodies for the impressive work they continue to do to galvanize the peoples of the world in support of our struggle to eradicate apartheid and to create a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa.
One thing remains predictably and disturbingly constant. Even as our struggle has continued to advance, even as the fortunes of apartheid have continued to decline, the intransigent opposition of the Pretoria racist regime to necessary and therefore inevitable change has continued undiminished. This has, of course, refuted the fallacious argument of allies of Pretoria that apartheid should be transformed through reforms, rather than eradicated. It has also exposed the insidious emptiness of Pretoria's so-called reforms, which have always been followed by still greater repression. It has also confirmed the correctness of our people's rejection of every reform Pretoria has tried. This is truer today than ever before.
For more than three years our country has been living under a state of emergency, because of the increasingly vicious repressive measures by which the Pretoria regime hoped to crush our people's resistance. Precisely because the state of emergency has failed to achieve its intended objectives, the Pretoria regime has, on three occasions, resorted to its renewal, extension and further tightening. As a result of the virtually limitless powers given to the regime's security forces by specific provisions of the state of emergency, well over 3,000 South African patriots have lost their lives at the hands of Pretoria state terrorism. In the same three-year period over 30,000 other patriots have been detained without trial, many of them tortured in detention, and some have even lost their lives in apartheid dungeons. Among the numerous victims of this system which the world has condemned as a crime against humanity - there is an alarming increase in the number of child detainees and child casualties.
Pretoria now routinely resorts to the use of its judiciary to assassinate its opponents. In addition to the fact that South Africa has the world's largest per capita political prisoner population, it is also responsible for the world's highest rate of executions. Lately, in a bid to escape the attention of international public opinion, it has taken to executing patriots secretly and only afterwards announcing the executions. At least seven patriots have been executed in this way in this year alone. As we speak, over 69 patriots, including the Sharpeville Six, are on apartheid's death row.
Unwilling to concede that our struggle is for liberation, Pretoria has always sought to obliterate the distinction between political prisoners and convicted criminals. Thus, although the African National Congress (ANC) has acceded to the Geneva Protocols and their Annexes on the conduct of war, Pretoria has refused to do the same and so continues to refuse to treat freedom fighters as prisoners of war. This of course underscores the fact that Pretoria continues to insist on seeing our just struggle against apartheid and for freedom as criminal. This attitude on the part of Pretoria is among the many factors resulting from the regime's intransigence that obviate the possibility of a negotiated resolution to the South African conflict and all but lock our country into an upward spiral of conflict that could lead to an interracial blood-bath of unheard-of dimensions.
In an equally alarming development, Pretoria has also taken to abducting South African exiles from neighbouring States where they have sought asylum. Early last year its agents abducted Ishmael Ibrahim3 from Swaziland in exactly this manner. In so doing it violated the territorial integrity of Swaziland and challenged the right of that country to give sanctuary to those fleeing for their lives from apartheid. Ishmael Ibrahim has since been placed on trial. He has been accused of offences which carry the death sentence if conviction is secured. We must demand that he, like others who have been similarly abducted, be released and returned to the countries from which they were abducted.
To aggravate further an already explosive situation, the Pretoria racist regime has also either enlisted or pressed into service vigilantes, kitskonstables and death squads to abduct and assassinate men, women and children in order to consolidate apartheid's reign of terror.
On 24 February this year, Pretoria imposed severe restrictions, amounting to a virtual ban, on 17 organizations - including the United Democratic Front (UDF).
Despite the military encirclement of and the building of walls around townships, the rent boycott continues; despite the creation of so-called joint management committees to manipulate the plight of our people in order to restore the eroding authority of Pretoria, street, block and township committees continue to co-operate, although in changed form as demanded by changed circumstances. That is true also of the people's tribunals and the people's defence committees structures through which our people dispense revolutionary justice and defend their revolutionary advances, respectively.
Despite the state of emergency, despite the most determined efforts of apartheid State terrorism, our struggle - which some used to regard as being confined to the townships - is already giving a good account of itself in the white suburbs. In a parallel and related development, and as a result of the failure of Pretoria's propaganda to mask the inhuman reality of apartheid, whites are in increasing numbers joining the struggle against apartheid, at different levels and in a variety of ways. The most conspicuous result of that development was the emergence of the End Conscription Campaign. The regime, afraid of the further erosion of its white support, has now banned that Campaign, but it has failed to stop the growth of white resistance to apartheid. In fact, many young whites are finding their way into Umkhonto we Sizwe to become active participants in the armed struggle.
Recently, the regime prohibited the holding of the all-in conference that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the mass democratic movements had called, for the purpose of expanding and consolidating our people's united front and for the working out of strategies specifically for a concerted rejection of the sham elections and in general for the further escalation of our struggle and resistance to intensified repression. The prohibition was preceded and then parallelled by the bombing, and sometimes the destroying, of buildings like Khotso House, which contained the offices of mass democratic organizations as well as the South African Council of Churches.
Two weeks ago the regime began a swoop on individuals it considered likely to be focal points of resistance to the sham elections. As usual this exercise was distinguished by its arbitrariness. In the first round the regime detained about 400 patriots. The arrest and detentions continue. All in all, the Pretoria regime has in its prisons or detention cells as well as under restriction a record number of political prisoners, detainees and restrictees. With the further escalation of its repressive State violence, it is already transforming its police State into the proverbial "killing fields". On this solemn occasion we must undertake to intensify, as never before, the campaign for the immediate and unconditional release of Nelson Mandela and all other political prisoners and detainees and for the lifting of restrictions on all restrictees.
Early this year the Pretoria racist regime suffered a decisive military defeat at the hands of the FAPLA forces of the People's Republic of Angola, the combatants of the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), and Cuban internationalist troops in southern Angola. That development shattered the myth of the military invincibility of apartheid, especially in the eyes of its traditional white constituency in South Africa itself. As a result, a growing number of whites, faced with the prospect of having to die in defence of apartheid, are refusing to serve in the South African Defence Force (SADF). Others, including the official apartheid State church - the Dutch Reformed Church - are questioning the role of the SADF as an instrument of the regime's repression at home and its aggression and destabilization abroad. That has in turn reinforced the process of the fragmentation of what used to be referred to as the "granite rock" of white unity around apartheid. It has led to the emergence of a significant body of white public opinion that is beginning to question the licence of Pretoria to rule and perpetuate itself by violence. That development, along with the escalation of our struggle as well as that of the fraternal people of Namibia, led by the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), has now compelled Pretoria to join the People's Republic of Angola in a search for a negotiated solution to the conflict in south-western Africa. Like the People's Republic of Angola, we believe that central to the resolution of this conflict must be the decolonization of Namibia in accordance with the provisions of Security Council resolution 435 (1978), without the encumbrance of any kind of linkage. We wish to commend the People's Republic of Angola and Socialist Cuba for their good faith and seriousness in continuing to participate in the negotiating process. We must also commend SWAPO for its statesmanlike conduct, as shown for example by its willingness to observe a cease-fire in order to facilitate the negotiating process. To ensure that Pretoria remains at the negotiating table and that the negotiations end in success, in favour of the struggling people of southern Africa, we must keep up and intensify these pressures.
Despite the public relations tricks and delaying tactics and other manoeuvres of Pretoria, we must intensify our campaigns: first, for the total isolation of the Pretoria racist regime; secondly, for the immediate and unconditional release of Nelson Mandela and all other political prisoners and detainees; thirdly, to save the lives of patriots in apartheid's death row; fourthly, for the rejection of Pretoria's pseudo-reforms, especially the forthcoming so-called municipal elections and other extensions and variations of its already domestically and internationally rejected "constitution"; and fifthly, for greater all-round political, diplomatic, moral and material support for the ANC and SWAPO, and for the front-line and other independent African States in southern Africa.
Finally, we wish to reaffirm our principled solidarity with the struggles of the people of Namibia, led by SWAPO; the people of Palestine, led by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the people of the Western Sahara, led by POLISARIO; the people of EI Salvador, led by the FDR/FMLN; the people of Free Nicaragua, led by the FSLN; and people everywhere struggling for a free, prosperous and peaceful future for all mankind.
Footnote
1. Mr. Nkadimeng, Secretary General of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, spoke on behalf of the ANC.
2. Source: United Nations document A/AC.115/PV.621
General J. N. Garba (Nigeria), Chairman of the Special Committee against Apartheid