Foreign Minister Pandor made the call in 2022: ‘As South Africans, we find similarities in our past with the Palestinians, and now I remember the funeral of Shereen Abu Akleh and what happened to her coffin. It reminds me of the gravesites that we had to carry out under the persecution of the apartheid soldiers’ (South Africa calls for holding Israel accountable for ‘inhumane conditions’ Palestinians live under, Middle East Monitor, 17 June, 2022).
In May that year Nokuthula Mabaso, an Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) leader was buried following her assassination in front of her children. She was the third activist of the shack dwellers’ movement to be killed in less than two months. To date, 24 Abahlali activists have been killed. Members of AbM are thus well acquainted with the state as a coercive machine of class oppression and likely know the fairytale Freedom Charter adopted by the ANC in 1955 envisaged a post-Apartheid South Africa where ‘The police force and army… shall be the helpers and protectors of the people’, ‘the right to be decently housed’ enshrined and ‘Slums shall be demolished …‘. AbM are credited with starting UnFreedom Day, which coincides with the official South African holiday called Freedom Day, the orthodox annual celebration of the country’s first non-racial democratic elections of 1994. On the 16 August 2012 17 workers were killed and 78 wounded by the police in the Marikana Miners’ Massacre, the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against other workers since 1976. Worse still, former President Mbeki’s support for alternative remedies such as vinegar rather than antiretroviral drugs saved the state’s funds at a cost of at least 300,000 lives. Winnie Mandela to her credit ‘… said to president Mbeki: ‘Why are ARVs not toxic for the members in Parliament who are taking them but toxic for the poor?’
And ‘More than two decades after South Africa ousted a racist apartheid system that trapped the vast majority of South Africans in poverty, more than half the country still lives below the national poverty line and most of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of a small elite’ (NPR, 2 April, 2018) led by billionaire Ramaphosa.
Shenilla Mohamed, executive director of Amnesty International South Africa, told Deutsche Welle (26 April, 2019): ‘Mandela had a very romantic dream, to some extent, of having a nation where everyone is equal, where people are able to access their basic human rights, economic, social, cultural rights. But South Africa is a country where the quality of life has not improved for the majority of the population in 25 years. Issues such as racism are still in the foreground because people feel they have been disappointed by a system which began in 1994, when independence promised that everything was possible.'
Were any of SA's first three presidents put on trial for supporting the dictator, Mugabe of neighboring Zimbabwe? As we have noted, Mbeki during his tenure was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousansds. Some members of the 99 percent called for him to be tried for crimes against humanity. Was he? Commissioner Phiyega. Ramaphosa and King Zuma share responsibility for the mass murder of miners. Were there ever plans to put them on trial? In June 2015, while in South Africa for an African Union meeting, the former dictator of Sudan (and one of 15 on the ICC's most wanted list), al-Bashir, was prohibited from leaving while a court decided whether he should be handed over to the ICC for war crimes. Was he?
The answer to all the above is NO! It is futile to punish such odious individuals whilst ignoring the vicious conditions which made them possible. War criminals are not responsible for war, which is caused by the struggles between competing capitalist states over markets and economic resources. War will only end with the abolition of capitalism. The dictators of yesterday, and the dictators and leaders of today, with their frightening military machines, only reflect the preparedness of their workers to ignore the bloodshed of all the conflicts before and after the war to end all wars and still to die for capitalism.
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