December 11, 2007

Dangerous Liaison

South African Shores Up Neo-Nazi Group

A notorious South African white supremacist, once accused of participating in planning a major terrorist assassination in his home country, has become a key player in the National Alliance, formerly America's leading neo-Nazi group.

Arthur Kemp, who now lives in Britain but was for years an intelligence operative working for the South African apartheid government, has visited the Alliance's West Virginia headquarters and several of the group's other chapters over the last two years. He also writes for and helps to edit the Alliance's National Vanguard magazine, as well as drafting speeches and radio essays for its leader.

It's unclear what Kemp's aims are — he refused repeated requests for an interview — but he is obviously helping to shore up the Alliance, which has largely collapsed since the death of founder William Pierce in 2002. He also may be trying to build stronger alliances between white supremacists in America and Europe, where he is a high-level cadre of the whites-only British National Party (BNP) and has important ties to other European white supremacist organizations.

A Radical in Uniform

Born in 1963, Kemp was raised in white-run Southern Rhodesia by a Dutch mother and a British father. In the early 1980s, he went to school at South Africa's University of Cape Town, where he tried to revive a "conservative" (meaning pro-apartheid) student club, and he has been a diehard ideologue ever since.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kemp was a pro-apartheid journalist, and in 1990 he wrote a glowing history of the white supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, or AWB). Founded in 1970, the AWB was created to establish a new Boer nation that would preserve white rule. In the 1980s and 1990s, the group was implicated in terrorist violence against anti-apartheid activists and, later, supporters of the post-apartheid government. The AWB's leader, Eugène Terre' Blanche, was finally imprisoned for six years for attempted murder.

Kemp ultimately went to work as a sergeant in the South African security forces, which were implicated in assassinations and other violence directed at the African National Congress (ANC) and other militant opponents of apartheid. Then, in 1993, leading ANC activist Chris Hani was assassinated, shot three times in the head at short range as he stepped from his car in Johannesburg. The assassination produced serious rioting and President F.W. de Klerk warned the country was on the brink of a race war. ANC leader Nelson Mandela appealed for calm and, ultimately, the crisis was resolved with a historic agreement to hold free elections in 1994.

Kemp, described by British newspapers at the time as an official of the National Intelligence Service (which denied any link to the Hani assassination), was interrogated by police in the murder but never charged. He admitted to drawing up a roster of names, headed by Mandela and followed by Communist Party leader Joe Slovo and then Hani, which authorities described as a hit list. Kemp claimed he didn't know it was to be used as a murder guide and offered up shifting explanations of the list, including the claim that it was "to be used merely for research purposes."

Later in 1993, murder charges in the Hani assassination were brought against the assassin (not Kemp) and a couple, Clive Derby-Lewis and his wife, Gaye. Kemp testified against the couple, saying they admitted to involvement during a lunch the three had together two days after Hani's death. (Kemp and Clive Derby-Lewis then both worked for a far-right newspaper, The Patriot.) Clive Derby-Lewis and the actual assassin, Janusz Walus, were found guilty and sentenced to death (both death sentences were later commuted to life), while Gaye Derby-Lewis was acquitted.

The fact that Kemp apparently avoided prosecution by cooperating with prosecutors and giving damning testimony against the Derby-Lewises may have made it difficult for him to remain on good terms with the South African radical right. Many activists in the racist movement believe Kemp moved on to Europe and the United States later because his former comrades came to detest him.

In any case, in 1996, two years after South Africa held free elections, Kemp relocated to Britain (he now resides near Oxford, England). That same year, the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight reported that Kemp had addressed a neo-Nazi meeting in Germany and that one of his speeches was published in the German fascist publication Nation und Europa, founded by a former SS officer.

In the late 1990s, South Africa held Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that offered amnesty to many of those who carried out violence either for or against the apartheid regime if they publicly confessed to those crimes. During one of those hearings, Gaye Derby-Lewis accused Kemp of aiding the assassination by providing the hit list and knowing what it was for. Kemp denied it.

Back in the USA

In the United States, Kemp is best known for a sarcastic racist essay, "An Apology to the Black Man from the White Race," that has been widely circulated by white supremacists. In his mocking response to the 1995 decision of the Southern Baptist Convention to apologize for slavery, Kemp "apologizes" to blacks for "teaching you how to read and write" and "for building you thousands of schools which we have repaired after you vandalized them and burned them down."

Kemp also is the author of March of the Titans: The History of the White Race. His massive 2006 book tracks the "white race" from 35,000 B.C. through the 20th century, ascribing nearly all cultural and scientific advances to white people. Kemp warns that multiculturalism and race-mixing are destroying this font of all that is good since "all civilizations rise and fall according to their homogeneity and nothing else." The book is anti-Semitic, containing chapters on such matters as "The Suppressed Link: Jews and Communism." Kemp and his book are favorites on the white supremacist forum Stormfront, where he occasionally weighs in on various topics. Stormfront's moderator, Jamie Kelso, has read sections of the book on the air, and the site carries a copy of Kemp's glowing history of the AWB.

(The 2006 hardback edition of March of the Titans is published by Burlington, Iowa-based Ostara Productions, a previously unknown outfit whose post office box is used by David Otto. Kemp thanks Otto in the hardback edition of the book.)

It was through his research for March of the Titans that Kemp first came into contact with the National Alliance. While reading up on "white history," he ran across the late Alliance founder William Pierce's series "Who We Are," which was published in the group's Attack and National Vanguard magazines. By 2000, Sam van Rensburg, then the Alliance's membership coordinator and himself a South African military veteran, was telling Alliance members about his countryman, Kemp. Two years later, Kemp told the neo-Nazi website, Tightrope, that Pierce's articles were "the best resource I found" and led him to contact the group.

Today, Kemp is working actively to rebuild the Alliance, which has fallen from more than 1,400 active members to a tiny handful (its chairman, Shaun Walker, was recently sentenced to seven years in prison on federal civil rights charges). And the Alliance has tried to repay the favor. In 2005, when Kemp's byline started appearing in Alliance publications, the group awarded him the "Dr. William Pierce Award for Investigative Journalism," which brought with it a $250 prize, for his article in National Vanguard, "White South Africa: What Went Wrong?"

Kemp writes for that magazine both under his own name and the pseudonym Richard Preston. He also has also been ghostwriting at least some of current Alliance Chairman Erich Gliebe's speeches and his "American Dissident Voices" shortwave broadcasts and other material — something that has not escaped movement stalwarts who don't believe the former boxer is capable of articles such as last year's "Iberian Drama: An Essential History of Spain from Antiquity through the Reconquest." "Who do they think they're kidding?" asked one post on a private E-mail list that includes many former Alliance leaders. "Erich couldn't find Spain on a map."

Gliebe's wife, Erika Snyder-Gliebe, has boasted to friends that she and Kemp share the Preston pseudonym and that she sometimes posts comments under that name to the website of Resistance Records, a music label owned by the Alliance. Kemp spent part of last two years in the United States, visiting the Alliance headquarters compound near Mill Point, W.V. and also some state chapters. He was slated to speak at the Alliance's May 2007 "Holocaust Revisionist Conference," but did not attend (Kemp did speak in 2006 at a Holocaust denial conference hosted by The Barnes Review, a denial journal run by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto that has published Kemp). Kemp has major articles in the latest issue of National Vanguard and is believed to have visited the United States as recently as February.

Kemp's American outreach may be part of an effort to build bridges between white supremacists in Europe and the United States. In Britain, Kemp has worked for the white supremacist BNP since 2004, and he is well respected by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany. According to Searchlight, Kemp this June was given the BNP's Excalibur merchandise outlet to run with another BNP activist. The magazine also reported that Kemp was put in charge of the ideological training of the BNP's "voting members" as part of plan to build a new elite within the party loyal to its leadership, particularly party chairman Nick Griffin (Griffin often travels to the U.S. to attend white supremacist events and solicit funds for his party). Searchlight also noted that Kemp isn't the only radical South African in a key BNP post. Lambertus Nieuwhof, who tried to bomb a mixed-race church school in South Africa in 1992, is also on their payroll and runs BNP Internet operations. Surprising no one, Nieuwhof has said he considers Kemp "a very good friend."

Kemp is clear about his goals for the white race. As he writes in his book on the AWB, "with new leadership, a new generation could easily once again take on the tradition of struggle handed down to them from previous generations." It may well be that his networking, along with his attempts to reinvigorate the Alliance that was once widely respected by white supremacists around the globe, is part of a concerted attempt to create "a new leadership" in both Europe and the U.S.

SPLC

7 comments:

John P said...

This is a really good article but unfortunately it seems to have been over looked by a lot of people with the excitement of the last few days.
Well worth a read

Antifascist said...

You're right, John. I think we'll resurrect this article when the current furore has died down a little.

Anonymous said...

The BNP are trying to market themselves recently as "the party for freedom of speech and democracy" as well as "standing up for the oppressed majority". Strange then they hire pro apartheid people who stood for for the opposite of those ideals. Their real goal of course is white supremacy to be reinstated worldwide. I want to know whether the new supporters aren't getting this or don't care?

Anonymous said...

Hani's flight of `coincidence'


21 Feb 1997 00:00
OUTsurance - Click Here
Stefaans Brmmer FLIGHT SA 232 from Johannesburg to London on February 6 1993, two months before Chris Hani was assassinated, had three passengers of note - the South African Communist Party leader himself; right-wing journalist Arthur Kemp, who was later arrested in connection with his murder; and Inkatha Freedom Party militarist Philip Powell. This "coincidence" was discovered by the Mail & Guardian amid allegations that Hani's assassination had been part of a plot that went beyond right-wing politician Clive Derby-Lewis and Polish immigrant Janusz Walus. Kemp gave the tip-off about the South African Airways passenger list to a London Sunday paper a number of weeks ago during an attempt to sell new evidence on Hani's assassination. The flight details were verified by M&G. Kemp was not charged with the murder, but was used as a state witness in the trial - he had supplied address details for the "hit list". This week, he remained mum, saying only: "I have a story to sell. I am prepared to negotiate the price." In a letter to the M&G this week, Kemp invited the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to revisit the assassination - claiming it would find nothing new as "there is nothing to hide". Kemp, now resident in London, also denied he had been associated with the old National Intelligence Service (NIS), as claimed in the M&G last week. The allegation that he had been a source for the NIS had been confirmed by members of the police and the new National Intelligence Agency before publication. He did not deny he had earlier been with the police security branch. SACP deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin confirmed Hani had been on the flight, saying he had been with a delegation en route to Cuba. Powell confirmed he had been on the same flight, saying he was on a holiday to London. He had encountered Kemp at Johannesburg International Airport before boarding, and had only realised Hani was on the same flight when he saw him at passport control in London. Powell's alleged role in IFP military activities - and links to the apartheid security forces - was highlighted last year in the trial of Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock. Testifying in mitigation of sentence, De Kock said Powell had been a security branch agent and was later associated with the Military Intelligence front company Longreach. De Kock implicated Powell in Vlakplaas-backed gunrunning to IFP military units in KwaZulu-Natal.

Anonymous said...

Hani `conspirator' was intelligence man


14 Feb 1997 00:00
OUTsurance - Click Here
Intelligence agent Arthur Kemp appears to have knowledge of a wider plot behind Chris Hani's assassination, writes Stefaans Brmmer ARTHUR KEMP, the right-wing journalist who gave address details for a "hit list" to Chris Hani's killers, had links with the old National Intelligence Service (NIS) - raising new questions about possible complicity or foreknowledge in official agencies. The Mail & Guardian has also confirmed the identity of one of two NIS "handlers" involved with one-time Civil Co-operation Bureau agent Eugene Riley. The handlers allegedly received intelligence reports from Riley warning of Hani's impending assassination. Riley died in an unsolved shooting in early 1994, but his girlfriend, Julie Wilken, has confirmed she typed the reports. The reports, revealed in the M&G a fortnight ago, correctly specified April 10 1993 as the date Hani would be killed, and claimed members of the African National Congress's security and intelligence structures would be involved. Wilken has claimed at least one of the reports reached Riley's handlers before the assassination. Kemp, who at different times worked for The Citizen and rightwing publication Die Patriot, was arrested after the assassination. He was used as a state witness in the trial of Conservative Party politician Clive Derby-Lewis and Polish immigrant Janusz Walus, who are both serving life sentences. In their trial Kemp testified how he had supplied a list with addresses - which he claimed he believed would be used so demonstrations could be held at the homes of enemies of the right wing - to Gaye Derby-Lewis, wife of Clive Derby-Lewis. The prosecution contended the list of 10 names had been a hit list. Hani's name appeared third on the list, after Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo. Intelligence and police sources have confirmed to the M&G that Kemp, a former police security branch member, had been an informant for the NIS. It is alleged that after the assassination the NIS decided to play "open cards" with FW de Klerk's government: the agency told the then- president of its relationship with Kemp, while denying that Kemp had acted in an official capacity. But in a new twist Kemp, who moved to Britain last year, recently contacted a London publication, claiming to have knowledge of a wider plot behind Hani's death. He did not give details. Kemp's claim of a wider plot echoes a similar one by Mohammed Amin Laher, whom Wilken has identified as a double agent for Riley and the ANC's then-Department of Intelligence and Security (DIS), and as the source of Riley's information on the impending assassination. Laher has claimed in a call from an undisclosed location that Hani's death involved a conspiracy "on both sides of the spectrum". While Wilken and some of Riley's former associates believe Riley had fed the information to the old department of military intelligence, the M&G this week confirmed that the addressees on the documents - identified in the documents only as "P&F" - were in fact two NIS members who at the time operated under the false company name of Jacaranda Pamphlets, an NIS front. "P", whose name has been supplied to the M&G but who cannot be named for legal reasons, specialised in gathering information on the right wing in the early 1990s and also had extensive contact with DIS members when they returned from exile after the unbanning of the ANC. He was instrumental in setting up links between DIS and NIS members in the negotiations that led to the amalgamation of the two intelligence bodies to become the new National Intelligence Agency. "P", who now works from the agency's head office in Pretoria, this week denied having received the documents or having known Riley. Agency liaison officer Willem Thron declined comment, saying the matter concerned the "now-defunct NIS". In other developments: * One of the original members of the DIS team that did an investigation on behalf of the ANC into the assassination confirmed Hani had had fears about his own security and had unsuccessfully agitated with the ANC to step up his security. He said the DIS investigation had found evidence of a second killer or group of killers, besides Walus, whom the DIS believed had been involved. He said this was based on an eyewitness report of a second car besides Walus's; on the angle of a bullet which seemed to have come from a different direction to where Walus had been standing, and on evidence that someone had been hiding behind a wall next door to Hani's Boksburg home at the time of the assassination. He claimed police at the time had been "unwilling" to follow the leads uncovered by the DIS investigation. * The documents in the M&G's possession are only part of a much larger collection of information which Riley had fed to "P&F" at the NIS, a large proportion of them supposedly based on information supplied by Laher. A senior serving intelligence official, formerly with DIS, has confirmed the existence of the documents, which deal with matters as divergent as arms smuggling, politicians' affairs and a supposed plot to use a computer programme to favour the ANC in the elections. But he claimed the information contained in the documents often had no bearing on reality. The question remains, however, how Riley and Laher could have had foreknowledge of the assassination plot, and how they could have remained in the NIS information- gathering chain if they had supplied consistently false information. * Hani and another leading South African Communist Party leader had repeated contact with an askari, a former ANC member "turned" by the police security branch, who "turned" again and clandestinely gave the SACP information on security branch matters. Shortly before the assassination, the askari warned Hani that things were "becoming hot" for him

Anonymous said...

Hani's flight of `coincidence'


21 Feb 1997 00:00
OUTsurance - Click Here
Stefaans Brmmer FLIGHT SA 232 from Johannesburg to London on February 6 1993, two months before Chris Hani was assassinated, had three passengers of note - the South African Communist Party leader himself; right-wing journalist Arthur Kemp, who was later arrested in connection with his murder; and Inkatha Freedom Party militarist Philip Powell. This "coincidence" was discovered by the Mail & Guardian amid allegations that Hani's assassination had been part of a plot that went beyond right-wing politician Clive Derby-Lewis and Polish immigrant Janusz Walus. Kemp gave the tip-off about the South African Airways passenger list to a London Sunday paper a number of weeks ago during an attempt to sell new evidence on Hani's assassination. The flight details were verified by M&G. Kemp was not charged with the murder, but was used as a state witness in the trial - he had supplied address details for the "hit list". This week, he remained mum, saying only: "I have a story to sell. I am prepared to negotiate the price." In a letter to the M&G this week, Kemp invited the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to revisit the assassination - claiming it would find nothing new as "there is nothing to hide". Kemp, now resident in London, also denied he had been associated with the old National Intelligence Service (NIS), as claimed in the M&G last week. The allegation that he had been a source for the NIS had been confirmed by members of the police and the new National Intelligence Agency before publication. He did not deny he had earlier been with the police security branch. SACP deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin confirmed Hani had been on the flight, saying he had been with a delegation en route to Cuba. Powell confirmed he had been on the same flight, saying he was on a holiday to London. He had encountered Kemp at Johannesburg International Airport before boarding, and had only realised Hani was on the same flight when he saw him at passport control in London. Powell's alleged role in IFP military activities - and links to the apartheid security forces - was highlighted last year in the trial of Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock. Testifying in mitigation of sentence, De Kock said Powell had been a security branch agent and was later associated with the Military Intelligence front company Longreach. De Kock implicated Powell in Vlakplaas-backed gunrunning to IFP military units in KwaZulu-Natal.

Anonymous said...

Camp and cowardice
Gavin Evans

18 Jun 2004 09:28
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: The British National Party (BNP), the premier neo- fascist organisation in the United Kingdom, is reeling from worse-than-expected results in local elections last week — not least in London, where the campaign was coordinated by some- time South African Arthur Kemp. The 41-year-old Kemp, whose high point of notoriety came from his role in the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993, is a close friend of BNP party leader Nick Griffin, who drafted him to coordinate its bid to win a seat on Ken Livingston’s London assembly. It failed. Born in what was then Rhodesia, raised in Cape Town and now living with his family near Oxford, Kemp is a strange creature with an even stranger political past. I first met him in 1982 when I was a member of the students representative council at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Kemp, then in his first year, was elected as a “joke” candidate in an uncontested by-election. Unintentionally camp, weedy and unsmiling, his contribution extended no further than planting stink bombs at public meetings. After one such incident, a left-winger threatened to thump him and Kemp immediately backed down, leading Tony Karon (then a leftie student, now a New York-based Time editor and television pundit) to dub him a “gutless fascist”. It wasn’t long before Kemp was heading determinedly in that direction. It had already emerged he was a member of the New Republic Party (a short-lived, right-of-centre, English-speaking affair). Soon after, however, he made a brief and futile attempt to ingratiate himself with the “broad left”. Making no headway, Kemp helped revive the Conservative Students Alliance — a right-wing group funded by the security police. But unlike most of his right-wing student allies, who drifted towards the National Party and later Tony Leon’s Democratic Alliance, Kemp took a more idiosyncratic path — serving the apartheid security and intelligence machinery on the one hand, and the extreme right on the other. He joined the police and then the security police after leaving university while drifting steadily towards a harder-line, pro-apartheid political stance than he was prepared to own up to in his UCT days. He became a prominent stalwart for the South African Conservative Party. Surrounded by burlier men, he had acquired a more confident swagger along with his supercilious sneer. He seemed to be doing well in his attempts to inveigle himself into their circles, working as political secretary to party leader Andries Treurnicht and writing a sympathetic book on the Afrikanerweerstandsbeweging (AWB) in 1990, and becoming a prominent writer in Die Patriot. As an English-speaking right-winger with a dramatic flair, he appealed to the flamboyant side of the Pretoria- based CP couple, Clive and Gaye Derby-Lewis. Kemp supplied Gaye with what became a list of the names and whereabouts of prominent anti-apartheid activists, including the name and address of Hani. Clive passed the list on to his hitman, Polish-born fascist Janusz Walus, who murdered Hani. Kemp’s list was later found in Walus’s flat. What the Derby-Lewises did not realise was that Kemp also informed the National Intelligence Service (NIS) of his list and where it had gone (although the NIS later claimed it had no role in Hani’s murder). Kemp was arrested along with Walus and the Derby-Lewises and held for a couple of days. He became a state witness, admitting his role in supplying the list, including Hani’s details, while denying prior knowledge of its purpose. By this stage Kemp was regarded as a gutless sell-out by his extremist comrades and further infuriated them with his reluctance to assist their amnesty bid. He emigrated soon after South Africa became a democracy and settled in Britain, where he promptly got to work building on his past ties with neo-fascist groups. In 1996 Searchlight, the anti-fascist newspaper, exposed the fact that Kemp had addressed pro-Nazi meetings in Germany and had written for the fascist publication Nation und Europa. He later wrote a 32-chapter racist history book entitled March of the Titans: History of the White Race, and his musings have been highlighted on the Nazi-supporting website Stormfront. Kemp developed a close relationship with BNP leader Griffin and began to make regular contributions to the party’s website and publications on subjects ranging from the Iraq War to “non-white” immigration. One of his most quoted is a lengthy racist diatribe entitled Third World Immigration: Importing Poverty, not Prosperity — a kind of reworking of Enoch Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood speech, arguing against black immigration to Britain. He joined Griffin at a rally of BNP supporters in Bromley. As with so many things in Kemp’s past, this one did not work out (mainly because of the relative success of the more mainstream right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party). The BNP is defensive about the exposure of Kemp’s past. “He’s a fantastic fellow and I don’t see anything wrong with what he’s doing,” said a spokesperson. However, some British neo-fascist activists are pointing to Kemp’s role as an informer against right-wing comrades in South Africa, saying that he is not to be trusted. If his past is anything to go by, they may have a point.