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Esteemed Heads of State and Political Parties of the Frontline States,
Distinguished heads of delegation of member parties of Socialist International,
Mr. Chairman,
Honourable Ministers, Ambassadors and High Commissioners,
Fellow leaders of the National Liberation Movement,
My compatriots, comrades in struggle from South Africa,
Comrades and Friends:
It is my honour today on behalf of the African National Congress and the majority of the people of South Africa to express our warmest appreciation to the Socialist International and its Committee on Southern Africa for convening and inviting us to participate in this most timely conference. This event, like its predecessor in Arusha, is rooted in the traditions of friendship and solidarity between the Socialist International and the people of our region - it is a tradition which forms an important current within our overall struggle.
This Conference is particularly significant, occurring as it does at a time when we are on the threshold of a major breakthrough in Namibia. We are certain that the parties grouped within the Socialist International have an important international role in ensuring that these new developments in our region are consolidated and gather momentum, opening the way for lasting solutions to the problems of southern Africa.
We wish also to record our heartfelt appreciation of the warm welcome and hospitality accorded to us by our hosts, ZANU(PF). We greet the leadership of this country and in particular our brother, colleague and leader, President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. It is entirely appropriate that we should be meeting in Harare. The Zimbabwean people, having liberated themselves almost a decade ago, have set about building, in a spirit of reconciliation, a society in which all can live in peace and harmony, regardless of differences of colour or creed. Their steadfast pursuit of these objectives, on the very doorstep of the world's most notorious racist system, while they reinforce our own vision of a liberated South Africa, has been a source of constant exasperation for the Pretoria regime.
For, the realisation of a democratic dispensation, and the attendant emergence of a single, reconciled people in Zimbabwe undermines all the fundamental premises upon which apartheid bases its rule. Pretoria continuously seeks to undermine these exemplary developments through economic and military coercion. It fails to recognise that the winning of independence in Zimbabwe as in other African countries has not been an accident, but a matter of historical necessity.
As we move towards a new positive breakthrough in our region, my own country continues to be in the grip of an ever tightening repression. South Africa is now into the fourth year of martial law; hardly a week passes without the announcement of further emergency restrictions, as a regime deep in crisis confronts a defiant people.
The most recent restrictions relate to the well canvassed detained hunger strikers. As I speak to you today about 300 of these detainees, some of them children, have been on hunger strike for three weeks. Scattered in jails through South Africa, they are among the thousands who have been detained without trial under the state of emergency. At least fourteen have been admitted to hospital. The hunger strikers are demanding their own immediate release. In doing so, they are demanding the release of all detainees, indeed, of all political prisoners. Theirs is not an isolated act, it has national, indeed, international dimensions.
The apartheid regime's response has been entirely characteristic - force feeding, continued detention and the outlawing of any actions of solidarity with the detainees.
At the same time, this regime continues to commit judicial murder, hanging anti-apartheid activists. There were well over one hundred executions last year. About seventy people are presently on death row awaiting their turn on the gallows, with many more to come. The apartheid army continues to occupy black townships, black schools and universities. Hardly a month passes without the announcement of the effective banning of more popular organisations, a few threats to the press, and measures such as the recently promulgated labour legislation designed to emasculate the progressive, nonracial trade union movement. After nearly 27 years the regime continues to keep Nelson Mandela and his colleagues imprisoned, despite the worldwide call for his and their unconditional release.
On every front, apartheid, in the depths of a far-reaching crisis, seeks to perpetuate its own existence through heightened repression, bannings, detentions, hangings and, when even these measures prove insufficient, the deployment of sinister death squads.
It is against this background, Mr. Chairman, that the impact on the South African situation of Pretoria's involvement in the Namibian independence process should be measured. Quite clearly from the point of view of the regime, even that process is part of the total strategy for the survival of apartheid system, for its defence. It is against this same background that we need to assess the statements made recently by Frederick de Klerk, the newly-installed ruling National Party leader, succeeding P.W. Botha. De Klerk declared himself "in favour of a South Africa free from domination or oppression". He has gone on to say that his party is "against domination of any one group by others" and that he himself is against "white domination". The use of the phrase "white domination" is very significant. A predecessor of P.W. Botha, Strijdom, then prime minister of South Africa,(2)
was quite explicit. He said his government's policy was "white domination", baaskap. Today, that party declares itself opposed to white domination. But then de Klerk goes on to say he is totally opposed to "one person, one vote" because, as he claims, this would be disastrous for South Africa.
Mr. Chairman,
The alternative to "one person, one vote" in South Africa is discrimination against the black majority. It is apartheid. That is what will be disastrous. As opposed to de Klerk's continued obsession with narrow groups, the African National Congress and our broad national liberation movement have a very different perspective. High on the agenda in our country today is the drive to build the broadest ever coalition of anti-apartheid forces, embracing both black and white South Africans alike.
In the course of last year, in preparation for an anti-apartheid conference, a very significant momentum was achieved. Democratic organisations, including trade unions and civic structures, representatives of various religious faiths and political persuasions, sports and cultural bodies, black business-people, anti-apartheid parties and organisations in the rural areas, youth, women, students and others - black and white - decided to hold a conference in pursuit of a nonracial and democratic South Africa. The planned conference was outlawed but not before the vision of a great united front had caught the imagination of the people.
Despite the continued and, indeed, heightened repression, our people in their overwhelming majority continue to mobilise, organise and defy the regime in united mass action. In this regard we wish to make special reference to the role of the churches, particularly church leaders, who have inspired our people with their own defiant actions. During the course of last year, in the middle of a state of emergency which the regime had hoped would crush the mass democratic movement in a matter of months, 3 million workers, together with all sections of our people, staged a three-day general strike: the biggest ever. In October the regime held nationwide local elections in an attempt to legitimate apartheid administrative structures. The response to the call from our national liberation movement for a boycott of these elections was overwhelming. The defeat for the Botha regime was crushing indeed.
If today the apartheid regime has become a party to the peace process involving Angola and Namibia this is because a set of pressures were brought to bear on the regime, among them - the escalation of the struggle of people of Namibia led by SWAPO, the continuing solidarity of the frontline States with the national liberation movements of the region, the growth of the global anti-apartheid solidarity movement with SWAPO and Angola; the ever mounting campaign for the total international isolation of apartheid, as well as the improved climate in international relations favouring the peaceful resolution of regional conflicts.
But perhaps the most decisive of these pressures was the historic defeat of the apartheid war machine in southern Angola - the victory at Cuito Cuanavale has turned the scales against South Africa and become a historic turning point in favour of those who have sought for justice. These combined pressures have had most positive results.
We mentioned them, not because they are worth mentioning anyway, but because they tell us how to reach the turning point in the South African situation when the regime will begin to see sense. It is as a result of pressure - internal pressures by the masses of the people, by our people in arms engaging in armed struggle and intensifying it and using every legitimate method to force the regime to abandon apartheid. It will come because of international pressure, the kind of pressure that sanctions could constitute.
Our people look to the independence of Namibia with great expectations, for it will mark one more step forward in the inexorable crumbling of racist-colonial domination in southern Africa. Tanzania started in this region, it was followed by Zambia, then came Mozambique, then Angola and not mentioning Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, but concentrating on these that I have mentioned, including Zimbabwe in particular, because it was in Tanzania where the armed struggle in this region met its first support, it was Zambia which took on the burden of supporting the struggle all around her borders. It was Botswana stuck up next to South Africa which came in to join the Heads of States in this region leading to the independence of Zimbabwe. We are now, perhaps this year, witnessing the independence of Namibia. Who would deny that we are irrevocably on the march to the liberation of South Africa itself?
So, therefore, let us go back to the old theme of pressures, of what the international community can do. It is often impossible to imagine what could be more effective against the Pretoria regime as a form of pressure by the international community than comprehensive and mandatory sanctions. It is an old theme which started in 1958 in South Africa. We are still being told today that sanctions will hurt us blacks. Let us dispose of this question once and for all - sanctions or bloodbath...
CONCLUDING STATEMENT
Mr. Chairman,
If we meet our goals - and I am convinced we will, our deliberations will lead us to an even greater understanding of a situation which is as complex as it is full of promise, a situation which is also fraught with potentially explosive dangers.
We came from different parts of the world to renew that solidarity that binds us to the most human cause, the struggle against apartheid. That solidarity should emerge not only renewed but also stronger, because it will be more informed.
We shall return to our different stations to translate that renewed and reinforced solidarity into even more concerted and more effective international initiatives to defeat apartheid.
We wish to assure you that the South African people's offensive against apartheid, which continues to escalate along all fronts, will not fall to harness those initiatives into a current of energy to further fuel the South African people's United Mass Action for People's Power. Of course, for your moving manifestation of solidarity with us, we shall thank you most fittingly by finally eradicating apartheid.
2 J. G. Strijdom was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1954 to 1958.