Tag: East Germany

‘East Germany and the ANC shared a special bond’ – Deutsche Welle

Christine Müller
Christine Müller

East Germany and the African National Congress shared a special bond: not only the government, but also the public in the communist state supported the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

Heavily armed police forces pushing along black children and teenagers, beating them with clubs, shooting with live ammunition. The disturbing images of the Soweto Uprising shocked the world in June of 1976.

Some 15,000 students in the South African township protested against a new rule that said they’d only be able to take exams in Afrikaans, the language of most white South Africans. They accused the apartheid regime of massively limiting their access to education.

Authorities said 575 people died in the dispute, but the protesters themselves said the number of victims was much higher. Years of unrest followed and led to international protest.

Soweto as catalyst

For Christine Müller from Leipzig, then in communist East Germany, the Soweto uprising was a “defining moment.” She still remembers the effect the pictures had on her. “This rage enveloped me, because I felt so helpless,” Müller told DW. “I thought that we needed to do something immediately.”
Christine Müller

Christine Müller says seeing the pictures from Soweto made her feel ‘helpless’
She researched the topic and looked for fellow supporters. For decades, she worked in church groups that advocated solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement. Today, Müller is the head of the “One World” working group at the Protestant Church of Saxony. For Müller, her involvement is an expression of her Christian faith.
“‘Apartheid’ means exclusion,” she said. “And that’s not just about the victims of racism in South Africa, but more generally about the excluded, who don’t get a piece of the pie when it comes to wealth and power.”

Involuntary union of church and state

East German stamp exalting African wars of liberation
East German stamp exalting African wars of liberation

In East Germany, the Protestant church was a main source of political opposition. But the authoritarian government was also involved in the fight against apartheid. That made for an unusual alliance.
The communist leadership in East Berlin described its support for liberation movements as anti-imperialistic solidarity. But East Germany also had pragmatic goals at heart: the government wanted to raise its country’s profile on the world stage. Until the 1970s, it lacked diplomatic ties to western nations because democratic West Germany regarded itself as the only legitimate successor state to the wartime regime. West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine of 1955 considered it an “unfriendly act” when other countries established diplomatic relations with the East.

Together with the US and Britain, West Germany was among the countries with the strongest ties to the apartheid regime in Pretoria. The West German Protestant church (EKD) was largely mute on the issue. Support for the African National Congress (ANC) and its imprisoned member Nelson Mandela tended to come from leftist groups. That led to angry disputes within the church.

In contrast, the East German government generally regarded any independent social movements as a threat. That didn’t make the anti-apartheid efforts of grassroots groups, or of the East German government, any less worthy, historian Ilona Schleicher said. In the face of the situation in Soweto and other examples of brutal violence against blacks, political persuasion and worldview weren’t of any importance, she said: “Every human being, no matter whether they oppose their state or not, reacts the same to those pictures if they’re really human: with compassion, solidarity and the desire to help.”

Fighting for democracy under communism

But the lack of democracy in East Germany cast a shadow over its anti-apartheid stance, Schleicher said: “They were fighting for something they didn’t have in their own country.” She experienced the anti-apartheid movement as the wife of an East German diplomat in southern Africa. That influenced her stance. “As a working-class child, I grew up with the promises of socialism,” Schleicher told DW. “For me, everything in East Germany looked right. The realization that many things were not in fact right in our country only came to me much later, and also because of the experiences we had abroad.”

On the ground in South Africa, she saw that the liberation fighters didn’t care about who helped them or what their motivation was. “What counted was the actual support.” The ANC profited from East German support in various ways. Instructors and teachers worked in ANC training centers in Tanzania and universities in East Germany accepted black South African students. To make this possible, the official Solidarity Committee collected donations in the population.

When the ANC began using violence against its oppressors in the 1960s, East Germany continued to support it. The Solidarity Committee sent paramilitary equipment including camouflage fabric, binoculars and rubber boats. And instructors trained more than 1,000 resistance fighters in Africa, but also in a secret military camp in the East German village of Teterow.

Apartheid support in West Germany

At the same time in West Germany, companies like Daimler-Benz, Siemens and Deutsche Bank invested in South Africa, and thus provided a form of support to the apartheid regime and its violations of human rights – knowing that they had the West German government on their side.

ANC supporters in the East did experience a crisis of conscience, Müller said: “That was the problem for many of my fellow Christians who said ‘We can’t support our government’s anti-imperialistic politics.'” That’s why she was even happier when the apartheid laws were abandoned in 1990, the year East Germany itself ceased to exist, and in 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president. Müller said that was a nice affirmation for her efforts, even though things are far from perfect in South Africa. – Deutsche Welle

Are Mrs. Thatcher’s cuckoos coming home to roost?

Mrs. Margaret Thatcher famously stated in the nineteen-eighties that “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”

For this, she was ridiculed by the British radicals, with Bishop Trevor Huddleston of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the forefront. Since that time, all the anti-apartheid secrets have been revealed, including the active role played by British radicals, especially within the Anglican Church, in undermining what was then still the sovereign government of South Africa.

Whereas the ANC and SACP also enjoyed Soviet and East German support, the financial and organisational muscle for the South African revolution was provided by Sweden and the Anglican Church. Another radical priest, Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s in London, oversaw a vast network of agents who channelled funds in the name of the Defence and Aid Fund into South Africa for political trials and to support the relatives of imprisoned revolutionaries. Under today’s banking laws, money may no longer be laundered in such a fashion.

On the website of the Canon Collins Trust, a document boasts that one hundred million pounds were distributed in support of attempts to overthrow the much-vilified reformist government of PW Botha. Revolution, and not reform, was what everyone had preached back then.

However, as South Africa pursues its dream of an egalitarian society at all costs, there is a certain revolutionary fatigue setting in, even among the most ardent supporters of the ANC. And the second phase of the revolution, or “second transition” as it has been euphemistically called, still lies ahead of us. During that phase, most white farmers will lose their land and large swathes of private industry, including the mines, may be nationalised. Mayhem and ethnic conflict will probably result.

Increasingly, to paraphrase a line from Joyce’s Ulysses, the New South Africa is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

Over the past thirteen days, there have been seventeen victims of farm attacks in South Africa. Not all have died, but the death rate is high. Some were horribly tortured. Another ten people were killed at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana amid strife between the mine and two competing trade unions.

The American NGO, Genocide Watch, has already classified South Africa as a category 5 (out of a possible 8) genocide risk, with polarisation between groups taking place. On his recent visit to South Africa, Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch stated that the atrocities committed against Afrikaner farmers “were signs of genocide and that there is enough suspicion that it is being organised”.

Stanton also asserted an intrinsic connection between communist ideology and genocide. In this, he is supported by the post-Maoist philosophers of France, the so-called nouveaux philosophes, who broke with Marxism in the nineteen-seventies and also saw the germ of crimes against humanity in the concepts of Marx and Lenin.

In the minds of the ANC “comrades”, transformation is both necessary and inevitable, echoing classical Marxist-Leninism. Ordinary human lives or cultures will not stand in the way of their grand strategy to effect a radical change in South Africa. In almost every public appearance, ANC leaders use the Marxist cliché “moving forward”, indicating the country’s march towards a millenarian goal.

Afrikaner children at high school listen to the iconoclastic band Fokofpolisiekar, voicing their frustrations with violence, affirmative action and social decay in songs such as “Brand Suid-Afrika”. And certainly the impression that South Africa is burning, sometimes literally, is not amiss. If only the BBC, NBC and other major TV networks overseas had been filming all of this as they did during the seventies and eighties, already there would have been an impression that South Africa was experiencing a crisis.

After almost two decades of ANC rule, it appears that Mrs. Thatcher’s cuckoos are coming home to roost. Like ZANU PF in Zimbabwe, the ANC has not been able to make the transition from a crypto-communist liberation movement waving AK-47s to a political party managing Africa’s only industrial state. In its rhetoric and its thinking, it is stuck in a time warp, sometime before Ché Guevara got shot in Bolivia.

The ANC’s British supporters, as well as Sweden, saw fit to launch the ANC in its successful bid for power in South Africa. In fact, on 27 April 2004, the Swedish ambassador in Pretoria stated on Radiosondergrense, but speaking English, that “without the help of Sweden, the ANC would never have ruled South Africa”.

To many outside South Africa, the ANC still represents the party of Nelson Mandela. To them he personifies the romantic hero, a kind of black Ché Guevara who went to prison to liberate the South African masses. However, to the racial and ethnic minorities who suffer under ANC rule, with its accompanying threats of “kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, the movement is a Frankenstein let loose. The modern ANC was made in Britain, but it has grafted itself onto the South African state, blurring the boundaries between itself and the republic.

Through its culture of tenderpreneurs and high-spending officials, it has arguably become one of the richest political parties in the world, unassailable in the polls. In a vast country where electioneering is prohibitively expensive, oppositon parties face a permanent financial and propaganda disadvantage. The SANDF has been transformed, precisely, into nothing more than an ANC militia, an extension of Umkhonto we Sizwe. So even if the ANC is outvoted in 2019 or 2024 or when Jesus returns, as Zuma has stated, it will probably cling onto power, just like ZANU PF or the Angolan MPLA has done.

Of course, that paragon of human rights and democracy, Robert Mugabe, was also enthusiastically backed by British diplomats at Lancaster House and fêted by Fleet Street as a great African leader. The British penchant for radical chic has found a ready outlet in Southern Africa, to devastating effect.

However, like all radical movements, the ANC will overplay its hand. The question is not if but when. The further issue is how much damage it will do to South Africa and how many more massacres of Afrikaner families will take place before a realignment occurs.