From young revolutionary agitator to reconciling elder statesmen
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| Nelson Mandela (1918 - 2013) |
Setting the Record Straight
Despite the numerous claims equating Nelson Mandela with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he was
not a prisoner of conscience because he advocated violence for decades and refused to renounce it even to gain his freedom. Despite the claims of ardent revolutionaries this did not speed up the end of Apartheid, but to the contrary may have lengthened the life of that evil and racist system. Mandela's story is that of a man who joined a nonviolent struggle, turned to violence and after failing to succeed with violence for many years returned to nonviolence and achieved change.
Colleagues in the Cuban opposition who are holding up Mandela as an exemplar
may be tempted to use violence. Presently, in Cuba there is a large nonviolent opposition movement that has suffered and continues to suffer
the violence of a 54 year totalitarian dictatorship. Prominent opposition activists have been
murdered by state security agents, and like Mandela some may be frustrated by the pace of nonviolent change. Believing violence to be a short cut may opt to follow Nelson Mandela's example. They would be mistaken to believe that violence will speed up the walk to freedom.
Mandela makes the case for violence
Mandela laid out the case for violence on April 24, 1964
at the Rivonia Trial before the Pretoria Supereme Court in which, in part, he stated:
At the beginning of June 1961, after a long and anxious assessment of
the South African situation, I, and some colleagues, came to the
conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be
unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace
and non-violence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands
with force.
This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all
else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred
to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of
political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe. We did so not because
we desired such a course, but solely because the Government had left us
with no other choice. In the Manifesto of Umkhonto published on 16
December 1961, which is Exhibit AD, we said:
"The time comes in the life of any nation when there
remain only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come to
South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back
by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our
freedom."
This was our feeling in June of 1961 when we decided to
press for a change in the policy of the National Liberation Movement. I
can only say that I felt morally obliged to do what I did.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
The Failure of Violent Resistance
For decades the African National Congress (ANC) allied with the Communist
Party had received weapons, explosives, and training from Soviet and
Cuban advisers. What was the response of the Apartheid Regime?
Heightened repression, more massacres, and the
development of nuclear weapons in the 1970s to target the majority black population and their Soviet and Cuban allies. In
April 1978, the South African government
approved a nuclear deterrent strategy
based on the following:
Phase 1:
Strategic uncertainty in which the nuclear deterrent
capability will not be acknowledged or denied.
Phase 2:
Should South African territory be threatened, for example,
by the Warsaw Pact countries through the surrogate Cuban
forces in Angola, covert acknowledgement to certain
international powers, e.g. the USA, would be contemplated.
Phase 3:
Should this partial disclosure of South Africa's capability
not bring about international intervention to remove the
threat, public acknowledgement or demonstration by an
underground test of South Africa's capability, would be
considered.
The response of the Apartheid regime was not to buckle to the violence of the African National Congress but to escalate. The following decade saw many more massacres of the black majority by
the apartheid regime, the forced resettlement of three million people to
the "black homelands", more than 600 killed in clashes, and greater
repression against the black majority.
By the 1980s the ANC's militant wing had
engaged in 156 acts of public violence including bombing campaigns targeting public establishments and Nelson Mandela's second wife
Winnie, recognizing that they no longer had AK-47s to fight with advocated using gasoline and tires to "necklace" opponents and burn them alive stating:
"Together, hand in hand, with that stick of matches, with our necklace, we shall liberate this country."
This is where Mandela's call to violence and alliance with the Cubans and Soviets led: to the white minority government responding to the threat with the development of
six nuclear weapons and his own wife engaged in the murder of women and children. He may have not been directly involved but the advocacy and legitimization of violence and his steadfast defense of that position over decades had consequences.
It was not this violence that brought an end to Apartheid but nonviolent actions inside and outside of South Africa. The nonviolent
Solidarity Movement in Poland set off a chain reaction of nonviolent change that spread across Eastern Europe in 1989 and ended with the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. Inside South Africa labor strikes began to have an impact and in coordination with an
international boycott campaign made great impacts in South Africa.
On the face of it the collapse of the East Bloc and the Soviet Union should have been at least indirectly positive for the South African Apartheid state which had as its principle adversary the African National Congress that had relied heavily on the Soviet Union and their Eastern European and Cuban satellites that aided Mandela's movement.
Mandela was a man who joined a nonviolent struggle to end Apartheid and
turned to violence to break the will of the South African regime in
1961 and
would beginning in 1964 spend the next 27 years of his life in prison
but finally rejected violence as a political tactic because he had no
other alternative. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East
Bloc the African National Congress (ANC) no longer had a weapons
supplier.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet
empire the African National Congress's military option was taken off the table, and this allowed negotiations and non-violent action to achieve
what political violence had not done in three decades: an end
to the racist apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela as president of a
multiracial South Africa. It is not a coincidence that the decision by the Apartheid regime to scrap the nuclear weapons program and dismantle its bombs was made after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
There are those in South Africa who in 1989 mourned the passing of the Berlin Wall but if not for the end of the Cold War things may not have changed. Paul Trewhela in politicsweb offers 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 Anti-Apartheid movement was without an international backer and had run out of weapons and ammunition. What remained was the international grassroots campaign, boycotts, economic sanctions, and a nonviolent movement internally that could coordinate strikes and raise the consciousness of the black majority.
This is what brought the South African government to the negotiating table. If the black majority refused to cooperate with their oppressors the system could not be maintained. At the same time the collapse of the international communist threat made it easier for them to negotiate without the fear that they would wind up in the Soviet orbit.
Mandela was not a prisoner of conscience
Amnesty
International adopted Nelson Mandela as a "forgotten prisoner"
following his arrest and conviction in 1962 for alleged passport
violations. In 1964 he spoke in his own defense at the famous Rivonia Trial and explained why he had chosen to organize an underground army
(MK) and plan a campaign of violence directed towards the end of
overthrowing the apartheid regime. Mandela's open avowal of chosing to
use violence to further political ends caused a split within the ranks
of Amnesty International, which at the time was very much smaller than
it is now. One group advocated continuing to work unconditionally for
Mandela's release, while the other urged that AI should adhere to its
own principle and restrict it's efforts for unconditional release only
to those political prisoners which they termed "prisoners of conscience"
-- those who had neither used nor advocated violence. This would
exclude Mandela from POC status, but would enable AI to continue to
work on his behalf in terms of fair trial, and against the possibility
of the death penalty.
This issue was debated at length at
the 1964 congress in Canterbury England, and it was decided there in
favor of the second position -- that is, not to make an exception for
Mr Mandela. I would recommend that readers interested in the details and
in the early history of Amnesty International should get ahold of a
copy of Egon Larsen's --A Flame in Barbed Wire -- (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1979). By the way, Amnesty International takes no official
position on the justification of the use of violence. It only makes a
distinction between those political prisoners who do and do not use or
advocate its use as concerns its internal program of action on their
behalfs.
President Mandela has long since acknowledged that
Amnesty made its decision in good faith, and has thanked the
organization for its work on behalf of thousands of other South African
prisoners and detainees.
For example in South Africa
Steve Biko was identified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience whereas Nelson Mandela was not. Biko was murdered by the Apartheid regime because his nonviolent black consciousness movement threatened the Apartheid regime as much or more than Mandela's violence. Nonviolence is not passive but active and resists injustice. Mandela in his 1964 speech failed to understand the
power of nonviolent resistance. Since then the evidence has only increased that the more violent and extreme the regime the more successful nonviolent resistance to it and
counter-intuitively the less successful violent resistance.
The greatness of Mandela: Peacemaker who gave up power
The greatness of Nelson Mandela and the reason that the world has honored him and will continue to for years to come is that once he made the return to
nonviolent resistance and negotiation to bring an end to the Apartheid regime for strategic reasons he did not abandon the principles of nonviolence and reconciliation when dealing with his adversaries when
he assumed power in a post-Apartheid system.
In neighboring Zimbabwe following international pressure and in particular from the United States the white minority regime (of what was then called Rhodesia)
peacefully transitioned into a black majority polity with the white minority also participating in 1979. In 1980 following
the Lancaster House Agreement Robert Mugabe was voted into power in British supervised elections. This was not due so much to a military triumph by guerrillas but the political elite wanting to end international boycotts and the pariah status of the country. Reserved
white seats in parliament were kept under the Mugabe regime until 1987. Unlike Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe has been president now for 33 years and shows no signs of retiring. According to a 2013
National Public Radio report on both men:
Once in power, Mugabe's military waged a brutal campaign against a rival
black movement in the early 1980s, leaving an estimated 20,000 dead and
setting the tone for dealing with any group seen as a potential rival....
Unlike in the rest of the African continent Mandela
charted a radically different course once in power:
As the country's first black president, he consistently preached
national unity, sometimes to the point of irritating the country's
blacks, who felt he was too conciliatory.
And on a continent where
many leaders rule until they are overthrown or die, Mandela served just
one five-year term beginning in 1994 and then retired in 1999.
This is why
Nelson Mandela is considered by some
a heroic figure and will be remembered in the history books. He gave up power. Mandela could have easily followed the path of Mugabe or
Castro and declare himself president for life. Remarkably, his
links to the Communist party,
Fidel Castro and other
unsavory types who have done
great harm elsewhere in Africa but assisted him in the violent struggle did not lead Mandela to following their dictatorial ruling style. Furthermore 27 years in prison and a life time in a profoundly racist society did not embitter him with the white minority.
Regis Iglesias, a former Cuban prisoner of conscience, and spokesman for the Christian Liberation Movement that is firmly committed to nonviolent change
offered the following assessment:
"He was a man who knew how to move politically
from positions of armed violence to reconciliation and peaceful
coexistence among opponents before confronted in hatred. He called a
tyrant like Fidel Castro "my President" and always ignored the
fate of peaceful activists for democracy in Cuba. He was an inclusive
President, generous and pragmatic that looked for the reconciliation of
the entire South African nation. His achievements gladdened me, his
inconsistency, born of political debt that he owed to the Cuban regime,
caused me grief, it impeded me from believing in his good intentions
more than in his pragmatic sense...Rest in peace Nelson Mandela"
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