A full-page advertisement appeared in the January 28, 1987 issue of the Washington Times with a picture of Oliver Tambo, leader of the South African Marxist terrorist group known as the African National Congress (ANC), standing next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Next to it was a composite photograph of Tambo standing next to U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. The headlines of the ad, which was sponsored by a coalition of conservative groups, asked: “Which Bothers You More?”
On the same day, a group of demonstrators affiliated with the Coalition Against ANC Terrorism staged a demonstration in front of the U.S. State Department. The demonstrators, many of them Black, wore tires around their necks as a reminder of the ANC’s tactic of burning innocent South African Blacks to death with the technique of necklacing. The protesters even staged a simulated necklacing incident, which was so realistic that two fire trucks were dispatched to the scene.
The purpose of the demonstration and the full-page advertisement was to protest against the profoundly significant meeting — held that same day — between George Shultz and Oliver Tambo. Many political observers regarded this meeting as an official Reagan Administration stamp of approval on a Communist terrorist group that not only has the blood of thousands of innocent human beings on its hands but is also bent on violently overthrowing a government friendly to the United States.
Howard Phillips, chairman of the Coalition Against ANC Terrorism, noted: “[The meeting] sends a horrendous message to the leaders of the African nations, suggesting that the U.S. is in alliance with the Soviets in favoring replacement of the incumbent anti-Communist South African government with a Marxist-Leninist cadre committed to armed revolution and Soviet policy objectives.” He further explained:
The ANC has endorsed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, allied itself with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Sandinistas, and condemned U.S. foreign policy at virtually every turn. ANC President Tambo has identified Cuba as his example of an ideal democracy and has been awarded the Ho Chi Minh Peace Prize by the Soviet puppet regime in Angola.
It was bad enough that the U.S. Secretary of State would take the unprecedented step of meeting with the leader of a terrorist organization that seeks the overthrow of a legitimate government. Even worse, the Shultz-Tambo meeting exceeded the exchange of official viewpoints and represented an astonishing “meeting of minds” between the two men. This startling fact came to light in the form of a revelation by Oliver Tambo himself.
On January 28, 1987, the same day as the meeting, Tambo made a guest appearance on the television program Nightline. The very first question Ted Koppel asked his guest was: “Dr. Tambo, I get the impression that you said what you were ready to say to Secretary Shultz, and Secretary Shultz said what he was ready to say to you. But in terms of a meeting of minds, that really didn’t happen today, did it?”
Tambo’s response surprised even Ted Koppel: “Well, to some extent it did.” The ANC leader went on to explain that the government of the United States and the Marxist-oriented African National Congress share a common objective or goal for South Africa!
This revelation is of profound significance, for the ANC’s objective for South Africa was long ago spelled out in detail in a document known as the Freedom Charter. This document, written and prepared for the ANC by the South African Communist Party, calls for the confiscation of private property and the establishment of a Soviet-style dictatorship of the proletariat. Tambo himself admitted on July 30, 1986, some six months prior to the meeting with Shultz: “The ANC and the SA Communist Party have common objectives….”
Although the Shultz-Tambo meeting and the subsequent revelation by Tambo are alarming in themselves, they merely confirm what many analysts have suspected for some time: that the government of the United States is conspiring to betray the Republic of South Africa and deliver that strategic U.S. ally into the hands of Marxist terrorists affiliated with the Soviet Union; that even the supposedly “conservative” Reagan Administration is as deeply committed to this conspiracy as the most radical elements in the Congress; and that this conspiracy against South Africa has reached its final stage.
Blueprint for Betrayal
The blueprint for betraying our strategic ally in southern Africa has been so firmly established that it is possible to identify each stage in the development of the plan. This blueprint has involved the following three stages:
(1) To downplay or completely obscure the extensive Communist involvement in the South African revolution by claiming that the root problem of the crisis is apartheid;
(2) To proclaim that the Communistic terrorist thugs in the African National Congress are “freedom fighters” who constitute the sole legitimate voice of the Black population of South Africa; and
(3) To pressure the South African government into negotiating with these Communistic ANC thugs on the basis of the two preceding assumptions, thereby paving the way for a Communist takeover of that Republic.
To accomplish the objectives of these stages of betrayal, the tactic of a “vise of pressure” has been utilized, in which the Communist revolutionaries create “pressure from below” through terror tactics and the U.S. government creates “pressure from above” through political, social, and economic coercion. Caught in the grip of this “vise of pressure,” the Republic of South Africa has found herself being squeezed to death, with her ability to resist overwhelming pressure put to the supreme test.
Although this conspiracy of betrayal was initiated long before Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency, it is a fact that the U.S. government’s campaign against South Africa has progressed much further and with much greater speed under the Reagan administration than it did under the administration of President Jimmy Carter. This is due, in large part, to the fact that the seemingly “conservative” Reagan administration’s commitment to the conspiracy against South Africa, at least prior to the Shultz-Tambo meeting, has gone unnoticed. In fact, it has been mistakenly believed in many quarters that the Reagan Administration is actually opposed to this strategy of betrayal.
Congressman Mark D. Siljander (R-Mich.), for instance, in a fund-raising letter sponsored by the Selous Foundation, recently stated: “President Reagan is desperate to stop the Communist takeover of South Africa.” Siljander went on to equate support for President Reagan and his administration with support for an anti-Communist South Africa free of ANC/Soviet domination.
This, however, is in sharp contrast with the officially stated view of the Reagan administration. In response to an inquiry, Phillip Wright, public affairs assistant for the United States Information Service, stated the official administration view in a letter dated September 12, 1986:
It is the view of the United States Government that the current problems and unrest in South Africa are not Communist-inspired. The root cause of South Africa’s current problem is apartheid.
Ronald Reagan himself voiced this same fallacy on July 22, 1986: “The root cause of South Africa’s disorder is apartheid, that rigid system of racial segregation, wherein black people have been treated as third-class citizens in a nation they helped to build.” The president is wrong: Apartheid is not at the root of the revolutionary activity in South Africa; Communism is.
The campaign against our strategic ally in southern Africa being waged through the U.S. Congress has received considerable attention and is well known. Congress virtually declared war on South Africa with the adoption of severe sanctions. Officially known as the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, the new law prohibits: flights by U.S. air carriers to South Africa and flights by South African air carriers to the U.S.; U.S. importation of any articles produced by South African government-owned or controlled entities; importation from South Africa of textiles, uranium and uranium ore, iron and steel, sugar and sugar-related products (with South Africa’s portion of the U.S. sugar import quota transferred to the Philippines), coal, and agricultural products; exports to South Africa of crude oil products; and any new U.S. loans to South African businesses. The law also specifically endorses the ANC, demands the release of so-called “political prisoners” in South Africa, and commands the South African government to abolish all vestiges of its domestic cultural policy of apartheid.
In declaring its war on South Africa, Congress went on record as asserting, in effect, that South Africa is to be regarded as a greater threat to the United States than the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China, and that the South African policy of apartheid is more evil than Communism. For instance, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) recently claimed that “in some areas our policy toward South Africa can and should be harsher than our policy toward the Soviets. In South Africa there is a clear majority opposition to the Government; the situation is different in the Soviet Union.”
The president’s well-publicized opposition to the sanctions bill created much of the confusion as to the administration’s policy objectives for South Africa. Nevertheless, the subject of disagreement was not the objectives but the means of achieving them. Secretary Shultz explained on December 4, 1986:
The premises of our policy were reexamined in the domestic debate that preceded the latest round of U.S. sanctions. That debate once again made clear that the principles underlying this Administration’s policy — many of which are codified in the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 — are shared by all Americans. The recent controversy over sanctions was, thus, over the means, not the ends, of our policy.
What has received far less attention is the fact that President Ronald Reagan himself unilaterally proclaimed his own declaration of war on South Africa a year before adoption of the Anti-Apartheid Act. Through Executive Order 12532, which was issued on September 8, 1985, the president solemnly announced: “I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, find that the policies and actions of the Government of South Africa constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy and economy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with the threat.” The Executive Order went on to ban the importation of Krugerrands and to impose other restrictions on South Africa. (These restrictions later became permanent law under the Anti-Apartheid Act.)
What is most alarming about this Executive Order, however, is that the government of South Africa is found to be a “threat” to the United States — a threat so grave as to justify placing the United States in a state of “national emergency.”
Although President Reagan has not used the state of “national emergency” for all the purposes that he may thereby be empowered to do in this country, he has assumed the role of virtual dictator over South Africa, issuing a series of demands for the total reconstruction of that sovereign nation.
In an address to members of the World Affairs Council and the Foreign Policy Association on July 22, 1986, President Reagan presented six “necessary components of progress toward political peace” in South Africa:
First, a timetable for the elimination of apartheid laws should be set.
Second, all political prisoners [terrorists] should be released.
Third, Nelson Mandela [who has persistently refused to take a pledge to refrain from violence if released] should be released to participate in the country’s political process.
Fourth, Black political movements [ANC] should be unharmed.
Fifth, both the government and its opponents [the Communists] should begin a dialog about constructing a political system that rests upon the consent of the governed, where the rights of majorities and minorities and individuals are protected by law. And the dialog should be initiated by those with power and authority: the South African government itself.
Sixth, if post-apartheid South Africa is to remain the economic locomotive of southern Africa [which it will not, if the preceding components are complied with], its strong and developed economy must not be crippled. And, therefore, I urge the Congress and the countries of Western Europe to resist this emotional clamor for punitive sanctions.
These are not mere suggestions recommended for the consideration of the South African Government. They are demands. To ensure that the South African government complies with such demands, the campaign of “pressure from above” has been pursued at an ever-accelerating rate by the U.S. government.
The Anti-Apartheid Act is just one part of the pressure that is being applied. On February 5, 1987, the Reagan Administration pledged $93 million in new aid to southern African countries, ostensibly to reduce their dependence on South Africa. The announcement was made by M. Peter McPherson, Director of the Agency for International Development and the senior American AID official, at a meeting of the Southern Africa Development Conference, held in Botswana. In addition to Botswana, the other member nations are Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Thus, the U.S. government is willing to assist Marxist dictatorships on the border of South Africa, thus increasing the internal threats that that country faces, even while our government attempts to weaken the South African government through sanctions.
The government of the United States relentlessly distorts the true nature of apartheid, despite the fact that South Africa is doing everything humanly possible to dismantle apartheid. Both Congress and the Reagan Administration blame the South African government for the violence and bloodshed perpetrated by the terrorists affiliated with the ANC and related groups. The U.S. government also criticizes the “State of Emergency” in that country, though it has proven to be the only effective way to prevent the Communist-inspired violence from engulfing the entire nation. All this has but one ultimate goal — to push the strategy of betrayal to its third and final stage.
President Ronald Reagan stated on September 29, 1986:
In the last several months, the South African Government, instead of moving further down the once promising road of reform and dialogue, has turned to internal repression. We all know that South Africa’s real problem traces to the perpetration of apartheid. And we know the solution to this problem can only be found in lifting the present State of Emergency, repealing all socially discriminatory laws, releasing political prisoners and unbanning political parties — necessary steps opening the way for negotiations aimed at creating a new democratic order for all South Africans.
This strategy of “pressure from above” has not been without effect in the plan to subject the anti-Communist South African Government and ultimately replace it with a Marxist-Leninist cadre loyal to World Communism. As Oliver Tambo candidly confessed during his recent tour of the United States: “The more pressure you bring from without, the less internal pressure is necessary.”
The Secret Side of the War
The government of the United States is overtly doing everything within its power to bring the South African government to its knees by applying “pressure from above.” But in order to apply effective pressure — indeed, even to justify the “pressure from above” — there must exist a corresponding degree of “pressure from below.” In other words, there must be chaos, anarchy, turmoil, confrontation, and violence within the targeted country. To ensure that these essential ingredients exist in sufficient quantity, the U.S. government decided years ago to covertly promote and create “pressure from below” within the Republic of South Africa.
It was during the years of the administration of President Jimmy Carter, whose foreign policy was based upon a twisted conception of “human rights,” that concerned South Africans began to question seriously the motives and methods of the U.S. government. Aida Parker, a distinguished South African journalist, who at the time was working for the Citizen, an English-language newspaper, decided to conduct an investigation of clandestine U.S. involvement in her country.
Utilizing documentation gathered by South African government intelligence sources, Parker pieced together an astonishing story, revealing that the government of the United States had been bankrolling and promoting the Communist revolution in South Africa since at least 1959. Among her alarming findings, published under the title “Secret U.S. War on South Africa”:
There is a massive and increasing flow of covert State Department-CIA funds into this country to support resistance and other anti-government groups….
There is good reason to suspect that much of this money is funneled into the Republic through the U.S. Embassy in Botswana, an office handling a daily and busy traffic of South African dissidents.
There is ample evidence that among the first major CIA-backed organizations was Mr. Robert Sobukwe’s PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) [an offshoot of the ANC], established in 1959 and formed, according to Harry Winston, a former chairman of the U.S. Communist Party, “in the luxurious offices of the USIS in Johannesburg.” [USIS are the initials of the United States Information Service of the American State Department.] ANC witnesses made similar claims in a political trial in Randburg earlier this year. It was the PAC-led defiance campaign that finally led to the shootings at Sharpeville.
It was those shootings, incidentally, that initiated a series of events culminating in the banning of the African National Congress, and in the ANC’s abandonment of all pretensions to “non-violence.” Even today, ANC leaders refer to the Sharpeville shootings as their justification for resorting to terrorism.
In addition to bankrolling and promoting the first bloody wave of violence in South Africa, the Aida Parker report disclosed that the U.S. government also funded and promoted the second wave of violence in that country — the 1976 Soweto student riots:
While rattling the sword of human rights, the Carter Administration does not show the same delicacy about human lives. There is ample evidence that U.S. agents financially back militants who are busy trying to exploit the delicate balance by inciting feelings against the Whites and the government. Prominent in this context is Drake Koka, the militant Black trade unionist widely credited with being one of the main instigators of last year’s bloody Soweto riots. Koka later fled to Botswana, where he used CIA funds to organize a “channel” for Soweto students wishing to jump the border, often with the intention of going north for terrorist training.
The Aida Parker report noted that the government of the United States, in addition to helping to finance the training of terrorists, was also providing funds for their legal defense whenever the terrorists were caught in the act of murder and treason. To ensure that the South African government’s efforts to contain this growing internal revolution were effectively crippled, the report stated, the U.S. government “(1) has over the years financially assisted in the creation of a whole solar system of political, cultural, academic, labour, church and social organisations, some of which are militant, (2) has aimed to create a Black-White polarisation and (3) is out to destroy the existing order.”
Under the supposedly “conservative” administration of President Ronald Reagan, U.S. government funding and promotion of the South African Communist revolution have actually been expanded and enlarged to the point that it is no longer possible to keep such activities secret. As James Montgomery, deputy assistant secretary of state, has recently confessed: “The U.S. Government’s largest human rights program worldwide is based in South Africa.”
It is indeed a large-scale operation. According to a recently published report by the Rands Afrikaans University’s Institute for American Studies, funding by the Reagan administration to promote anarchy and revolution in South Africa in the name of “human rights” totals some $200 to $300 million!
In an article entitled “The Involvement of the US Government in South Africa,” which appeared in the winter 1986 issue of America Review, Ansophie M. Joubert noted that the funds to fuel the South African revolution “are channeled through a number of public and private entities, including the Agency for International Development (AID), the United States Information Agency (USIA), the African-American Institute (AAI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United States Department of Commerce.”
Through these various channels, the Reagan administration is bankrolling revolutionary and radical groups dedicated to the overthrow of the existing foundations of South African civilization. Recent recipients of such U.S. funding range from the radical “Black Consciousness” group known as the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), which received more than a million dollars for “leadership development,” to a host of radical trade unions that have been responsible for urging numerous strikes and fomenting labor unrest.
According to Joubert’s scholarly article, U.S. funding for this latter category of recipients is so extensive that “left-wing trade unions have more cash than they can spend and this, in turn, has contributed to a distortion of political power and influence.”
Aida Parker, one of the first journalists in the world to expose the secret side of the U.S. government’s war against South Africa, has recently offered this sobering assessment of the grim situation: “In a breathtaking display of grossly interventionist over-kill, everything that Washington could do to promote chaos and anarchy in this country is being done.”
The Final Stage of Betrayal
The whole purpose of the complementary campaigns of “pressure from above” and “pressure from below” is to push the strategy of betrayal to its third and final stage — to coerce the South African government into negotiating with the leaders of the Marxist African National Congress to bring about a “new” South Africa. Even ANC leader Oliver Tambo has candidly confessed that this is the only way his Marxist group could ever come to power in that country, for the ANC has no hope of ever shooting its way to power in South Africa.
When Tambo appeared on Nightline on January 28, 1987, Ted Koppel asked him: “You don’t think that militarily you’re going to be able to defeat South Africa, do you?” Tambo responded: “We’re not really trying to do that. You know, our struggle isn’t all armed struggle. It’s very, very much political…. And in that effort we need the assistance — the intervention — of the international community.”
The government of the United States has been doing everything in its power to provide that “assistance,” even going so far as to conduct a propaganda public relations campaign on behalf of the ANC. Speaking on ABC-TV on June 22, 1986, for instance, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Dr. Chester Crocker, declared that the Reagan administration believes that the ANC “has committed itself to democracy and so forth, a whole series of things which I think all Americans would approve.” In earlier congressional hearings, Dr. Crocker referred to the ANC’s Marxist terrorists as “freedom fighters.” When Michael Armacost, under secretary of state for political affairs, described the objective of the Shultz-Tambo meeting of January 28, 1987, his choice of words to describe the ANC did not go unnoticed: “The purpose [of the meeting is] … to facilitate a dialogue between the Government of South Africa and the legitimate voice of the Black Community.” (It is notable that three key players in the Reagan State Department on the South African issue — Secretary Shultz, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Armacost, and Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Crocker — are all members of the Council on Foreign Relations.)
Since the Communistic ANC is regarded as “the legitimate voice of the Black community” in South Africa, its domination by dedicated Communist agents is deemed irrelevant. As Crocker has asserted: “I think there are, in fact, inside the ANC a range of voices.”
There is indeed a range of voices inside the ANC — from Marxist to Leninist. The ANC itself, in a May 11, 1986 broadcast over “Radio Freedom,” has publicly ridiculed and mocked those who assert that a peaceful resolution of the South African revolution can be accomplished “by appealing to non-existent, non-Communist African Nationalist Congress leaders.'”
Yet it is precisely those very “non-existent, non-Communist” leaders within the ANC leadership whom the government of the United States claims to have discovered and established a working relationship with. It is also those same “non-existent, non-Communist” ANC leaders whom the U.S. government claims to be relying upon to prevent the very real, very Communistic leaders within the ANC from establishing a Marxist dictatorship after the new order has been ushered into South Africa.
The conspiracy to betray South Africa has clearly reached its final stage, and the dramatic conclusion cannot be far in the future. The Communists within the African National Congress have already predicted that they will be ruling South Africa by the end of this decade. As long as they have the government of the United States actively working on their side, their prediction may well become a tragic reality.
