Malevolent clowns rerun South African history as a farce

JOHN CARLIN investigates bombings, arms caches, and a plot to overthrow the state.

News of a white extremist plot in South Africa has raised a question that the world never imagined would have to be asked: is the ghost of apartheid stirring? Will a resurgent white right try to turn back the clock and destroy Nelson Mandela's "rainbow nation"?

Police say the extremist plotters drew their inspiration from the Ku Klux Klan and September 11.

On Tuesday the police caught one of the alleged ringleaders, former Army officer Tom Vorster, who had been on the run for six months and is believed to have been in contact with white supremacist groups in the United States. Having made two other arrests late last week, the police believe they have caught all the conspiracy's leaders. But last week's Soweto bombers are presumed to be still at large.

A farmer, an ex-policeman and a former university lecturer, Dr Johan "Lets" Pretorius - all of them right-wing Afrikaners - were the first to be arrested, in April. The alleged plotters seem to have struck back within a month, with a suspected police informer found dead at a shooting range with nine bullets in his body. But the counter-terrorist unit in charge of the investigation, named Operation Zealot, has since unearthed a cache of bombs on a farm, seized a truck loaded with thousands of automatic rifles and arrested 18 suspects, three of them serving members of the South African National Defence Force.

Vorster appeared in court on Wednesday on charges of terrorism, high treason and sabotage. All 18 are due to face trial in Pretoria in May, and police are expecting to make more arrests shortly.

Much of the prosecution's case will rest on more than 200 pages of documents found among the suspects, all members of an outfit calling itself Boeremag, or "boer force". The documents are reported to reveal that the plotters had been inspired by the attacks in the US on September 11 to identify heavily populated targets, achieving what the old apartheid security establishment used to call "high terror value".

Their objectives were to overthrow the Government, set up a white junta and drive the black population into the sea. They would do this by recruiting a rebel army; assassinating white "traitors" and black Cabinet ministers; freeing jailed Boer heroes; cutting power supplies; and seizing control of airports, radio stations, gold mines and abattoirs.

But the success or failure of the Boer counter-revolution rested above all on a radical new concept, a strategy codenamed "Push and Suck".

It may all be academic now. Thanks to Operation Zealot, 10 of the alleged plotters have been charged with high treason. But examination of the fantasies that drove the Boeremag reveals at least three interesting things: how mad the dregs of the apartheid far right are; how stable South Africa has become since the historic elections of 1994; and how right Marx was when he made that crack about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Push and Suck was the means by which a rebel army whose numbers would swell to 4500 would ethnically cleanse 40 million black people.

The final solution contemplated was not, however, genocide - not even the worst of the "volk" ever seriously contemplated mass murder. What was on the agenda was mass incarceration and mass forced removals.

The master stroke would have been to expel black South Africans not out of "white areas", as in the old days, but out of South Africa altogether. First, all black people would be forced out of what used to be called the Northern Cape, the Free State and the Transvaal towards the coastal provinces of KwaZulu Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape. They would be pushed out by straight military means, but also sucked out by placing large amounts of food along the roads leading out of the centre of the country.

The key lay in letting it be known to the black masses that if they would only be so kind as to abandon their ancestral homes and join the great exodus to the sea, their reward would be unlimited quantities of free grub. Which helps to explain the plotters' resolve to seize abattoirs as well as radio stations, but serves also to reveal that the group belonged to a species of white South African (a happily endangered species) so unevolved as to persist in the belief that black people are not fully qualified members of the human race, but animals to be hunted down.

The millions upon millions of black refugees from the three big central regions having been duly displaced to the coast, part two of the operation would involve closing the new borders and forcing the economic collapse of the coastal provinces. At which point the military junta would launch a series of military attacks. The upshot of the inevitable victory would be the demand that every last black man, woman and child go north into Africa.

Once South Africa was entirely lily-white, once the Boeremag had pulled off the miracle that had eluded the old National Party during 40 years of apartheid, plans would be set in motion to disband the junta and recreate a new, whites-only political dispensation - presumably based on the Westminster model.

The plot required the implementation of three preliminary phases.

Phase one involved recruiting and intelligence-gathering. The plotters, at least three of whom are Army officers, initially sought to enlist members and obtain secrets from the South African National Defence Force. It was also considered vital to obtain information on how to take over the South African Broadcasting Corporation and close Parliament.

Phase two was unleashing "chaos" on South Africa. This would involve carrying out misleading decoy actions. One plan was to stage a spectacular attack on a white target - an unspecified action codenamed Lima One - which would be blamed on Muslims or Jews. Another was for a death squad of 50 individuals to carry out assassinations and blame them on black people. (Among the apparent targets was the former premier F.W. de Klerk.)

There were also plans to stage jailbreaks for Eugene de Kock, a former security-police assassin described by his own colleagues as "prime evil", and for Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus, the two men responsible for assassinating African National Congress leader Chris Hani in April 1993.

The third phase would have been the coup d'etat itself, the essential part of which would be "taking out" the entire Cabinet and selected MPs. The airports and the abattoirs having been seized, power stations would be blown up and a 10-day blackout would be imposed. Military installations would be seized, the Government (or those members of it who remained alive) would be left with no choice but to surrender and a revolutionary army would set forth boldly to push, suck and conquer.

And one final thing. Once the country had been, as they used to say, successfully "unblackened", the fledgling Boer democracy would seek strong ties with the Government of the US.

As South Africa's top policeman, Commissioner Jackie Selebi, said upon last month's discovery of a clandestine home-made munitions dump on a farm in the northern Limpopo province, the plotters' intention had been to carry out massive terrorist actions against civilians.

The captured arsenal included 16 metal cylinders, each weighing about 18kg, that would have provided casings for bombs that could have killed scores of people if detonated in a busy shopping centre. Police also found 22 buckets of ammonium nitrate powder (the raw materials for the bombs), alarm clocks converted into timers, hand-grenades, and eight boxes of ammunition.

Why would a group of well-fed farmers, well-paid Army officers and a doctor go to the hare-brained extreme of wishing to slaughter innocent people in the furtherance of a manifestly impossible cause? The answer is this: a combustible mix of ancient myths and terrors and present fears based on tangible day-to-day dangers.

The best-known incident in Afrikaner history, and one which has coloured the thinking of whites ever since, concerns the fate that befell the leader of the Great Trek of 1836, Piet Retief. Lured by the Zulu king, Dingaan, into the royal kraal for peace talks, Retief and 70 of his trekkers were foully betrayed. Dingaan's "impis" - Zulu regiments - slaughtered Retief's party and then fell on nearby trekker encampments, massacring men, women and children.

The lesson has been taught to Afrikaner schoolchildren ever since, entrenching the cliche in the Boer mind: "Never trust a black man."

An appalling retribution was exacted on Dingaan: 3000 Zulu warriors were killed on the banks of Blood River.

Add to that a heavy component of unacknowledged guilt, and it is not hard to see why the prevailing nightmare of white South Africans for a very long time has been of a black hand reaching from under the bed in the middle of the night with savage intent.

The ancient terrors run deep. But the Boeremag might perhaps have restrained their revolutionary urges, might have quietly snuffed out their ancient terrors, had it not been for the fact that, in the wide open spaces inhabited by the more conservative, less worldly, less politically sophisticated members of the Afrikaner tribe, those terrors have been reinforced every three or four days since the world celebrated the triumph of democracy and the ascent to power of Nelson Mandela in May 1994.

The shocking statistic is this: since 1994 more than 600 white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, compared with 25 in Zimbabwe. And they have been murdered by their black neighbours.

As a liberal-minded journalist who lives in a fortified "gated community" in Johannesburg said to me the other day, it is not fun to live out there on the farms if you are white. Not fun at all. Which is why the farmers are all heavily armed, and have created paramilitary vigilante groups that keep in permanent radio contact.

Who can blame them? These far-flung regions of South Africa have not succumbed to the Mandela magic. The ancient grievances remain. A sharp edge remains in relations between black and white. The fears and hatreds have not gone; and, from the point of view of the black people of the countryside, few of whom have seen any change in the appalling circumstances of their lives, it is not difficult to see why.

The underlying absurdity of the Boeremag conspiracy derives from their incapacity to see that their sad little world is an anachronism; that things have changed in the big cities.

In Johannesburg there are black men in large offices with white secretaries, and black women driving Mercedes-Benzes. And these and other black men and women have nice houses now and they are just as afraid of being robbed and killed by a poor black person as the white people who, quite possibly, live in the same gated villages.

This point will have been brought home to three of the plotters charged with treason when, in Pretoria last month, a judge turned down their request for bail. The judge's name was Dikgang Moseneke. Ten years ago Moseneke was the number two of the Pan Africanist Congress, an organisation whose slogan was "one settler, one bullet", and whose declared intention was to "drive the whites into the sea".

The PAC is also an anachronism these days. Its abysmal performance in the 1994 elections brought derisory cries from ANC supporters of "one settler, one per cent!" The PAC's white counterpart, the Afrikaner Freedom Front, did better in the 1994 poll, but after five years of Mandela its vote was halved in the second democratic elections of 1999. Just a shade over 1 per cent of voters still entertained the notion of dividing South Africa along racial lines.

All of which helps to explain why most South Africans seem relatively relaxed about the arrest of the Boeremag plotters and see them as malevolent clowns.

The explosions in Soweto last week were the twitchings of an amputated limb. While certainly a concern as a police matter, in terms of the potential they hold for further loss of life they will barely register as a pin-prick on the body politic.

Because South Africa has demonstrated once again that, for all the challenges that lie ahead in overcoming poverty, crime and Aids, the nation's one great, indisputable triumph has been the cementing of its political foundations.

In the eight years since the most celebrated political prisoner in history became President of South Africa, the country has enjoyed a measure of stability not seen since the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652.

- INDEPENDENT