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Compatriots,
Forty eight hours ago P.W. Botha announced a state of emergency affecting the Eastern Cape, the Witwatersrand and the Vaal Triangle. Already in these areas many people have been arrested. Combined military and police units have moved to occupy certain townships such as Kwa Thema. People have been murdered by these forces of occupation. The truth about the criminal misdeeds of these bands of marauders has been kept out of the public eye through tightened press censorship.
Inevitably the fascist measures of extreme repression that Botha has imposed will be extended to other areas of our country. Botha has at last decided to impose martial law. He has granted full powers to his armed forces to govern certain areas of our country. This is an eventuality for which the Botha regime has prepared and about which we have repeatedly warned. This regime can now no longer conceal its true face. What has become plain for all to see is the reality of military dictatorship and not the comforting but spurious image of a reformer that Botha had sought to cultivate and project.
The Pretoria regime speaks about law and order. It says it has imposed martial law on large parts of our country in order to reestablish order and stability. In cynical disregard of the interests of the majority of the people of our country, the United States government, the principal ally of the apartheid regime, has not hesitated to approve of the new measures of repression that its friends in Pretoria have adopted. The Reagan Administration has openly said that it hopes that these measures will succeed in their purpose. Botha and Reagan hope and pray that the intensified campaign of terror against the people and our democratic movement will succeed to stop our march to liberation. They are intent to ensure that racist law and apartheid order continue to hold sway. That is the hopeless mission that the Pretoria regime and its supporters have given themselves.
Our own tasks are very clear. To bring about the kind of society that is visualised in the Freedom Charter, we have to break down and destroy the old order. We have to make apartheid unworkable and our country ungovernable. The accomplishment of these tasks will create the situation for us to overthrow the apartheid regime and for power to pass into the hands of the people as a whole.
We have achieved a good deal of progress in making South Africa ungovernable. Correctly, we concentrated on the weakest link in the apartheid chain of command and control. For months we have maintained an uninterrupted offensive against the puppet local government authorities in the black urban areas as well as other state personnel in the townships such as the police and their agents.
By declaring a state of emergency in these areas, Botha has admitted that his organs of government has collapsed. He has conceded that the only way he can restore apartheid rule in these townships is through martial law. He could no longer govern in the old way. The perspective ahead of us is to intensify the struggle exactly in these areas that are under martial law. In struggle, we must make it impossible for our enemy to govern even in the new way. We must confront its new organs of government in the townships - the combined army and police units which have been brought into our midst exactly to reassert apartheid rule and therefore to perpetuate our oppression and suffering. This is the first task we have to accomplish the light of Botha`s state of emergency - to confront and defeat his new organs of government.
While saluting those among our people who have responded so magnificently to our call to make our country ungovernable, we must also draw attention to the fact that not all areas of our country and not all sections among the oppressed responded with the same level of activity and determination. This has enabled the enemy to concentrate its forces on certain areas of our country. Even now, under its state of emergency, the apartheid regime has the possibility to concentrate its attack on a selected number of areas in our country.
This is a situation which we must correct. It is vital that all areas of our country should join in the general offensive to make the apartheid system unworkable and South Africa ungovernable. There is not a single black person anywhere in our country who can say that he or she lives in conditions of freedom. We are all subjected to domination by organs of government imposed on us by the apartheid regime. This is the case whether we live in the towns or the countryside.
In the past, all of us have joined together to reject apartheid rule, whatever form it took. Accordingly, we have consistently rejected the bantustan system and the community councils. We have also overwhelmingly rejected Botha`s tricameral parliament as well as the organs of local government visualised in the latest apartheid constitution. But, as we had foreseen, all these institutions have been imposed on us despite the fact that we do not want them. As usual, the apartheid regime has refused to act in accordance with the will of the people.
We, for our part, have no cause to submit to the dictatorship of the racists. We have said we are opposed to its apartheid institutions. These have been imposed on us against our will. We have no choice but to destroy them. This is what we have done in the Eastern Cape, on the Witwatersrand, in the Vaal Triangle and the Free State. We must spread this offensive to reach all other parts of our country. In all our localities, wherever they may be, we must rise now and destroy the apartheid organs of government that are used to hold us in bondage. We make this call to all black people - African, Indian and so-called Coloureds.
Our people in some parts of the country are suffering under the iron heel of military dictatorship. They are facing the full might of the apartheid state because they dared to stand up to fight for our liberation. Regardless of what the martial law administrators do, the masses of our people in these areas will continue to fight for our emancipation. The time has come that the rest of the black masses of our country, all 25 million of us, should join in one determined offensive to make all of our country ungovernable. If needs be, let us force the apartheid regime to deploy its armed forces in every village and township in our country. Let us act together to make all of South Africa ungovernable.
Racist white South Africa is, without doubt, applauding P.W. Botha for declaring the state of emergency. These hidebound white supremacists see this act of desperation on the part of the apartheid regime as a demonstration of firmness and a determination to protect white privilege at all costs. They are convinced that Botha will succeed to suppress our struggle and save the apartheid system from collapse.
White South Africa will not awaken from this dream world while our struggle is concentrated in the black areas of our country. We cannot and show not allow a situation of relative peace and tranquillity to obtain in the white areas of our country while the black townships are in flames. We must take the struggle into the white areas of South Africa and there attack the apartheid regime and its forces of repression in these areas which it considers its rear.
For many years, the Pretoria regime gave its white supporters a false sense of security by deluding them into believing that the battlefront of struggle was drawn at the borders of our country. We have shattered that myth and brought the struggle to the very doorstep of the colonial oppressor. The enemy, however, continues to hope that it will manage to hold our struggle to that line of battle, outside of the white towns and cities. As we buried the illusion of a confrontation taking place at the borders of our country, so must we now put paid to the notion that our struggle will remain confined to the black areas. No longer should white South Africa live with the idea that it can continue with its business as usual while our people are perishing in their hundreds, out of sight of the white families that have sent their sons into our townships, armed to the teeth and with one intention only, to kill, kill and kill.
Out task, to take the struggle into the very midst of the enemy, presents all revolutionaries of our country with the challenge of devising the correct tactics to realise this objective. It is a challenge that all of us, workers, women and youth, must meet. It however also places a special responsibility on all our white compatriots who are committed to bring about a democratic South Africa to act now to show the white population of our country that however much it might try to close its eyes to what is happening, the fact of the matter is that our country is in crisis.
White South Africa must be made to realise that Botha cannot guarantee its security. The greater the repression that he resorts to in defence of white minority rule and in the name of the whites of our country, the greater becomes the level of insecurity facing these very same whites. To guarantee its own security, white South Africa has to come over to the side of the forces fighting for a democratic and nonracial society. The alternative that Botha offers them - that of pitting themselves against the overwhelming majority of the people of our country - is nothing but a death trap. Nothing will come of it except grief for the whole of white South Africa. We offer our white compatriots the only way out of the crisis which will surely engulf them, and that, in the near future - renounce Botha and his apartheid republic; join the anti-racist forces in the struggle for a democratic South Africa.
The time has also come that those who serve in the apartheid tricameral parliament and claim to stand for a democratic South Africa should abandon the illusion that this parliament can do anything to solve the problems of our country. This institution is as much a part of the structure of apartheid rule as are the racist army, police and prison service. It is an instrument for the perpetuation of the white minority rule. To hold out the hope that it can do anything to bring about a just social is to attempt to hoax the people and to aid and abet the Pretoria regime in perpetuating its rule of terror. If there is any genuine anti-racist left wing within Botha`s parliament, now is the time for them to abandon this house of iniquity and join the masses of the people in struggle for a truly just society. Large parts of our country are under a publicly proclaimed state of emergency. Others are treated as though they are under such a state of emergency. This situation no longer allows for the playing of inconsequential games presented as an effort at reform. It demands that each one of us should choose sides: one is 3either on the side of genuine change or one is on the side of continued repression. There is no middle road.
Those among the black people who have persisted in refusing to stop serving the army are now faced with the inevitable consequences of their mercenary stubbornness. They have now been turned into an army of occupation and administrators of martial law. If, in the past, they considered their duties as normal, they can no longer do so. There is nothing normal about an emergency. Neither will the actual tasks that they will carry out be normal. Their masters will demand on them the most heinous acts of brutality against their own people. On them will fall the greatest burdens in Pretoria`s campaign of extreme repression. Once more we call on these black people to leave the ranks of the enemy which is using them to terrorise their own mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children. We call on those whom the enemy has armed to turn their guns against those who have invaded our townships and not point them at the unarmed black masses of our country who are fighting to liberate themselves.
There are some black people in our country who, claiming to be leaders and representatives of our people, have joined the clamour for the maintenance of apartheid law and order. The enemy is using these so-called law-abiding blacks to justify the intensified campaign of repression it has launched under the state of emergency that it has proclaimed. We call on these misguided individuals to direct their anger against those who have brought our country to the situation in which it is today. Only recently, Afrikaner intellectuals at the state-funded National Council for Social Research correctly laid the blame for the conflict in our country on the apartheid system. It is the height of servility for the black people who call themselves leaders, to refuse to acknowledge this truth and instead seek to secure a livelihood for themselves by blaming the victim of terror for the injury done to him.
The apartheid system is in crisis. The state of emergency will not extricate the racists from this situation. All it will do is further to deepen that crisis and increase the cost in human lives of ending white minority domination in our country. We have advanced a great deal towards the realisation of our goal of a united, democratic and nonracial South Africa. There can be no stopping now. There can be no turning back.
Let us therefore mobilise and march together in even greater unity towards freedom. At all times we must expect that the enemy will respond with even greater repression. We must withstand these campaigns of terror with the same determination that we have displayed over so many months. But more, we must defeat these campaigns and raise our struggle to even higher levels.
Our watchword must be mobilisation, organisation, struggle. All our people must be mobilised into action. All our people must be organised for action. All our people must engage in struggle. That must be our reply to the enemy`s desperate counteroffensive.
In that struggle we have to set up our armed offensive. In a situation of martial law, the need for the oppressed masses to resort to people`s war becomes plain for all to see. Therefore the order of the day to all units of Umkhonto we Sizwe is that they must strengthen their links with the people. They must act together with the people to inflict the greatest possible number of casualties on armed enemy personnel. They must take the battle to the enemy and, side by side with the heroic masses of our country, defeat the enemy`s efforts to rule in a new way, seize the initiative from the enemy and drive him into retreat.
Thousands upon thousands of our people have been engaging the enemy in armed confrontation, using primitive means to deliver their blows. Now is the time for them to face the enemy using modern weapons of war.
At this hour of a heightened enemy counteroffensive, progressive humanity has rallied behind us as never before. The whole world has denounced Botha`s state of emergency, and pledged its support for our struggle.
The international community will adopt new measures to isolate the apartheid regime which has declared war against our people.
Drawing strength from this international support, we must march with even greater confidence to victory. Botha`s state of emergency is an admission of defeat. Each desperate act he adopts is a sign that we are approaching our goal.
Make Apartheid Unworkable!
Make South Africa Ungovernable!
Prepare the Conditions for the Seizure of Power by the People!
Amandla Ngawethu!
Matla ke a Rona!
Ihlomile!