By Norm Dixon
The unprovoked massacre of unarmed, peaceful protesters by the Pretoria-backed Ciskei military regime will be met by an intensification of the campaign of mass action for peace and democracy, two senior leaders of the South African liberation movement told Green Left Weekly. Speaking from Johannesburg, Saki Macozoma, a member of the African National Congress national executive, and Essop Pahad, central committee member of the South African Communist Party, both angrily condemned the de Klerk regime's attempt to blame the carnage on the African National Congress' exercise of its democratic right to call the demonstration.
Soldiers of the "independent" Ciskei bantustan opened fire without warning after several hundred demonstrators at the head of an 80,000-strong march attempted to cross a razor-wire barrier that prevented marchers' entering the homeland's capital, Bisho, on September 7. At least 32 people were killed and 200 wounded in two merciless salvos of machine gun fire, rifle grenade blasts and tear gas rounds that lasted over five minutes each.
Ciskei's military dictator, Brigadier Oupa Gqozo, and his Pretoria apologists claimed that the demonstrators had opened fire on the troops, a charge immediately dismissed as false by all the many foreign journalists and observers present. Television pictures beamed throughout the world exposed the lie.
South African President F.W. de Klerk and his ministers then attempted to justify the killings by pointing to the supposed breach of the "rules" laid down in a court order specifying where the huge crowd could and could not assemble.
De Klerk accused the ANC of being "provocative" and thus responsible for the killings. These accusations were dutifully echoed by the South African press and repeated ad nauseam in media reports and editorials.
Cold-blooded murder
A seething ANC secretary general Cyril Ramaphosa, who was in the protest's front line and was forced to fling himself into the dust when the lethal bursts of gunfire erupted, answered de Klerk's claims by saying that "there is nothing anybody did to provoke that type of response. To open fire like that ... it's sheer lunacy. We will not allow this tragedy to be forgotten."
Saki Macozoma told Green Left Weekly bluntly: "To blame people who have been shot equally with those doing the shooting — and I don't care what sort of meandering reasoning anyone can invoke — it is just an obscenity." Essop Pahad agreed. "We regard those killings as cold-blooded murders. It was a very peaceful demonstration. I myself was in a meeting of the National Peace Secretariat [a multiparty body charged with eliminating political violence] in Bisho on the Sunday before the demonstration in which we made it quite clear that we were going to march but that it was going to be a peaceful march, that our people were not going to be armed. We readily agreed that they should have as many monitors as possible because we wanted to create a situation where the Ciskei military would not open fire on our people."
The peace monitors could only stand by helplessly as hundreds of Brigadier Oupa Gqozo's troops, positioned in a line for a kilometre along the Ciskei "border", raked the huge crowd with thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Free activity
The march marked the beginning of a new phase of the ANC's mass action campaign, which was launched on June 16 and reached a high point with the general strike on August 3 and 4, and mass rallies on August 5, Saki Macozoma explained. The objective of this phase of mass action is to secure a climate of free political activity in Ciskei and the other homelands, he said.
"The Ciskei denies free political activity. It disrupts the meetings of the ANC. It tear-gasses people and it has shot people before at ANC meetings. We are finding it increasingly difficult to operate in the homeland."
Essop Pahad explained that Ciskei was chosen because the people from that area, known as the border region, had over several months been campaigning to get rid of Gqozo. "People from that region argued very strongly that we needed to go to the Ciskei because of the level of repression there. They felt that Brigadier Gqozo was not in a strong position. It is a region where the ANC and SACP have quite a lot of support. [We] decided to make a national demonstration in the Ciskei in order to highlight it."
Pahad pledged that the liberation movement will be launch mass actions in "any area where there is an absence of conditions for free political activity". Macozoma added that "we have a march going on in Qwaqwa today [September 9]. We are planning marches in Bophuthatswana. We're planning marches in KwaZulu. We are also planning marches in right-wing controlled towns where have been denied the right to march and free political activity."
Pahad told Green Left Weekly that the ending of the severe repression in Ciskei and the other homelands "is directly connected to the whole process leading to the election of a constitution making body ... We need to force a climate of free political activity."
Bantustans
The institutionalising of the National Party's unrepresentative and repressive bantustan allies in a new constitution under the guise of a key part of de Klerk's strategy to maintain the political and economic dominance of the white minority. It was with this in mind that the regime insisted in CODESA that a 75% majority in the projected constituent assembly must approve key clauses of the constitution. The government's refusal to budge on this point led the ANC to suspend its participation in CODESA in May.
De Klerk hopes the ANC can be prevented from achieving the democratic constitution it wants and/or winning South Africa's first post-apartheid elections. This possibility would evaporate if the democratic movement removed Pretoria's stooges from the Ciskei, KwaZulu, Bophuthatswana and Qwaqwa and won the right to freely organise. In that situation ANC-aligned parties would easily win any general election in these areas.
Macozoma points out: "[The homelands] are being used by the regime to do those things it cannot do at the centre. So you have the situation where the regime talks negotiations in the centre and uses the homelands for the repressive purposes in the periphery. If we don't have [free political activity] we will not be able to fight an election because there are about 10 million voters who reside in areas designated as homelands. If people like Gqozo can intimidate the ANC in those areas, it means we will never be able to organise and win an election.
"It is clear that these ruling homeland parties do not have any popular support ... There isn't support for the homeland system and there has never been. There isn't going to be because they are shooting people whenever they embark on a march."
The 10 bantustans or "homelands", four supposedly "independent", are institutions central to apartheid. They are economically unviable, overcrowded, eroded rural slums, accounting for only 13% of the land and scattered in a patchwork over the country. The homelands were devised to deny blacks political rights within South Africa, while ensuring a continuous supply of cheap black labour. Another aim was to divide the black working class along tribal lines.
Puppets
Apartheid's architects hoped the homelands would produce a layer of black collaborators as an alternative to ANC and the democratic movement.
While the South African people's mass struggle throughout the '80s, together with international solidarity, forced de Klerk to abandon apartheid's grand vision for the homelands, he is not yet ready to cut adrift the puppets of apartheid that the bantustan system has created. This explains the regime's refusal to condemn Gqozo's deadly response to the peaceful protest. It also explains the close links between the apartheid regime and the Ciskei dictatorship revealed in the aftermath of the massacre.
Macozoma outlined some of these links to Green Left Weekly: fuge for all kinds of discredited South African military personnel, ranging from those involved in the murder of anti-apartheid activists, the Koevoet which was used in Namibia [to terrorise SWAPO] to Battalion 32 and 31 which are mercenary forces ... South African military intelligence runs the Ciskei homeland. There is a coalescence of all those forces who are opposed to genuine democracy in South Africa in Ciskei."
Gqozo, a former prison warder in South Africa and member of one of the South African Defence Force's first black battalions, seized power in Ciskei in March 1990 through a military coup.
According to Louise Flanagan, who witnessed the massacre and is a researcher with the Independent Board of Inquiry, an non-aligned watchdog group that investigates political violence, the chief and deputy of the Ciskei Defence Force, the chief and deputy of military intelligence, the chief of operations, the chief of finance in the army, the chief of logistics in the army, the chief of personnel and the chief of the air wing in the army are all either seconded officers from the SADF or former SADF officers. Ciskei's security forces are paid for and trained by Pretoria.
Pretoria's support for Gqozo's actions was not limited to attempts to justify the carnage. Prior to the march, the area surrounding Ciskei was declared an "unrest area", and SADF troops were rushed into the region. As they fired, the Ciskei troops were backed by SADF personnel who, while not directly participating, were there to move into action if the Ciskei troops lost control of the situation. After the massacre South Africa deployed hundreds of troops in Bisho to "protect industrial property", most of which is owned by white South Africans. The SADF force sealed both sides of the border.
Commenting on the international anti-apartheid movement's calls for the reintroduction of trade and sporting sanctions, Pahad said that the ANC and its allies were discussing "the precise nature and character of international involvement".
Pahad said that the liberation movement is to have "the closest consultation and discussion with anti-apartheid movements throughout the world both to see what needs to be done immediately to support our struggle and to look at the kind of demands to be put forward and how realistic and obtainable those demands are".