For decades, Nelson Mandela decried the apartheid machine and its arms hardware manufacturer Armscor (South African Armaments Corporation). and many commentators therefore looked with interest to the country's first free elections last year to see how the new government would tackle the arms issue. Socialists saw what they had always anticipated. Overnight, Mandela changed his views and bowed to the whims of international capital. Last November, launching the South African equivalent of Farnborough, the Defence Exposition of South Africa (DEXSA), Mandela announced that "South Africa is launching a defence industry which is guided by new priorities and a new ethos,” that this was a "unique opportunity to help ensure that peaceful purposes are served by the defence industry" (New African, February 1995).
This from the man who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace!
Mandela's reasoning was that arms sales could be justified if the recipients were "responsible" countries—an idea that smacks of insanity, for any country that buys arms does so with the view that they will come in useful. Further, any increase in the world's arms stockpile can only increase the likelihood of conflict breaking out Kasrils. a former member of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, was another to defend the South African search for new markets for arms. The South African government, he stated,
"...is establishing strict criteria concerning countries to which we will or will not sell arms ... countries that violate their people's human rights, are involved in civil war, or threaten the sovereignty of their neighbours".
Kasrils's words come only a month after a shipload of automatic rifles, intended for unstable Lebanon, ended up in Yemen, itself embroiled in civil strife.
Embargo
In 1977, the UN Security Council had imposed an arms embargo on South Africa. At the end of May 1994 it was lifted. As the election results were announced, Armscor, assured of Mandela’s support, informed the international media that it would now increase its share of the world’s arms market from 0.2 percent to 2 percent, a tenfold leap. In reality, the UN embargo had only paid the anti-apartheid lobby lip-service, for Armscor had enjoyed 17 years of covert circumvention of the embargo, supplying arms to Angola, Argentina (used in the Falklands War). Iraq. Libya, Rwanda. Somalia and Zaire—everyone a repressive regime.
Indeed, the Guardian reported last year that “evidence has been accumulating that for political and strategic reasons, Western governments and their intelligence agencies turned a blind eye to sanctions-busting" (23 September).
Abba Omar, an Armscor spokesman and another former Umkhonto we Sizwe figure believes the South African arms industry has an "outstanding contribution to make to the development of South Africa". His view is that the arms industry, being the biggest exporter of manufactured goods. not only brings much needed money to the South African economy, but that the technology it generates spills over into developments in transport, health care, water purification and the like, as well as providing employment. Thus, as the argument goes, everyone benefits.
Ranged against the advocates of arms trade benefits is the anti-weapons lobby. One such voice, Peter Storey, a Methodist minister argues that “to talk of a moral or ethical defence industry is a contradiction in terms. The defence industry represents one of those areas of human behaviour where ethics have to be suspended in order for it to function at all (New African).
In her analysis Open Arms for the Prodigal Son; The Future of South Africa’s Arms Trade Policies (BASIC Report, June 1994) Sue Willett, of King’s College, London’s Centre for Defence Studies, argues the arms industry can only be developed at the expense of civilian industry:
“Heavy dependence on the exports of weapons is not a good foundation for an exporting manufacturing sector . . . The danger is that temporary reliance on arms exports serves to put off into the indefinite future a really vigorous programme of developing alternative civil industries (Quoted in CAAT News, August 1994).
Insane logic
Mandela promised, on coming to power, that he would see to the implementation of improved housing, health care and sanitation, for instance. To maintain an arms industry is not only to betray the aspirations raised by the ANC’s Freedom Charter. It is more importantly an acknowledgement by Mandela, a recognition, that what the ANC stood for in the past—"black majority rule" and "socialism now"—was in fact a pipe-dream, and that those who take power within the capitalist system have to allow, and encourage it to operate according to its own insane logic.
When the arms embargo was lifted, Armscor’s general manager announced that he expected South Africa’s weapons exports to double within the next financial year. Between 1993 and 1994 Armscor’s sales to some 55 countries netted South Africa R886 million. If we add to this the fact that 72 countries attended DEXSA recently to view the wares of over 100 exhibitors, and the recent British invitation for South Africa to put a tender to supply 90 "Roolvalk" helicopters for the British army, then it becomes apparent that headlines like "Mandela applauds South Africa's rising arms trade" (Times, 23 November 1994) clearly cast Mandela in the same mould as every other pro-capitalist government official in the world.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Mandela has subordinated everything he once stood for to the profit motive and to the risks, inherent to the capitalist system, it entails. With Mandela aiming to stand down at the next election, it is evident that he will do so having sanctioned the ascendancy and, more, the legitimacy of the profit-seeking élite of South Africa. Time will teach the South African working class not to put their faith in leaders, but in their own collective strength and to link their struggle with workers everywhere.
John Bissett
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