Perhaps it is not surprising that, after the UK, the country that provides the largest number of visitors to the British National Party website is South Africa, where there are still many white residents who hanker after the country’s apartheid past.
Many of them may be friends and relations of the growing number of South African BNP members, of whom Arthur Kemp, editor of the BNP website and in charge of the ideological training of the party’s 250 or so elite activists, is the most prominent.
It has clearly not escaped the notice of the BNP leadership that white South Africans who fled black majority rule and now live in the UK are potentially a fertile recruiting ground for the racist party.
Especially of interest to the BNP, which has run several major fundraising campaigns over the past year, are wealthy South African business people and well paid financial services professionals in the City and Canary Wharf, many of whom meet up at the Aardvark pub in Rotherhithe, southeast London. Run until last month by Werner Swanepoel, it boasts “true South African hospitality”, live performances by South African artists and traditional South African food.
It was also the venue in July 2006 for an international meeting of the hardline white separatists of the Orania Movement, an attempt to set up a white homeland in the village of Orania in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. With only around 1,500 residents, the privately owned village is a minuscule shadow of the ambition by Professor Carel Boshoff, a grandson of the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, to grab a large part of the province for a self-governing Afrikaner homeland at the time of the collapse of the apartheid regime.
Hopeful of rich pickings for the BNP, in both members and financial support, and with one eye on the potential for building a South African resistance against majority rule, Neil McAllister, a South African BNP activist and failed publican now living in Chessington, Surrey, has cultivated a link with Swanepoel. He has been helped in this by Una Rice, a white exile from Zimbabwe, who works hard for the BNP in Barking and Dagenham.
A graduate, Rice, 31, was the victim of a road accident in 1984 which is reported to have left her disabled with brain injuries. She had arrived in the UK two years earlier with her mother. Now living in Barking, east London, she has gone about establishing herself as a political and clerical prop for councillor Bob Bailey, the leader of the BNP group on Barking and Dagenham council, and Richard Barnbrook, a Barking and Dagenham councillor and the BNP’s sole member of the London Assembly.
Last November McAllister and Rice arranged for Bailey and other senior BNP members to go with them to meet Swanepoel at the Aardvark pub, carrying a wad of BNP membership forms, with a view to recruiting South African key players to the party.
McAllister also passed Kemp the names of South African businesses to contact as potential financial backers, a task he will have to fit in between his many speaking engagements at BNP branches around the country, where he eagerly touts his overpriced and tedious books about the history of the white race and the neo-nazi South African AWB paramilitary group.
Despite McAllister’s enthusiasm to sign up South Africans for the BNP, he does not confine his political activities to that party. He was seen toting the South African flag from apartheid days on last November’s National Front Remembrance Sunday march.
Alongside him, waving the flag of the illegal Ian Smith white regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), was Chris Hurst, a university student from Richmond studying at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Hurst was among those invited to go to the Aardvark pub to help McAllister’s BNP recruitment drive.
McAllister and Kemp appear especially keen to enlist young people, such as Hurst and Rachel Hill, a 24-year-old English woman who grew up in South Africa after her parents emigrated there. A British nationalist from an early age, she joined the BNP two years ago after leaving school in Pretoria and returning to the UK. Her eager activism quickly propelled her into party office, as secretary of Melton and Rutland BNP, despite her apparently living in Oxfordshire. She also managed to get her picture onto the front page of issue 101 of Voice of Freedom, the BNP’s monthly newspaper, sitting in the front row at the 2008 BNP conference last November.
Many BNP members have no difficulty accommodating their leaders working in close conjunction with European fascists and nazis, whom they see as allies in a pan-European struggle for the future of the white race, and with US white supremacists who can bring financial support.
They find it harder to swallow Kemp, who now has a big say in the way the BNP is run and a strong influence on its ideology and policy. They will also be worried about the BNP’s growing links with South Africans who threaten to get the party embroiled in what might become a second wave of assassinations and sabotage back in their homeland for very little return for the party here.
The Orania Movement
The Orania Movement’s aim is to set up a self-governing Volkstaat for South Africa’s minority Boer-Afrikaner population. The Afrikaner Freedom Foundation (Avstig), formed by Professor Carel Boshoff (pictured) in the late 1980s, bought the dilapidated village of Orania in 1990, a few months after the repeal of the apartheid laws and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.
Orania, which has around 1,500 inhabitants, is now a self-proclaimed Afrikaner homeland, which follows the strict racial segregation of the apartheid era. Only Afrikaners are welcome and non-white residents are banned. All jobs are filled by Afrikaners. Black people can visit the village but are not welcome.
Around 60 Cape Coloured families who were forced to leave the village in 1991 after Avstig bought it received financial compensation from the South African government in 2006.
Situated in the middle of the Karoo desert in the Northern Cape Province at the border of the Free State, its economy is largely agricultural. In 2004 Orania launched its own currency in an attempt to move further towards self-sufficiency. It also has its own flag, consisting of a small boy pulling up his sleeves against a blue and orange background, traditional Afrikaner colours.
The villagers celebrate Afrikaner holidays and do not participate in South African national elections.
The South African government has mostly ignored the Afrikaner enclave, one of only two all-Afrikaner white settlements in the country – the other being Kleinfontein near Pretoria. However there has been some concern that Orania may provide shelter for white supremacist terrorists.
Searchlight
Showing posts with label South Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Africa. Show all posts
February 07, 2009
September 15, 2007
Anger rises in South Africa as killers walk free
Since soon after the fall of the apartheid regime Searchlight has investigated and revealed the involvement of former South African security service officers in trying to destabilise the new South Africa and lend their support to the far right internationally. We have exposed plots by the international far right, including people and groups in Britain, to plot assassinations and economic sabotage.
South Africa’s former hardline minister of law and order in the apartheid era received only a suspended sentence at the end of his trial last month after a plea bargain. Adriaan Vlok’s ten-year sentence was suspended for five years after he pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of a leading black activist cleric in 1989 in return for the withdrawal of charges of conspiracy to murder.
Vlok oversaw the bombings of the Cosatu trade union headquarters in Johannesburg in 1987 and the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches in 1988, for both of which he was granted amnesty by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1999. He did not apply for amnesty for the attempted murder by poisoning of the Reverend Frank Chikane in 1989, hence the prosecution.
Under Vlok’s watch the state police and military apparatus carried out countless assassinations of anti-apartheid activists within South Africa and on cross-border raids, ran dirty-tricks campaigns and fitted up innocent people. They also ran the notorious Vlakplaas farm, where opponents of the regime were tortured and murdered.
Vlok is just one among many apartheid regime operatives who have gone unpunished for their crimes. One of them has now become flavour of the month in the British National Party. Arthur Kemp, a former sergeant in the South African Security Police, was suspected of organising the surveillance of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party, in the weeks leading up to his assassination in April 1993.
In June this year Kemp, whose 586-page tome March of the Titans is highly praised by Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was handed the BNP’s Excalibur merchandise outlet to run alongside Nicholla Ritchie. Now Griffin has put him in charge of the ideological training of the BNP’s “voting members” as part of the plan to build a new elite within the party loyal to the present leadership. This puts Kemp among a very small group of Griffin’s most trusted lieutenants.
Writing on the BNP website Griffin said: “Arthur is a highly skilled and very welcome addition to our central team. I am delighted to have been able to bring him on board and hope he will be with us throughout the years of decision ahead of us.”
Kemp’s past presents no problem for the BNP, which has long made plain its regret at the fall of the murderous apartheid regime and its hatred for Nelson Mandela. The day before a new statue to Mandela was unveiled in London last month, the BNP website described him as “the man convicted of terrorist offences”, the “offences” in question being acts committed during the brave struggle by him and other fighters against white rule. The BNP’s article included a link to what it described as an “interesting poster” – the notorious “Hang Nelson Mandela” poster produced by the rightwing Federation of Conservative Students in the early 1980s, something that must be an acute embarrassment to at least one member of the current Shadow Cabinet.
Although Kemp was arrested after the Hani murder, he was never charged and had no need to apply to the TRC for amnesty. The TRC was set up after the end of apartheid under the chairmanship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to hear evidence from victims of apartheid. Perpetrators of politically motivated violence could also come forward to give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution, though not all were granted it and some ended up being prosecuted. It was seen as an important means of achieving reconciliation between the black and white communities. However critics point out that the failure to bring those who committed human rights abuses to justice was more likely to hinder reconciliation than help it.
Some commentators believe that there was also pressure from the West, that pursuing apartheid criminals would deter foreign investment in the new South Africa, though South Africa had its own economic clout, being rich in natural resources.
Remorse was not a prerequisite for amnesty but many who came to the TRC pleaded that they were changed men after finding religion. Last year Vlok washed the feet of Rev Chikane as a Christian gesture of atonement, something about which Rev Chikane himself felt uneasy but was pushed into agreeing by ANC government members. At the time the South African journalist Joe Qwelane, who was locked up without charge and witnessed savage beatings under apartheid, wrote that Vlok’s apology was unconvincing.
The TRC ceased operating in 2003 leaving many issues unresolved. It is now the prerogative of the national director of prosecutions to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute for crimes committed by both sides during the anti-apartheid struggle. Relatives of those who were unlawfully killed by the apartheid security forces and of those who died at the hands of ANC combatants both oppose this discretion, each believing that only people from their own side will be targeted.
There is a suspicion that some members of the ANC government, sitting in posts obtained through corruption, do not want to rock the boat by genuinely seeking justice for the victims of apartheid. And some ANC figures who also carried out crimes against their own people appear to have protection from powerful politicians.
On one side is AfriForm, a non-governmental organisation representing white farmers, some of whom do not seem to accept that anything has changed since apartheid. Black workers have been tortured and in some instances killed by their white masters.
Zimbabweans fleeing President Mugabe’s regime have to cross land owned by these farmers, some of whom have been taking the law into their own hands. Only a handful have been arrested and AfriForm has been busy supporting them. AfriForm is also championing the case of Dirk van Eck, an Afrikaner whose wife and children were killed by a landmine placed by ANC guerrillas at the height of the military struggle. Although van Eck agreed to a TRC amnesty for the two combatants, who are therefore legally and justly immune from prosecution, his name appeared on nearly every placard held by white demonstrators outside the court during Vlok’s trial.
Searchlight stands with all decent South Africans, black and white, who demand justice for those who died and were tortured, with proper investigations and reinvestigations and appropriate punishment for those found guilty.
Chris Hani’s name tops the list of those assassinated on state orders. Two men, Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, are serving life sentences in South Africa for his murder, but others including Kemp have escaped justice.
The fall of the apartheid regime was greeted throughout the world with a huge amount of hope for the future. Since Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s president, corruption has grown and much of the black population remains in severe poverty.
Last month Hugh Masakela, a musician with an international reputation as one of the world’s greatest trumpet players and as a hero of the struggle against apartheid, told the world that he and many other musicians whose music became symbols of protest against white domination are no longer welcome in the new South Africa, because the ANC is “terrified” of music as an agent of change.
In an interview with The Times, Masakela said, “I am not bitter I am disgusted”. He accused the ANC of conniving in a “business deal” to bring about the end of apartheid that had entrenched the power of the elite but left most of the population in poverty. He agreed with critics of the TRC that reconciliation had not happened. “What is amazing is how the perpetrators [of crimes under apartheid] almost reluctantly apologised – ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ – because a deal was there. It’s the same old story. After the Allies overran Germany you couldn’t find anybody who supported Nazism. It’s the same thing in South Africa. You can’t find anyone who supported apartheid.”
But like Germany’s Nazis after the war, South Africa’s white supremacists are still there and many, like Kemp and Lambertus Nieuwhof, who received a 12-month suspended sentence for bombing a South African church school and now runs the BNP’s internet operations, are still promoting the same views around the world. One of our most urgent concerns is to have these people as well as Leonard Veenendaal, a wanted white supremacist double murderer living in Cambridgeshire whom we exposed in our July issue, sent packing as soon as possible.
Vlakplaas torturer rewarded
Not everyone who committed human rights abuses on behalf of the apartheid regime was white. Vlakplaas was a remote farm that was taken over by a combination of govern-ment agencies to wage the internal and external war against the ANC and anybody else, black or white, battling apartheid.
Dirk Coetzee, the first commander of the covert Vlakplaas police unit, set about recruiting black members of his death and torture squads. Coetzee received an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his involvement in several crimes.
Many young black criminals found their way into his squads. One of the worst was Joe Mamasela. He had a streak of vicious ruthlessness that endeared him to his bosses, and enjoyed inflicting torture and killing people while he and his fellow officers enjoyed a barbecue. It is unlikely anyone will ever know how many ANC supporters died at his hands.
Sometimes he pretended to be an activist with MK, the military wing of the ANC. On one occasion he gave dodgy hand-grenades to fighters in Duduza township. Several were killed or maimed.
In 1986 he enticed ten township youth activists, promising to take them to Botswana to train with the MK. Before they crossed the border security officers ordered them off the vehicle and drugged them. Their bodies were then blown up. In 2005 the remains of the youths, who became known as the Mamelodi 10, were found and Mamasela admitted his role in the murders. He escaped prosecution in return for giving evidence about his colleagues, for which he was paid. He remains at liberty, enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, and is believed to be running a security company.
Adriaan Vlok, the police minister at the time the Mamelodi 10 were murdered, washed the feet of the victims’ mothers and widows, shortly before performing the same act on Reverend Frank Chikane. He described it as a deep spiritual experience. However he has always denied responsibility for the acts carried out by Vlakplaas and its officers.
Searchlight
South Africa’s former hardline minister of law and order in the apartheid era received only a suspended sentence at the end of his trial last month after a plea bargain. Adriaan Vlok’s ten-year sentence was suspended for five years after he pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of a leading black activist cleric in 1989 in return for the withdrawal of charges of conspiracy to murder.
Vlok oversaw the bombings of the Cosatu trade union headquarters in Johannesburg in 1987 and the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches in 1988, for both of which he was granted amnesty by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1999. He did not apply for amnesty for the attempted murder by poisoning of the Reverend Frank Chikane in 1989, hence the prosecution.
Under Vlok’s watch the state police and military apparatus carried out countless assassinations of anti-apartheid activists within South Africa and on cross-border raids, ran dirty-tricks campaigns and fitted up innocent people. They also ran the notorious Vlakplaas farm, where opponents of the regime were tortured and murdered.
Vlok is just one among many apartheid regime operatives who have gone unpunished for their crimes. One of them has now become flavour of the month in the British National Party. Arthur Kemp, a former sergeant in the South African Security Police, was suspected of organising the surveillance of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party, in the weeks leading up to his assassination in April 1993.
In June this year Kemp, whose 586-page tome March of the Titans is highly praised by Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was handed the BNP’s Excalibur merchandise outlet to run alongside Nicholla Ritchie. Now Griffin has put him in charge of the ideological training of the BNP’s “voting members” as part of the plan to build a new elite within the party loyal to the present leadership. This puts Kemp among a very small group of Griffin’s most trusted lieutenants.
Writing on the BNP website Griffin said: “Arthur is a highly skilled and very welcome addition to our central team. I am delighted to have been able to bring him on board and hope he will be with us throughout the years of decision ahead of us.”
Kemp’s past presents no problem for the BNP, which has long made plain its regret at the fall of the murderous apartheid regime and its hatred for Nelson Mandela. The day before a new statue to Mandela was unveiled in London last month, the BNP website described him as “the man convicted of terrorist offences”, the “offences” in question being acts committed during the brave struggle by him and other fighters against white rule. The BNP’s article included a link to what it described as an “interesting poster” – the notorious “Hang Nelson Mandela” poster produced by the rightwing Federation of Conservative Students in the early 1980s, something that must be an acute embarrassment to at least one member of the current Shadow Cabinet.
Although Kemp was arrested after the Hani murder, he was never charged and had no need to apply to the TRC for amnesty. The TRC was set up after the end of apartheid under the chairmanship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to hear evidence from victims of apartheid. Perpetrators of politically motivated violence could also come forward to give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution, though not all were granted it and some ended up being prosecuted. It was seen as an important means of achieving reconciliation between the black and white communities. However critics point out that the failure to bring those who committed human rights abuses to justice was more likely to hinder reconciliation than help it.
Some commentators believe that there was also pressure from the West, that pursuing apartheid criminals would deter foreign investment in the new South Africa, though South Africa had its own economic clout, being rich in natural resources.
Remorse was not a prerequisite for amnesty but many who came to the TRC pleaded that they were changed men after finding religion. Last year Vlok washed the feet of Rev Chikane as a Christian gesture of atonement, something about which Rev Chikane himself felt uneasy but was pushed into agreeing by ANC government members. At the time the South African journalist Joe Qwelane, who was locked up without charge and witnessed savage beatings under apartheid, wrote that Vlok’s apology was unconvincing.
The TRC ceased operating in 2003 leaving many issues unresolved. It is now the prerogative of the national director of prosecutions to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute for crimes committed by both sides during the anti-apartheid struggle. Relatives of those who were unlawfully killed by the apartheid security forces and of those who died at the hands of ANC combatants both oppose this discretion, each believing that only people from their own side will be targeted.
There is a suspicion that some members of the ANC government, sitting in posts obtained through corruption, do not want to rock the boat by genuinely seeking justice for the victims of apartheid. And some ANC figures who also carried out crimes against their own people appear to have protection from powerful politicians.
On one side is AfriForm, a non-governmental organisation representing white farmers, some of whom do not seem to accept that anything has changed since apartheid. Black workers have been tortured and in some instances killed by their white masters.
Zimbabweans fleeing President Mugabe’s regime have to cross land owned by these farmers, some of whom have been taking the law into their own hands. Only a handful have been arrested and AfriForm has been busy supporting them. AfriForm is also championing the case of Dirk van Eck, an Afrikaner whose wife and children were killed by a landmine placed by ANC guerrillas at the height of the military struggle. Although van Eck agreed to a TRC amnesty for the two combatants, who are therefore legally and justly immune from prosecution, his name appeared on nearly every placard held by white demonstrators outside the court during Vlok’s trial.
Searchlight stands with all decent South Africans, black and white, who demand justice for those who died and were tortured, with proper investigations and reinvestigations and appropriate punishment for those found guilty.
Chris Hani’s name tops the list of those assassinated on state orders. Two men, Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, are serving life sentences in South Africa for his murder, but others including Kemp have escaped justice.
The fall of the apartheid regime was greeted throughout the world with a huge amount of hope for the future. Since Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s president, corruption has grown and much of the black population remains in severe poverty.
Last month Hugh Masakela, a musician with an international reputation as one of the world’s greatest trumpet players and as a hero of the struggle against apartheid, told the world that he and many other musicians whose music became symbols of protest against white domination are no longer welcome in the new South Africa, because the ANC is “terrified” of music as an agent of change.
In an interview with The Times, Masakela said, “I am not bitter I am disgusted”. He accused the ANC of conniving in a “business deal” to bring about the end of apartheid that had entrenched the power of the elite but left most of the population in poverty. He agreed with critics of the TRC that reconciliation had not happened. “What is amazing is how the perpetrators [of crimes under apartheid] almost reluctantly apologised – ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ – because a deal was there. It’s the same old story. After the Allies overran Germany you couldn’t find anybody who supported Nazism. It’s the same thing in South Africa. You can’t find anyone who supported apartheid.”
But like Germany’s Nazis after the war, South Africa’s white supremacists are still there and many, like Kemp and Lambertus Nieuwhof, who received a 12-month suspended sentence for bombing a South African church school and now runs the BNP’s internet operations, are still promoting the same views around the world. One of our most urgent concerns is to have these people as well as Leonard Veenendaal, a wanted white supremacist double murderer living in Cambridgeshire whom we exposed in our July issue, sent packing as soon as possible.
Vlakplaas torturer rewarded
Not everyone who committed human rights abuses on behalf of the apartheid regime was white. Vlakplaas was a remote farm that was taken over by a combination of govern-ment agencies to wage the internal and external war against the ANC and anybody else, black or white, battling apartheid.
Dirk Coetzee, the first commander of the covert Vlakplaas police unit, set about recruiting black members of his death and torture squads. Coetzee received an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his involvement in several crimes.
Many young black criminals found their way into his squads. One of the worst was Joe Mamasela. He had a streak of vicious ruthlessness that endeared him to his bosses, and enjoyed inflicting torture and killing people while he and his fellow officers enjoyed a barbecue. It is unlikely anyone will ever know how many ANC supporters died at his hands.
Sometimes he pretended to be an activist with MK, the military wing of the ANC. On one occasion he gave dodgy hand-grenades to fighters in Duduza township. Several were killed or maimed.
In 1986 he enticed ten township youth activists, promising to take them to Botswana to train with the MK. Before they crossed the border security officers ordered them off the vehicle and drugged them. Their bodies were then blown up. In 2005 the remains of the youths, who became known as the Mamelodi 10, were found and Mamasela admitted his role in the murders. He escaped prosecution in return for giving evidence about his colleagues, for which he was paid. He remains at liberty, enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, and is believed to be running a security company.
Adriaan Vlok, the police minister at the time the Mamelodi 10 were murdered, washed the feet of the victims’ mothers and widows, shortly before performing the same act on Reverend Frank Chikane. He described it as a deep spiritual experience. However he has always denied responsibility for the acts carried out by Vlakplaas and its officers.
Searchlight
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