Nongqai_Vol_12B

CHAPTER 5.

THE OPPOSING OPERATIONAL DOCTRINES The anti-colonial struggle for liberation had manifested in two basic forms around the world: the nonviolent civil disobedience doctrine of Mahatma Gandhi, and the “power grows from the barrel of a gun” doctrine of Chairman Mao. The latter inspired the communist-supported “progressive” forces who wished to acquire total, dominant political and economic power by revolutionary means, through so-called “people’s wars” that would then result in one-party people’s republics on the Marxist model.

The latter path was chosen by the liberation movements in South Africa, egged on by the USSR. This resulted inevitably in armed conflict against the white South African state, launched by the armed wings of the likes of the ANC and the PAC, which consisted mostly of acts of terror in the form of bombings, land mines and coercive attacks on civilians (mostly black) who were not siding with the revolutionaries. Equally inevitably, the state felt itself obliged to maintain law and order.

5.1 International examples.

This situation was not unique to South Africa during the Cold War. Communist-inspired and supported local revolutionary forces, directed and abetted by especially the USSR as part of its struggle against the capitalist West and America in particular, were active all over the once-colonised world. The principal counterstrategy developed by the West (with the USA at the forefront) was to resist communist expansion by all means short of nuclear war, lest the colonies start “falling like dominoes”. The experience in the Americas exemplifies the then-accepted doctrine of fighting fire with fire: the American-operated “School of the Americas” for Latin-American military officers and security personnel, based in the erstwhile Panama Canal Zone, trained these officers in harsh counter-insurgency measures, including torture. The USA actively supported the countries of the Southern Cone (principally Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil) when they launched their Plan Condor for security cooperation that resulted in the infamous “dirty war”, providing them with technical support and training. This “dirty war” resulted in some 50,000 deaths, plus 30,000 “disappearances” and 400,000 secret incarcerations. This doctrine of fighting fire with fire was justified by the USA as necessary, in order to avoid the greater evil of these countries falling under the yoke of international communism. (The same argument as that which the USA would later deploy in its war on Islamist terror, justifying the suppression of civil liberties – think of Guantanamo).

Although not nearly on the monstrous scale witnessed under American sway in Latin America, the experience of the British security forces in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” there, is also illuminating. Especially when one considers its relative scale and the inevitable consequences (measured in human hardship) when an internal political enemy chooses to violently engage a state by means of revolutionary warfare, in the form of terrorism. Some 350 people were killed there by the British security forces, out of a population of 1.5 million (1/30 th of South Africa’s population at the time of the Struggle). This number of deaths attributed to the U.K. security forces certainly seems a lot, but it actually constituted only 10% of the total number killed of 3, 500 (of these 60% were killed by Irish republican forces and 30% by Ulster loyalists, with 52% of total deaths being civilians and 32% security forces). The total number of casualties in Northern Ireland would therefore, pro rata, have been of the order of 105,000 if extrapolated to South African population numbers. This places in perspective that the total number of 20,500 deaths actually suffered during South Africa’s political unrest from 1960 to 1994 (although as such absolutely tragic), was fortunately actually quite low for this kind of conflict. (South Africa had never suffered a full-scale guerrilla war, as had for example occurred in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, where the mortality figure per capita was six times that which South Africa suffered over the entire 35-year course of its armed conflict).

The low proportions of total deaths that were actually attributable to the security forces in South Africa also correlate with those same proportions for Northern Ireland. The data for the 51 Nongqai Vol 12 No 12B : SAP-SB / ANC-MK