{"id":465811,"date":"2011-07-21T20:18:36","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T20:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/07\/21\/magnus-malan-and-crimes-against-humanity-in-africa\/"},"modified":"2011-07-21T20:18:36","modified_gmt":"2011-07-21T20:18:36","slug":"magnus-malan-and-crimes-against-humanity-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/07\/21\/magnus-malan-and-crimes-against-humanity-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Magnus Malan And Crimes Against Humanity in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Fahamu<\/a><\/p>\n

Horace Campbell<\/p>\n

21 July 2011<\/p>\n

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opinion<\/p>\n

General Magnus Malan, the chief architect of the total onslaught of the apartheid military, passed away on 18 July 2011.<\/p>\n

This total onslaught strategy was the idea that South Africa was threatened by a communist conspiracy and that the South African apartheid state must respond with economic, political, ideological, psychological and military tools to defend capitalism and white supremacy.<\/p>\n

Malan was minister of defence for 11 years, 1980-1991, and it was under his tenure that the apartheid war machine spread death and destruction across Africa. Under his tenure as minister of defence this illegal state decided to weaponise biology. The results are still being felt across Africa today with the ramifications of the biological warfare project that was called Project Coast. Malan’s life and death should remind young people that the fight for freedom must be protracted and that the economic, military and political defeat of apartheid is still a task to be completed. Africans may occupy positions of political power in South Africa but the economic legacies of apartheid are very much flourishing.<\/p>\n

Internationally, the crimes of the Nazis are condemned. German society no longer celebrates Hitler and the Nazis as great leaders, but in South Africa the publishing houses and think-tanks that were nourished and financed by Magnus Malan thrive and distort history. Many of these think-tanks have changed their names, but not their basic philosophy. Yet the people of South Africa have tried to transcend the ideation system of revenge and bitterness. The people have attempted to draw on the principles of Ubuntu I practise. Hiding behind the new philosophy of Ubuntu, the war criminals of South Africa have sought to rehabilitate themselves as servants of the South African state and as fighters against communism. The central place of the military in the processes of accumulation and enrichment has been taken over by sections of the African National Congress (ANC). Younger South Africans must work harder to completely understand the real consequences of apartheid and to remember that one cannot dismantle the system with the same ideas that built a system.<\/p>\n

APARTHEID AS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY<\/p>\n

Magnus Malan was born into white privilege in South Africa in 1930 when the ideas of Hitler and white supremacy had not yet taken over the leadership of the organisation that was to later become the National Party. By the end of the Second World War, the National Party had completely absorbed the ideas and principles of Nazism and codified these ideas into a series of laws and forms of organising society that still cripple South Africa to this day. Operating through a secretive organisation called the Afrikaner Broederbond, some of the adherents of the National Party had been interned during Second World War because of their overt support for Adolf Hitler and the ideas of the Nazis. This National Party came to power in 1948 and through the period 1948 to 1990 this party articulated a set of principles entrenching white minority rule. Apartheid as a doctrine codified and structured life in society with brutal force and super-exploitation. Malan was born in the period when the administrative system had relegated blacks to ‘reserves’, but the demand for labour brought Africans into the urban areas where they were dumped into marginal and police-controlled areas called townships. Malan matured within the secret order of the Afrikaner Broederbond and became one of the principal thinkers for the military plans for the next three decades.<\/p>\n

This system of apartheid controlled every aspect of the lives of Africans and other oppressed peoples called ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indians’. Masters and servants ordinances and the pass laws defined the position of Africans and regulated their freedom of movement. The Group Areas Act, the Native Land Act, the Population Registration Act, the Reservation and Separate Amenities Act and the Suppression of Communism Act were all part of the legal basis for the consolidation of the South African form of Nazism that was called apartheid. When Africans opposed these draconian measures they were shot down in the streets, with the Sharpeville Massacre of 1961 standing as one of the more notorious actions of this militarised society.<\/p>\n

Malan joined the military after graduating from the University of Pretoria and was sent to the United States to train over the period 1962-1963. It was during this time that Magnus Malan strengthened ties with conservative and racist military forces within the US military establishment. After rising through the ranks of the apartheid military, Malan was promoted to becoming chief of the army in 1973-1976 and chief of the defence forces in 1976-1980. He was appointed as minister of defence in 1980 and served in this position until 1991.Those US military personnel who want to establish relations with Africa would do well to research and expose the linkages of Malan to the US military establishment so that the present generation would be aware of the collaboration between the US military and apartheid.<\/p>\n

MALAN AND TOTAL STRATEGY<\/p>\n

Despite the efforts to crush the resistance of the people, the organised and spontaneous opposition to apartheid galvanised an international movement. Malan fancied himself as a military intellectual who had studied the campaigns of France in Algeria and the British in Kenya and Malaysia. After the independence of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 and the massive uprisings of Soweto in 1976, Malan and the thinkers of the apartheid state came up with the military doctrine of ‘total strategy’. This strategy was supposed to be the apartheid regime’s response to what it perceived as a multi-dimensional ‘total onslaught’ against the South African state.<\/p>\n

To carry forward this strategy the military became central to the reproduction of state power. This was reflected not only in the links between the military and industry, epitomised in the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR), but also in the militarisation of the state and society. Under Magnus Malan and Prime Minister P.W. Botha, the management techniques of the South African Defence Forces were harnessed to militarise every aspect of life. Total Strategy meant that the apartheid state mobilised economic, military, political, medical, information, cultural and psychological tools to preserve capitalism and white supremacy. Malan was at the top of an aggressive state organised under a National Security Management System (NSMS). An inner war cabinet called the State Security Council linked the military to local administrative structures through joint management committees and a decentralised system of ‘security management’ at all levels.<\/p>\n

This Total Strategy received a boost after the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980. Through a series of meetings with William Casey of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, there was a decision to intensify the wars against the peoples of South Africa and the region as a whole. The long-term plans of the South African State Security Council merged well with the anti-communist policies of the Reagan administration. The United States supported apartheid and acted as a buffer for apartheid when the United Nations wanted to impose stricter sanctions. It was in this period when intellectuals such as Chester Crocker (who was by then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs) became international spokespersons for the defence of apartheid on the grounds that the South African state was in the frontline struggle against communism. The liberation movements of South Africa were labelled as terrorist organisations and Nelson Mandela was kept in jail as the number-one terrorist.<\/p>\n

MAGNUS MALAN AS A WAR CRIMINAL UNDER THE UN CONVENTION<\/p>\n

The local struggles against apartheid inspired an international movement and in this struggle the South African apartheid state became isolated in the court of international public opinion. In 1973 the General Assembly of the United Nations had under the Apartheid Convention declared that apartheid was a crime against humanity and that ‘inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination’ were international crimes (art. 1).<\/p>\n

Article 2 defined the crime of apartheid – ‘which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa’ – as covering ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them’. It then listed the acts that fell within the ambit of the crime. These included murder, torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest of members of a racial group; deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause its physical destruction; legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields; measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups; the prohibition of interracial marriages; and the persecution of persons opposed to apartheid.<\/p>\n

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