25 October 19741
The delegation of the African National Congress of South Africa thanks the Security Council for having invited it to appear before this Council. We wish also, as others speakers before us have done, to pay a tribute to you, Sir, and to endorse the fact that you and your country have been correctly charged with the historic task of presiding over these crucial meetings of the Council.2
Allow me also, on behalf of our delegation, to extend the deepest condolences of our organization and people to the Iraqi delegation and people in connexion with the untimely death of their Foreign Minister.
It was our intention to deal as succinctly as possible with the issues now confronting the Council but because of the situation created by the representative of the racist and Fascist regime of South Africa in his address to the Council, we are compelled to traverse some of the area which he covered. We crave your indulgence and hope that we shall in the end demonstrate the benefits of this exercise. We will submit in this address that the statement of Mr. Botha,3 to which the Council listened so patiently, is if anything added justification for the review of the relationship between the United Nations and the regime he represents and the penalties which will ultimately be decided upon.
The representative of the South African minority Fascist regime, though professing respect for you, Mr. President, and the Council, thereafter immediately displayed characteristically bombastic, pompous arrogance towards the Organization, its devoted Members, its precepts and the conventions and resolutions which have been adopted against the obnoxious system which his clique represents.
The appeals of this body in its solemn resolutions were dismissed by Mr. Botha as being based on bias, vendetta, half-truths and even lies. This contempt, and the sinister references of this regime to the independent African States in the Organization in their condemnation of the racist regime, demonstrate once more the nature of the regime with which the Council has to deal.
As Professor Edgar H. Brookes said, in one of his books entitled Apartheid: A Documentary Study of Modern South Africa, on page XVI:
"While the world as a whole fully understands that the era of colonization and imperialism has, after four centuries, come to an end, South Africa is still living in the atmosphere of that era, and cannot readily understand the reasoning of those who have emerged from it. The dialogue between South Africa and the rest of the world in the 1960s is something like the duel between the whale and the elephant."
There is no meeting point.
As the representatives of the South African racist regime have demonstrated over a score of years in the Organization, and in the Council only yesterday, there is no meeting point between humanity and this monster which they claim to be divinely inspired. Their obstinacy persists against the mighty wave of international law and world opinion. They continue to pour scorn on the legitimate demands and appeals of the people of our country, the Organization of African Unity, Africa and the world at large.
The Council was subjected to a lengthy lecture by Mr. Botha, who in the substance of his address tried to justify apartheidand to show how misguided Africa and the world were. It was a very strange thesis based on the inherent Fascist and Nazi approach that the overwhelming majority in the Assembly - represented by the Council - were wrong and out of step with human aspirations, and that this illegal megalomaniac regime was right and had a monopoly of being right.
Mr. Botha's address emphasized that the methods of that regime were right and that the whole world had been misled. His whole statement was primarily based on the superiority of the racist practices of apartheidover everything that is happening to humanity. Throughout his whole statement there was also a constant and veiled threat. Even the epoch-making events in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, to say nothing of the States of Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, were virtually brushed aside as a poor example of what South Africa, through its bantustan policies, has been trying to achieve peacefully - whatever "peacefully" means to the South African regime.
Our submission will be that the whole tenor and theme of that statement is South African racism and apartheid űber alles - over the whole world at any cost. Listen to the racist attitude to the Organization - and here I shall quote from the text of Mr. Botha's statement yesterday. He said:
' London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968
"Let us not beat about the bush. The only choice we have before us is either to continue on the present sterile course of confrontation and recrimination, or" - and he gives the world an alternative - "to make a sincere endeavour to get together, to listen to the other man's point of view with an open mind, and to try to break through the suspicions, the misunderstandings and the misconceptions which have so long divided us. Communication or confrontation? Harmony or the escalation of strife? That is our choice - our only choice." [1800th meeting, para. 51]
It is our submission that this world body has been trying to communicate with the racist and Fascist regime for well over 25 years. And yet they have been intransigent and Mr. Botha and his racist regime have the audacity to come to propose the verything that this body was doing more than 25 years ago, which they stubbornly opposed. There is a subtle threat of defiance, we submit, in that quotation.
But let us go a little further and quote another excerpt. Mr. Botha asked the Council:
"What valid reason can be advanced for singling out South Africa's relations with the United Nations for review by the Security Council?" [Ibid., para. 54.]
He replied:
"There is none. This is really just a political move in the vendetta being conducted by certain Members of the United Nations against my Government." [Ibid.]
The General Assembly resolution which called for these meetings of the Council was adopted by 125 votes to one, but for Mr. Botha the 125 are meaningless. That demonstrates the attitude of that racist regime to the General Assembly and its members.
If that is not sufficient, let me quote something else said by Mr. Botha which goes to the root of the thinking of the South African regime:
"It is said that we have disregarded resolutions of the United Nations organs. But next to nothing is said of the nature and quality of the information and documentation upon which those resolutions were based. Closer analysis will show that the material in question is unbelievably one-sided, that it is uniformly hostile to South Africa, that it is often completely unsubstantiated." [Ibid., para. 57.]
The General Assembly is composed of very, very responsible Members and their representatives. The Security Council, which has also adopted resolutions against the racist South African regime, is virtually the supreme body of the United Nations and all the peoples represented in it. It is a very, very responsible body. But Mr. Botha had the audacity to sit in the Council and say that the information and documentation on which United Nations resolutions were based was unsubstantiated and one-sided. Once again, the South African regime is apparently the only one with some sense, the rest of mankind works on the basis of unsubstantiated, biased and prejudiced information.
I shall quote only one more extract from Mr. Botha's arrogant, contemptuous statement. He said:
"In consequence, the resolutions in question were based on inadequate, prejudiced and often grossly distorted information - information which was certainly not tested and objectively weighed in order to separate facts from ignorant or malicious misrepresentations." [Ibid., para. 58.]
Now if, from those extracts from Mr. Botha's statement that I have just cited, the conclusion cannot be drawn that the South African regime’s conduct has been completely and constantly contemptuous and arrogant and that it has complete disrespect for the United Nations, including the Security Council, I do not know what further evidence is required.
The racist regime's bankrupt case is based on what we shall demonstrate to be a gross distortion of the history of our country, a deliberate and fraudulent omission of the facts of colonialist aggression and plunder and the enslavement of our people by the white settlers and colonialists. The racist regime's case is based also on lies and a misleading presentation of the apartheidpolicy, a presentation designed to suit that regime's aims at this session. Lies are brazenly resorted to despite the public pronouncements of the leaders and architects of this hideous policy, pronouncements that are well known. Mr. Botha's statement to the Council cunningly evaded, we shall submit, the issue of which the Council is seized. In fact, the whole performance was typical of the well-known Nazi technique deriving from the dictum popularized by Goebbels: "If you tell a lie often enough and if it is big enough, you end up being believed".
Our delegation is gratified at the fact that at the current session of the General Assembly the Credentials Committee recommended to the Assembly that the credentials of the representative of the racist, Fascist regime of South Africa be rejected. The Assembly indeed did that, by an overwhelming majority, and it referred the whole question of the relationship between the racist regime and the United Nations to the Security Council for review. That unequivocal action on the part of the United Nations is, in our view an important contribution to the struggle to combat and eliminate apartheid and racism, and expresses in concrete terms the wrath and disgust of the peoples of the world, in whose sacred name, let us always remember, the Organization was created – their wrath and their disgust with a group of racist criminals, disciples of Adolf Hitler, whose policies and practices are reminiscent of Nazi Germany. It is indeed an affront, an insult to humanity that international criminals should find shelter, respectability and acceptance in the Organization that they treat with so much contempt and disrespect and to which they pay no allegiance whatsoever – criminals who fraudulently claim to be representing the peoples of South Africa.
Our peoples have always contested the legitimacy of the racist white minority regime of South Africa, from its very inception. We deem it necessary, particularly at this series of Council meetings, to expose the roots of apartheidand to show that the racist regime is now acting as an international Frankenstein.
The fact is that our country - despite Mr. Botha's lie yesterday that there was peace for 150 years - was the target for over 250 years of the most brutal colonial invasion and oppression by whites of mainly Dutch and British descent. Throughout those 250 years of plundering, rapacious, bloody, genocidal wars, our forefathers throughout the length and breadth of the country, against overwhelming odds, rose up against the invaders to defend their land, its wealth and themselves against enslavement. Ultimately, however, the savage foreigners defeated them militarily. To the extent that the whites disarmed them completely, our people were conquered—but they were never subdued. This colonial aggression, usurpation and monopoly of political, economic and military power had its consummation in the South Africa Act of 1909, which established the all-white Parliament, the source of all the vicious, racist and apartheidlaws in the country.
The so-called South African Constitution was a gross assault on the right to self-determination of the indigenous people and the instrument for further aggression against our people. The South African Constitution was fashioned by the white minority, for the white minority, and against the black majority. It was and still is inherently racist and discriminatory in character. It is based on white domination and white superiority and it is the instrument and machinery for all the racist and genocidal laws. It entrenches all political, economic and military power in the hand of a white minority. It is an instrument which purports to legalize the enrichment, through robbery and brutal exploitation, of a small white minority, and the impoverishment and oppression of the vast majority of the African people.
This so-called Constitution was adopted by a white minority in alliance with the United Kingdom a colonial Power. In fact, the Constitution was passed by the United Kingdom's colonial Parliament in spite of vigorous protests from the African people, The purpose of that instrument was to impose White domination, lordship and Herrenvolk-ism on the Africans in all spheres of life in order to create and perpetuate the type of colonialism which exists today in our country. The Africans protested vigorously against this naked rape of their land and rights. Deputations sent to the United Kingdom the colonial Power, availed nothing. This so-called Constitution, which itself is so grossly illegal and inhuman, is the instrument which legalizes all the atrocities and crimes committed against our people by the whites and the white regime.
There can be no shadow of doubt that, born out of illegality, the South African regime is itself illegal. No criminal can legislate for himself to legalize his illegal and criminal acts. That is what the white minority regime, with the United Kingdom's assistance tried to do in 1909 and is still trying to do today with the United States, France and other collaborators.
The African National Congress, ANC, which we represent here today, was formed in 1912, shortly after the so-called South Africa Act came into force; it was formed because of the rejection of the African people of the domination and overlordship imposed on them by an all-white racist regime and their refusal to pay allegiance to it. ANC was created as the mouthpiece of the African people and their instrument for their national emancipation and liberation. All Africans were called upon to pay allegiance to ANC and not to the white regime. Although the Africans were completely disarmed, ANC strove to create a State within a State. It had, and continues to have, its own anthem, its own flag, and its own policies and slogans which were, and continue to be, diametrically opposed to those of the white regime, thereby challenging its sovereignty. What it lacked then was an army. However, from its very inception the ANC has continued to challenge and contest the legitimacy of the white minority regime and its laws, both nationally and internationally.
Internationally, at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, ANC sent a delegation to condemn the white regime and to warn that Namibia - then South West Africa - should not be handed over to the white minority regime of South Africa because the plight and fate of the people of Namibia would be no different from that of the people of South Africa. While the delegation of the white regime sat in the sheltered comfort of the conference room and had an audience of delegates, the delegation of ANC had to be content with lobbying in the corridors. Its protest fell on deaf ears. Instead of the white regime being condemned for its atrocities, international recognition was given to that illegal, illegitimate and inhuman regime. And what is even worse, the Namibian people, their land and their wealth were handed over on a silver platter to the white racists. Thus the South African illegal minority white regime became a respectable member of the League of Nations and a full member of the exclusive club of colonialists and imperialists.
What a tragedy that was. And how true it is today that the fate of the people of Namibia is no different from that of the people of South Africa. By a stroke of the pen an international body expanded the area of foreign domination in southern Africa by a brutal, barbarous and ruthless regime. Thus, the international Frankenstein was created.
Even assuming that the racist, apartheidregime is a government - which we contend it is not; it is merely a regime - it is certainly not the government of the people of South Africa. By its very Constitution, policies practices and pronouncements, it is at most - and I emphasize, "at most" - a Government of some whites, by whites, for whites and voted for by whites. It has no moral or legal right to claim to be a government over the majority. Whatever it does with respect to that population is fundamentally illegal. The South African regime imposes its rule on the overwhelming majority of the people of our country through the baton and the gun. It is a gangsterish rule of terror and tyranny, nor has it any sovereignty over the majority of the peoples of the country. It is for that reason that this Frankenstein is building an army and accumulating an arsenal beyond measure for a white so-called defence force.
We said that there is a growing recognition of the rights of our people in the General Assembly, and now in the Council, but the development is not yet complete nor is the pace fast enough. May we refer to General Assembly resolution 3151 G (XXVIII), in paragraph 11 of which the Assembly
"Declares that the South African regime has no right to represent the people of South Africa and that the liberation movements recognized by the Organization of African Unity are the authentic representatives of the overwhelming majority of the South African people".
That resolution was adopted on 14 December 1973. We should like to state that it is a vindication of the cause for which the organization has struggled in international forums since 1919 - more than half a century, is it not?
Perhaps we should now turn to some aspects of the statement by Mr. Botha, just to correct the record on one of his fundamental lies. The story presented here by the representative of the South African racist regime - that our country was a no-man's-land until both blacks and whites simultaneously occupied South Africa - is a blatant lie to try to justify the present landlessness of our people and the dispossession of their birthright. Like many others, the representative of the South African regime well knows that the first meeting-point in our country with the white invaders was at Cape Town—then called the Cape of Good Hope and sometimes the Cape of Storms, which indeed it was in those days—where, in the seventeenth century, the white aggressors virtually exterminated the Khoisan and decimated the Khoi Khoi. There is abundant evidence of that from notable historians. To quote only one, C. W. de Kiewiet, a white South African historian, on page 73 of his book A History of South Africa4 states:
"The great acreages of South Africa were not unsettled spaces open to the unhindered occupation of Europeans. That European settlement took place in a land settled by a relatively numerous native population is a fact of first-rate importance."
Perhaps - and I do not know where Mr. Botha studied his history - we might refer him to a quotation by Jan van Riebeeck, who landed with the first settlers in 1652. They were interrogating some of the African prisoners at the so-called Cape of Good Hope. Reporting to his company, the Dutch East India Company, Jan van Riebeeck said:
"The prisoners, having been asked the reasons why they had caused us this trouble, declared for no other reason than that they saw that we kept in possession the best land and grazed our cattle where they used to do so and that everywhere with houses and plantations we endeavoured to establish ourselves so permanently as if we intended never to leave again but take possession of this Cape land, which had belonged to them during all the centuries, for our sole use."
Perhaps I might now turn once more, and as briefly as possible, to another remarkable statement made yesterday by the representative of the racist regime. He referred to the Great Trek, and said it was a historic event. Well, it was historic, but we shall show how it was historic from the point of view of real history. We would say Mr. Botha must know what motivated that so-called Great Trek. It was at a time when the world had decided on the emancipation of slaves. The Afrikaner people had got used to having the blacks as slaves. The Great Trek was a revolt against the decisions of the world concerning the emancipation of slaves. And Piet Retief, the leader of one of the groups which trekked north from the south made it clear, in a long manifesto, that they were leaving the coastal part of South Africa because they wanted to go and find some place where there would be no interference, where they would be able to establish themselves firmly on a master-servant basis, where they would establish a State "in which there will be no equality between blacks and whites either in State or in church". That was the historic Great Trek, and throughout it battles were fought by our people in defence of the land and their wealth throughout the whole of South Africa.
Now may we turn to one of the most important aspects, also referred to in the statement of yesterday in an attempt to show that South African foreign policy is peaceful. We contend the opposite, and we think the facts prove it. We should like to describe very briefly the imperialist-colonialist aggressive and expansionist foreign policy of the South African white racist regime.
We have already shown that the white racist minority regime established a new type of colonialism in South Africa. We should like to stress that the illegal colonialist white racist regime of South Africa creates all the trappings of a colonialist State in South Africa where not only were the colonially oppressed and the colonial oppressors, the colony and the metropolis, within the same area, but also all the characteristics of a colonialist and imperialist Power were demonstrated. Expansionism and aggression have the basic policy of the white racist regime in South Africa; hence the fact that it is now arming itself to the teeth and its military budget is spiralling every year.
We should not forget Cecil Rhodes, who dreamt of having a railroad for British imperialism from the Cape to Cairo. Nor should we underestimate Harry Oppenheimer's exuberance in building an Oppenheimer gold and diamond empire in Africa and the world.
South Africa and the racist settlers became international exploiters and oppressors from the very time they landed at the Cape of Good Hope. And that is how the so-called wealth, so boasted about by the South African whites, came into being - through ruthless exploitation and oppression, through slavery, slaves coming from many parts of the world, and through the exploitation of migrant labour from many parts of Africa.
Yesterday, Mr. Botha, in his statement had the audacity to say that South Africa is confronted by the fact that there were thousands and thousands of Africans coming from outside South Africa. Now that process was deliberately engineered by South Africa and its allies many years ago. It is no creation of the African States. As a matter of fact the African States are beginning, since their independence, to try and curb it.
The Cape of Good Hope was of good hope for international pirates but bad hope for the indigenous peoples of the country. It had as its development, its roots in slavery and genocide; and there this was planted, as we indicated, with the extermination of part of our people, the Khoisan when van Riebeeck set foot in our country on 6 April 1652, ostensibly to establish a vegetable garden to supply the ships of the Dutch East India Company. Thus our country and peoples became victims of international trade and companies, thugs and robbers.
The history of our country since 1652 has been that of expansion and robbery. Indeed, even the South Africa Act of 1909 envisaged the incorporation of what is now known as Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. It was a pact between the United Kingdom and the Boers. Aggression and expansion, as we. said, are the roots of white South African foreign policy. The South African bantustans as the extension of the South African colonialist philosophy in practice, the South African colonialist and imperialist power policy, has its acid test in Namibia.
Our delegation would merely want to state that the crimes against humanity which have been so clearly enunciated in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid [General Assembly resolution 3068 (XXVIII)] are crimes which have been committed by the South African racist regime from the very moment that it became the centre of international capital and the greatest exploiter of African and international labour. South African and racist aggression have become, as we said, blatant in Namibia, more brazen in the military activities of the South African regime in Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe, which the racist representative hardly referred to yesterday, in a subversive and violent action against Zambia and Tanzania. This monster, it will be our submission, must be curbed and controlled; that depends, as it did with Adolf Hitler and nazism, on the might and collective concerted effort of the peoples of the world.
Our delegation wishes to draw the attention of the Council to the fact that the policies of apartheidare being discussed in the year when the General Assembly has adopted a Programme for the Decade for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination [resolution 3057 (XXVIII)]. We should like to emphasize that the programme is one of action. Further, in an unprecedented resolution, the United Nations last year adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. It is not necessary for our delegation to elaborate on the implications of that Convention, save to say that some who claim to be opposed to apartheidhave as yet not signed or ratified the Convention. The urgent appeal of our people is for the immediate signature and ratification of, and action on, this important international Convention, in order that the appropriate tribunals be set up to try and convict international criminals.
There were boasts about Bantu education. We do not want to deal with that extensively save to say that when that Bantu education was established, it was established with the clear purpose of the enslavement of our people. As a matter of fact, the author of the Bantu education, Mr. Verwoerd, stated quite bluntly and clearly that it was intended to train the African not to look to the green pastures of the European whites.
Let us now turn to the substance of what our delegation wanted really to raise before the intervention of the South African racist representative. We should like at this stage to characterize apartheid and its laws which permitted the lawlessness that now exists in South Africa. There are many oppressive regimes perhaps in the world, but where South Africa is unique is the way in which the law is openly used to maintain racial domination. Apartheid is not simply a relic from the past; it is a highly systematic method of control which allies racist ideology to the sophisticated machinery of a modern industrialized State. The law in South Africa has become the major instrument for dividing the population and securing the privileges of the white minority. Far from being the means for protecting the people from abuse by the authorities, the law has been converted into the principal mechanism for tyranny over the people. The law and the courts are used to harass individuals and dispossess whole communities. It is through the so-called law that people are deprived of their land and that wives and husbands are prohibited from living together. It is the same law which sanctions the placing of segregation signs on all public facilities in the country and which prevents people from moving about freely in their own land, from being seen on the streets at night.
As we stated, South Africa has no written constitution or bill of rights. In constitutional terms the Parliament that sits in Cape Town is supposed to be sovereign and may pass any legislation it likes on any subject. The Constitution Act of 1961 expressly provides that the Parliament shall consist of white persons only, elected by white persons. Thus the law states clearly that all power resides in the hands of the white minority, who constitute a mere 4 million people out of a total population of over 20 million. The position today is that the black majority have lost even the limited representation that they had in Parliament 60 years ago, when in part of South Africa some blacks were able to vote even though they were not permitted to stand as candidates. The dispossession of the land through this law is a well-known fact. We were told yesterday that the Land Act of 1931 was passed in order to secure land for the Africans. It was a startling assertion - startling, because in fact it is well known that the Land Act was passed for no other reason than to dispossess our people of their land and to ensure that they would become mere reservoirs of cheap labour for the white farms and mines.
May I also refer to the so-called "laws" which are passed by the Cape Town Parliament. Among the worst laws passed by that Parliament, regarded by our people as fixing upon them the badge of slavery, are the Pass Laws. They are a vicious form of enslavement and exploitation. The figures for arrests under those laws have now risen to nearly 2,000 a day. The prisons of South Africa are virtually bursting with so-called offenders against the Pass Laws. Those laws are equivalent only to the Nazi law whereby Jews were supposed to wear a certain type of badge to identify them. They are no less vicious.
If we were to go into the details and examine the laws of South Africa we would find that every one of them was an infringement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, we do not seek at this stage to go through all the laws, or indeed any one of them. It is only the South African racist Government which does not seem to understand - or perhaps it does understand - that the laws it passes every year in its Parliament against our people are infringements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I say, perhaps it does understand - and it does not care.
May I refer quite briefly to the bantustan scheme. It is our submission, and I have no doubt that this is supported by resolutions of the General Assembly, that the bantustans are a complete assault on the right of our people to self-determination.
We should like in conclusion to make one or two further observations.
We are aware, and indeed the past 25 years in the life of the United Nations have made us very much aware, that South Africa has very powerful allies in this body. Some big Powers are supposed to have the power to veto. But may I say that, in our view, those big Powers should be very careful, for perhaps not now but in the future the indictment may be brought against them very forcefully that they were accomplices of a regime which has committed atrocities and crimes against humanity. As a matter of fact, with all due respect to their very membership and rights even in the Council, it might one day be necessary to challenge them directly if they continue to associate themselves with international criminals. If they exercise their veto today, we should like to say very clearly that they are vetoing human rights. However, we should like to emphasize that we do not fear that veto, because we believe, as time and history have shown, that time is still on our side. We would hope that they will refrain today from using their veto, and will side with those who are for human rights and against those who are criminals against humanity. Our delegation would urge the Council forthwith to expel the racist, criminal regime of South Africa. That, to us, is still the lower level. It would be a mild act. And we would hope that the United Nations, the General Assembly and the Council would soon find it possible to bring an indictment against these international criminals, to begin a "Nűrnburg Trial" before the disaster and not to wait until afterwards.
1. Source: United Nations document S/PV.1802. The Security Council was considering “relationship between the United Nations and South Africa” at the request of the General Assembly. The African States proposed the expulsion of South Africa from the United Nations. The proposal received a majority of votes, but was not adopted because of vetoes by France, the United Kingdom and the United States.
2. Michel Njine of the United Republic of Cameroon was the President of the Security Council for the month.
3. R. F. (Pik) Botha, representative of South Africa at the United Nations