 |
| Source: Paul Trewhela |
Communists reject nonviolence as a means to achieve lasting change because civil disobedience is incompatible with Karl Marx's theory of class struggle. This is why they demonize and misrepresent Mohandas Gandhi and downplay the real events that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa. Instead, they celebrate the start of the Cuban military intervention in Angola (Operation Carlota) on November 5, 1975, highlight a dubious military victory in 1988 involving Cuban troops, and falsely celebrate it as the agent of change.
 |
| Agostinho Neto and Fidel Castro carried out purge in Angola. |
Purge in Angola
Not mentioned is that Cuban troops, in May 1977, took part in a massacre not long after independence in Angola following a split in the governing Communist MPLA party. Amnesty International cites reports that 30,000 "had disappeared" in the purge; others say as many as 80,000 were killed.
What of Castro's involvement in South Africa?
 |
| General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez walking with Fidel Castro |
What happened to the Cuban general who headed the Cuban military mission in Angola and prosecuted the battles against the South African Defence Forces, and their allies?
Cuban General who successfully led the effort in Angola executed
General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, who organized and led Cuban troop buildups in Angola (1976) and Ethiopia (1977), led Sandinista and Cuban troops in Nicaragua against Contra forces in the early 1980s, and distinguished himself in Southern Africa during a months-long military campaign against the Apartheid regime's army in Angola from August 1987 to March 1988, unfortunately for General Ochoa, it is believed that he had grown too popular among the troops and had the mistaken idea that he had the right to an opinion, was executed by firing squad on July 13, 1989.
 |
| General Arnaldo Ochoa executed on July 13, 1989. |
Arturo J. Cruz's article in the November 1989 issue of Commentary Magazine titled "Anatomy of an Execution" outlined what cost General Ochoa his life.
"On Wednesday night, June 14, Raul Castro addressed the nation on radio and television. He spoke for two hours, at times almost incoherently, and his words betrayed a barely suppressed hatred for Ochoa—an envious passion toward a colleague who was a senior general officer in the fullest, most professional military sense. Raul accused Ochoa of being irreverent; he complained about Ochoa’s jokes; he derided what he called Ochoa’s “populist deviations” with the troops (referring, evidently, to the one thing which Raul himself has never enjoyed with the Cuban enlisted man—genuine popularity)."
This was in a sensitive moment for the regime. Panamanian strong man Manuel Noriega, who had been involved, together with the Castro brothers, in drug trafficking has been indicted in U.S. courts and the American military invaded Panama captured him had been. Others like Tony de la Guardia were executed because they could have testified to the direct involvement of the Castro brothers in the drug trade. Bad luck for his twin brother Patricio, who ended up sentenced to 30 years in prison.
It was South Africans, not the Castro regime that ended the Apartheid regime
 |
| UDF boycotted elections |
Nationalist narratives tend to glorify violent narratives, at the
expense of successful nonviolent initiatives. In India for example, the
3,000 nationalists who joined ranks with Hitler and the Third Reich to fight the British get credit with speeding up Indian Independence. However the millions who took part in nonviolent actions in Gandhi's movement get short shrift as the Hindu nationalists grow in power in India.
The same holds true in South Africa. Piero Gleijeses. a professor of
American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies writing in The National Interest in 2014 gives a positive assessment of the Cuban intervention in Angola quoting Nelson Mandela that their victory “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor ...
[and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa ... Cuito Cuanavale
was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my
people—from the scourge of apartheid.”
For the record both sides claimed victory in the battle of Cuito Canavale.
Failure of ANC violence to dislodge the Apartheid regime
Professor Gleijeses failed to look at the historical context, and Nelson
Mandela's commitment to the violent overthrow of the Apartheid regime.
In the case of South Africa the decision of the African National Congress (ANC) to adopt violence as a means to end Apartheid in 1961 may in fact have prolonged the life
of the racist regime by decades. It also led to Nelson Mandela spending
decades in prison refusing to renounce his violent stand.
Mandela became a symbol of resistance, and later an agent of national reconciliation, but he was not the agent of regime change in South Africa.
UDF nonviolent resistance, and economic sanctions ended the Apartheid regime
It was not
the armed struggle of the ANC that brought the Apartheid regime to the
negotiating table but the United Democratic Front
(UDF). The history of how the Apartheid regime was brought to an end is often overlooked. This is the
history of the UDF and the successful nonviolent struggle it carried out that is documented in A Force More Powerful:
In the city of Port Elizabeth, Mkhuseli Jack, a charismatic 27-year-old youth leader, understands that violence is no match for the state's awesome arsenal. Jack stresses the primacy of cohesion and coordination, forming street committees and recruiting neighborhood leaders to represent their interests and settle disputes. Nationally, a fledgling umbrella party, the United Democratic Front (UDF), asserts itself through a series of low-key acts of defiance, such as rent boycotts, labor strikes, and school stay aways.
Advocating nonviolent action appeals to black parents who are tired of chaos in their neighborhoods. The blacks of Port Elizabeth agree to launch an economic boycott of the city's white-owned businesses. Extending the struggle to the white community is a calculated maneuver designed to sensitize white citizens to the blacks' suffering. Beneath their appeal to conscience, the blacks' underlying message is that businesses cannot operate against a backdrop of societal chaos and instability.
Confronted by this and other resistance in the country, the government declares a state of emergency, the intent of which is to splinter black leadership through arbitrary arrests and curfews. Jack and his compatriots, however, receive an entirely different message: the country is fast becoming ungovernable. Apartheid has been cracked.
Undaunted by government reprisals, the UDF continues to press its demands, particularly for the removal of security forces and the release of jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. White retailers, whose business districts have become moribund, demand an end to the stalemate. The movement also succeeds in turning world opinion against apartheid, and more sanctions are imposed on South Africa as foreign corporations begin to pull out many investments. In June 1986, the South African government declares a second state of emergency to repress the mass action that has paralyzed the regime.
The collapse of the violent option with the end of the Cold War coincided with Apartheid's end.
The negotiations to
end Apartheid began in 1990, after the collapse of the East Bloc, and coincidently ended in 1991, the year the Soviet Union peacefully dissolved. The ANC no longer had the weapons and financial support provided
by Havana and Soviets from the 1960s into the early 1980s. There were some in South Africa who in 1989 lamented the passing of the Berlin Wall, but if not for the end of the Cold War things might not have changed for the better. Paul Trewhela in PoliticsWeb offered the following analysis:
On 9 November 1989, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall cracked open, the Cold War in Europe came to an end, the Soviet empire tottered to its grave and the ANC military option lost whatever teeth it might have had. The military/security state erected by the National Party never lost a centimeter squared of its soil. Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, never won a centimeter squared of soil. True, the repeated mass mobilizations and popular uprisings within South Africa through the Seventies and the Eighties placed a colossal strain upon the regime, and, true, the economic strain upon the state - especially in conditions of attrition exercised against it by the US banking system - placed it under further serious pressures. Nevertheless, honest accounting must say that, given the continuation of the Cold War system in Africa, this nuclear-armed state at its southern tip was nowhere near collapse.
The international situation that undermined the ANC's armed struggle, combined with the successful nonviolent campaigns of the United Democratic Front (UDF) facilitated the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
In South Africa there was a older tradition going back to 1893 - 1914 with Mohandas Gandhi's experiments with nonviolence against anti-Indian racism there. It was in South Africa on September 11, 1906 that the word Satyagraha came into existence. It is this legacy of nonviolence that has endured and gives hope for the future.
Castro regime's role in the Red Terror in Ethiopia
 |
| Left to right: Ramiro Valdes, Raul Castro, Fidel Castro and Mengistu Haile Mariam |
Unfortunately, abandoning nonviolence and embracing the false and violent narrative of Castroism is a recipe for endangering South African democracy. There lies the way of mass murder and genocide. This is not conjecture. General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez was sent to Ethiopia in 1977 to build up Cuba's military presence. Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Ramiro Valdés Menéndez were deeply involved in sending 17,000 Cuban troops to Eastern Africa to assist Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam in consolidating his rule and eliminating actual and potential opposition in Ethiopia.
 |
| Fidel Castro and Mengistu Haile Mariam |
The claim of anti-imperialism is also undermined by the Castro regime's actions in Ethiopia.
Background
Ethiopia was the only African country to successfully resist the European colonial scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Ethiopia had an African monarchy that stretched back to Biblical times.
Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia had served first as regent of Ethiopia from 1916 to 1930 and as emperor from 1930 to 1974. He was the heir to a dynasty that traced its origins to the 13th century and, from there, by tradition, back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Ethiopia was invaded and occupied by Mussolini in 1935, who used chemical warfare to defeat the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians fought bravely against the Italian fascists.
At the League of Nations in 1936, Emperor Selassie condemned the use of chemical weapons by Fascist Italy against the people of Ethiopia. Ethiopia was the only independent African state during a time when the rest of the continent was under colonial rule. H.I.M. Haile Selassie, the lion of Judah, resisted the fascist invasion of his homeland, Ethiopia, and warned the world of its threat when he addressed the League of Nations. He would go into exile in Great Britain but returned home after the defeat of the fascists.
The fascist occupation ended in 1941 when Sudanese forces accompanying Ethiopian King Haile Selassie entered Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941.
Ethiopian monarch led efforts for decolonization and African unity.
Emperor Haile Selassie's internationalist views led to Ethiopia becoming a charter member of the United Nations, advocating for the decolonization of Africa, and his political thought and experience in promoting multilateralism and collective security are still viewed as part of his enduring legacy. On May 25, 1963, the Organization for African Unity (OAU) was established, and Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, was selected as the first President of the OAU. The permanent headquarters of the OAU was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He was a fierce advocate for African independence and unity, and clearly understood and condemned the history of European colonialism on the continent.
"The events of the past 150 years require no extended recitation from us. The period of colonialism into which we were plunged culminated with our continent fettered and bound; with our once proud and free peoples reduced to humiliation and slavery; with Africa’s terrain cross-hatched and chequer-boarded by artificial and arbitrary boundaries. Many of us, during those bitter years, were overwhelmed in battle, and those who escaped conquest did so at the cost of desperate resistance and bloodshed. Others were sold into bondage as the price extracted by the colonialists for the ‘protection’ which they extended and the possessions of which they disposed. Africa was a physical resource to be exploited and Africans were chattels to be purchased bodily or, at best, peoples to be reduced to vassalage and lackeyhood. Africa was the market for the produce of other nations and the source of the raw materials with which their factories were fed."
Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in a communist military coup, and it is believed that the officers smothered him on August 27, 1975. Mengistu Haile Mariam "ordered the emperor's body to be buried head down in the palace and had a lavatory erected over the grave so that he could express daily his contempt for the monarch."
In December 1994, The New York Times
reported that an Ethiopian court described "how Emperor Haile Selassie
was strangled in his bed most cruelly" in 1975 by order of the leaders
of the Marxist-Leninist military coup.
Castro regime's troops took part in Ethiopia's Red Terror
 |
| Source: "Red Terror" Martyrs' Memorial Museum |
Human Rights Watch in their 2008 report on Ethiopia titled outlined "Collective Punishment War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region" some of the practices carried out by Cuban troops sent there by Fidel and Raul Castro excerpted below:
In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”Charles Lane of The Washington Post in the December 1, 2016 article "Castro was no liberator" raises the following question that touches heavily on Ethiopia:
Mengistu participated in a successful military coup against the U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, eventually seizing power on Feb. 3, 1977,by massacring his rivals in the officer corps. Castro admired this bloody deed as a preemptive strike against “rightists” that showed “wisdom” and cleared the way for Cuba to support Mengistu “without any constraints,” as he explained to East German dictator Erich Honecker in an April 1977 meeting whose minutes became public after the fall of European communism. [...] With the Cuban forces watching his back, Mengistu wrapped up his bloody campaign of domestic repression, known as “the Red Terror,” and sent his own Soviet-equipped, Cuban-trained troops to crush a rebellion in Eritrea. The last Cuban troops did not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.
Mengistu fled into exile on May 21, 1991. Less than a decade later on November 5, 2000, Haile Selassie was given an Imperial funeral by the Ethiopian Orthodox church. Bob Marley's widow, Rita Marley, participated in the funeral of Ethiopia's last monarch.
Haile Selassie was honored on February 10, 2019 with a statue of his likeness unveiled at the African Union's headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He was being honored for his role in establishing the African Union's predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Hopefully, his legacy will endure and Communism's negative one will be abandoned.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment