'Fighting apartheid, we are all hawks!'

September 16, 1992
Issue 

By Norm Dixon

Essop Pahad, 54, first became politically active in the Transvaal Indian Congress in the late 1950s and was elected to its executive in the early 1960s, after which he was detained and then banned. He is a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party. In exile he served 15 years as the SACP representative on the editorial committee of the World Marxist Review. Pahad spoke to Green Left Weekly about the South African government-inspired media claims that the march on Ciskei has revealed a "hardliner-moderate" split in the African National Congress.

The decision to organise the September 7 march on Ciskei was "taken at a meeting of the SACP, ANC and Congress of South African Trade Unions alliance ... to create the conditions where free and fair political activity can take place in the so-called independent states such as Ciskei and Bophuthatswana. It wasn't the decision of one particular organisation, it was the decision of the alliance and, may I add, our decision ... was in response to the request of the people of that region ...

"Parts of the media are trying to turn this into an anticommunist hysteria by trying to portray the march as if 'communist hardliners' were leading the rest of the 'moderates'. We reject that with contempt.

"The ANC leaders present [at the demonstration], Ronnie Kasrils and Raymond Suttner and others, are also leading members of the SACP but they were there representing the ANC. Ronnie Kasrils heads the ANC's Campaigns Committee ...

"This march was part of the mass action campaign. It was the result of proposals put forward by the ANC to the Campaigns Committee which were discussed and adopted by the ANC policy conference [in May]. After discussions between the alliance members, we came to a common agreement on the kind of steps that were needed to be taken."

Pahad explained that the media in South Africa portray differences in the ANC as being between "hawks" and "doves". "When it comes to peace, all of the people who genuinely desire a democratic South Africa and who genuinely want to see a reduction and elimination of violence from our lives are 'doves', but we are all 'hawks' when it comes to fighting apartheid and we will continue to fight like hawks in order to destroy it."

Pahad said that in the view of the SACP, the importance of mass action goes beyond the immediate objectives of genuine democracy and an end of state-sponsored violence: "The mass actions also have a longer term consequence ... For a democracy to flourish we must develop a culture of mass action. Even when we have an interim government, even when we have a democratic government, the people must e in mass action on those grievances they feel are not being listened to. Mass action is central to any kind of democratic society."

The SACP has a "paid-up" membership of around 30,000, Pahad reported. "Our membership comes from the most exploited sections of our community, people who do not have very much money ... One of the regions in which the party has a great deal of support and where we are growing very strongly is the border region, where Ciskei located. The other is the other part of the Eastern Cape around Port Elizabeth, where we had at the end of July a rally of 50,000 people.

"The party in our view can only grow and can only become stronger if, as a party, we are engaged in the day to day struggles of the people. In South Africa millions of our people have suffered the ravages and consequences of capitalism. So there is an elementary and conscious rejection of capitalism while socialism is viewed very favourably.

"By and large we have a very powerful support base within the main trade unions in this country, principally the National Union of Mineworkers. The SACP is very popular among the mineworkers."

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