STRYD TEEN VREEMDE OORHEERSING (35)

LW Bienedell

Lees reeks by Stryd teen vreemde oorheersing

"Who founded apartheid?

What is more, and is of the utmost significance, is that apartheid was no innovation of the ANG of Dr Malan, Mr J G Strijdom and Dr H F Verwoerd. Apartheid in sport, education, residence, land ownership, voting qualifications, parliamentary representation, and sexual intercourse was all in place when the Malan government took over in 1948. These were introduced by the British colonial government and upheld and augmented by all British-sympathetic governments since the unification of South Africa in 1910, significantly sealed by an act approved in 1909 by the British parliament which provided that only British subjects of European extraction would have the right to sit in the South African parliament.

More than one apology

From the above it is plain that from the British side an apology is owed not only to Afrikaners for the awful devastation and documented war crimes caused by the British army against the former republics, but also to the Black nations in South Africa for the discrimination practiced by the British authorities on purely racial grounds without any prospect of national self- determination for the various nations, as was the essence of the policy of separate development into which the policy of apartheid evolved under the outstanding leadership of Dr H F Verwoerd.”

BRITTE MOET OM VERSKONING VRA VIR OORLOGSMISDADE EN VIR APARTHEID!

29 Januarie 1999

Ten spyte van die Afrikanervolk se eis om ’n verskoning van die Britte vir die oorlogsmisdade, is hulle ook geregtig op die volgende eise:

dat die Britte moet verskoning vra vir die instelling van apartheid in Suid-Afrika, omdat hulle self die beleid hier toegepas het;
dat Desmond Tutu as verteenwoordiger van die Britse Staatskerk in Suid-Afrika eerste om verskoning moet vra vir die instelling van apartheid.

TONY Blair, Britse Eerste minister het gekom en gegaan... en hy het geen verskoning aan die Afrikanervolk aangebied vir die volksmoord van die Britte op die Afrikanervolk se voorouers tydens die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog nie. Mnr. Jaap Marais het die afgelope week ’n brief aan die Britse Hoë Kommissaris in Kaapstad geskryf om die saak verder te voer. Mnr. Marais het gereageer op die Hoë Kommissaris se brief wat hy op 18 Januarie ontvang het, nadat hy reeds op 5 Januarie voor Blair se aankoms in Suid-Afrika aan haar geskryf het om ’n onderhoud met Blair te reël. In sy brief trek mnr. Marais die Britse regering se voorneme van “versoening” in twyfel, nadat die Hoë Kommissaris laat weet het dat hulle die volgende eeu met ’n gees van “versoening en vriendskap” benader. Die rede vir die twyfel oor hierdie voorneme is die feit dat die Britse regering steeds weier om die feite van die geskiedenis oor die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog te erken. Hulle weier steeds om die skandelike poging van hul destydse leiers om die Afrikanervolk “uit te wis” te erken en daarvoor verskoning te vra. In plaas daarvan probeer hulle steeds om die lyding en ontbering van die Afrikanervolk gelyk te stel met al die ander betrokkenes by die oorlog, asof almal ewe veel sou gely het... Terwyl die Britte steeds weier om die Afrikanervolk om verskoning te vra vir die volksmoord van 1899-1902 is hulle ’n essensiële deel van die magte agter die ANC en instellings soos die Tutu-kommissie wat van die Afrikaners ’n verskoning eis vir apartheid! Meer nog, die ironie van die saak is dat Afrikaners nie die enigste instellers van apartheid in Suid-Afrika was nie, maar dat die Britte self apartheidswette in Suid-Afrika ingestel en goedgekeur het voor die Afrikaners die land in 1948 oorgeneem het! Daarom, as daar vir apartheid verskoning gevra moet word, moet die Britte dit eerste doen. Hulle kan dan sommer hul verteenwoordiger in Suid-Afrika, Desmond Tutu, vra om dit namens Brittanje te doen... Mnr. Marais se volledige brief aan die Britse Hoë Kommissaris lui soos volg:

25 January 1999
The British High Commissioner

Madam

Thank you for the letter dated 18 January from your office in reference to my letter of 5 January.

I note that you remark on the Anglo-Boer War in its effect on those who were in one way or another involved, and that you wish to approach the centenary in the spirit of reconciliation and friendship.

You will appreciate that the involvement of the Afrikaners is on a level and of a nature that distinguishes it from others mentioned by you, namely “Africans, British and Commonwealth, military and civilian — who died and suffered”.

The Boer nation of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was the target of an aggressive war by Britain which as Gen J C Smuts said, “gradually developed in an attempt to massacre the Afrikaner people”, and A H Crosfield wrote: “We have devastated with fire and sword two countries that once were prosperous and happy”.

“Ethnic cleansing”

Whatever British and Commonwealth societies suffered, was not the devastation of their countries and the concerted effort to “ethnic cleanse” their nations, as was written by Prof Richard Crompton of Oxford in 1991 in reference to the Afrikaner nation.

Furthermore, the Boers were defending their fatherland and their freedom against foreign aggression, instigated to a great degree by financial greed and imperialist lust for power, as J A Hobson relates in The War in South Africa.

None of the others named by you was remotely affected in the same way as the Boers. And it is disconcerting to see that efforts are being made to confuse the issue of British refusal to apologise to Afrikaners by suggesting that “Afrikaners, Africans, British and Commonwealth, military and civilian” all suffered in some way and may therefore be lumped together, in this way rationalising the British refusal to offer an apology to the Afrikaners for the death and destruction inflicted on them by the army of Kitchener, who has been named a war criminal, inter alia, for the havoc he wrought on this country.

The British refuse to reconcile

This British attitude cannot be seen otherwise than as a refusal to reconcile with the Afrikaner nation. This is of particular pertinence in the light of the several apologies recently offered by British authorities for acts of 150 and 225 years ago to, for example, the Waikatu people of New Zealand and the Irish nation — and to whom it may concern, for the high British taxes that lead to the Boston Tea Party.

There must be a deep-seated antagonism against the Afrikaners to single them out for discrimination, as is now being manifested by British persistence in dealing with the well-documented atrocities of the British army in the Anglo-Boer War as a thing apart, that does not need an apology.

Tutu’s TRC and the British

The British irrational and immoral position on this matter is further accentuated by the ongoing agitation that Afrikaners have to apologise to Blacks for apartheid, a campaign strongly supported, if not instigated, by British authorities and highlighted by the role played by an archbishop of the British state church, Desmond Tutu, as chairman of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission, assisted by Dr Alex Boraine, a former Methodist Minister, who for years was an executive of the Anglo-American Corp., from where a running battle against the Afrikaner National Government (ANG) was conducted since 1948 in concert with the British Foreign Office, which according to Lord Deedes, a former British Minister, was “in the vanguard of the fight against South Africa”.

If reconciliation between Afrikaners and Blacks must be attained through an apology by Afrikaners for apartheid, then evidently, reconciliation between British and Afrikaner interests require an apology from the British authorities for the war crimes of 1900-1902. But amazingly, this the British government refuse. And no effort at an explanation is even offered.

Who founded apartheid?

In this connection I may mention that in the November 1998 issue of the South African Bar Journal, Consultus, I wrote on this matter. The following from the journal may be useful in considering the issue in historical perspective.

“As regards ‘apartheid’, it is necessary to look beyond the present emotional sound and fury. ‘The policy called “apartheid” which evokes such hostility abroad’, wrote L E Neame, former editor of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, ‘is not a new and more evil way of treating Blacks and Coloureds. ‘Apartheid’ is simply the Afrikaans word for separation — and separation has been the underlying principle of the policy of Europeans in the African sub-continent for generations’ — a truth, acknowledged by many objective observers.

“HW Hancock in Smuts 1919-50 says: ‘Apartheid was a new name for the segregationist policies which all previous governments had pursued on this or that sector of the racial front, but never as yet along the whole unbroken front of racial theory and practice’.

“So, the National Party did not introduce a new principle in regard to racial relations, but co-ordinated the fragmentary prescriptions, conventions, rules and regulations. And as The Star said about Dr H F Verwoerd: ‘Long before he became Prime Minister he had started to fashion the instinctive but amorphous philosophy of apartheid into a cohesive and intellectually acceptable system’.

‘Apartheid’ was not translated

“What is pertinent is that the word ‘apartheid’ was not translated in English, though there is the literal equivalent of ‘apartness’ and other terms. ‘There is no reason’, wrote Dr Edgar Brookes in Apartheid - a documentary study of modern South African, ‘why a translation such as “separation” could not have been used, but the intention was most probably to suggest, by the use of a foreign word in the English language, something foreign and ominous. Something so bad that there was no word at all in the English language for it’, the object being to stigmatize ‘apartheid’ as an evil identified with Afrikaners and thus make the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) equivalent to Anti-Afrikaner Movement”.

The quotations from Neame and Hancock above show plainly the historical truth that if an apology is owed for apartheid, the British authorities with in the forefront, Archbishop of the Anglican Church, Desmond Tutu, as the representative of the British theocracy should be first to apologise. A British confession in this respect would contribute greatly to better understanding among the divergent racial and ethnic groups in South Africa, especially if it is accompanied by a statement of the grounds on which the British policy of apartheid was based, as for example the Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Stanley’s observation that “it had been a task of almost insuperable difficulty to reconcile the principles of free institutions with the legal equality between different races. At the Cape of Good Hope more than in almost any other possession of the British Crown, the elements of society were more heterogeneous and dissimilar, and in addition these elements were separatedfrom each other by distinctions almost indelible

This is the essence of the principles on which the policy of apartheid rests. Basically the same conviction in support of the idea of apartheid was expressed by the English-dominated Natal Native Affairs Commission in 1906/7. “...Equality”, it said, “results not from artificial restraints, but springs from, likeness in essentials, and a political system which works admirably when applied to homogeneous equals, results only in chaos when generated into a nostrum and administered universally”, which was what the policy of apartheid was aiming to avoid.

You will appreciate the enormity of the hypocrisy in the present persecution of Afrikaners in the name of anti-racism and of fighting “the evils of apartheid”, as if Englishmen in South Africa were not the prime movers of the practice of racial separation. Is it too much to expect leaders of the English establishment to tell the truth about English support for racial separation in South Africa?

The Afrikaners after 1948 did only do what the British Colonial governments and South African English political leaders in South Africa had been doing for more than a century while they had the power. But the Afrikaner Nationalist Government (ANG) of 1948-66 also pursued a policy of racial separation more rational, more refined on an ethnic and nationalistic basis, and more acceptable intellectually than that prescribed by the British authorities and their agents in South Africa.

More than one apology

There is much more reason for a British apology for the apartheid practiced by their governments in the South African colonies than there is for an Afrikaner apology in this regard.

And there is much more reason for a British apology to Afrikaners for the death and devastation inflicted on them, than there is for the British apology to the Waikatu people of New Zealand and the Irish nation. There is also much more reason for a British apology to the Afrikaner nation for the suffering and loss of life in Kitchener’s death camps than there is for the British insistence on an apology from Japan for the treatment of British prisoners during World War II.

Mutual understanding and trust can be based on truth only.

Yours sincerely

JA MARAIS

LEADER OF THE HNP