the Thatcher government was wrong to describe the African National Congress
(ANC) which resorted (among other tactics) to violence against the apartheid regime,
as terrorist in character. The US government saw the ANC as one of the most
notorious terrorist groups at the time. The point is that the ANC only resorted to
violence as a response to the actions of a regime that banned the organisation and
imprisoned its leaders.
Brian Bunting, a South African who has written widely on the anti-apartheid
struggle, has documented in detail the laws passed in the period of ‘grand apartheid’
under Dr Verwoerd that, among other things, prevented peaceful protest. He cites
the comment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the ANC-aligned Spear of the Nation) on its
birth in 1961 where it talked about carrying on the struggle for freedom and
democracy ‘by new methods’ which ‘are necessary to complement the actions of
the established national liberation organizations’ (1969: 216). The ANC was no
more terrorist than the partisans and liberation movements that fought against the
Nazis during the Second World War. We would therefore disagree with the inclusion
of the ANC in Harmon’s glossary of terrorist groups (Harmon, 2000: 281). The
violence employed by the ANC was regrettable, and it is worth noting that grisly
‘neck-lacing’ of those seen as regime collaborators (when individuals had old car
tyres placed around their neck which were then set ablaze with petrol) was a practice
that the ANC never officially supported. The ANC is better described as a
democratic rather than a terrorist movement. Chomsky (2003: 61) speaks of the
French partisans using ‘terror’ against the Vichy regime, but although he intends
by this example to expose what he considers to be the hypocrisy of the USA, violence
against illiberal systems should not be described in these terms.
This is not to say that the use of political violence in conditions in which it cannot
be labelled terrorist is not problematic. We should be careful not to idealise political
violence. Movements that resort to violence inevitably commit human rights abuses
as well, and anyone who thinks that liberation movements are purely and simply
a ‘good’ thing, ought to see how, in contemporary Zimbabwe for example, the use
of political violence can leave a legacy of authoritarianism and brutalisation. Reports
from human rights groups have noted that in the first half of January 2004, there
were 4 deaths, 68 cases of torture and 22 kidnappings, with much of the violence
carried out by youths from the ruling ZANU-PF party (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
world/africa/1780206.stm).
In a moving work, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter(1991), Sachs, a
leading supporter of the ANC, a human rights lawyer and then a judge in South
Africa, recalls the anguish he felt when he heard reports that Umkhonto we Sizwe
were to target white civilians in the struggle to liberate South Africa. Having lost
the sight of one eye and his right arm as the result of a car bomb in Maputo in
Mozambique in 1988 (the work of agents of the South African security forces),
Sachs feared that a free South Africa might come to consist largely of one-eyed and
one-armed people like himself. He was hugely relieved to hear reports that his
organisation was not planning to escalate violence in a way that would plunge South
Africa ‘in an endless Northern Ireland or Lebanon type situation, where action
becomes everything and politics gets left behind’ (Hoffman, 1994: 22). His anxiety
testifies eloquently to the fact that violence remains a dangerous process even when
it is (justifiably) used against illiberal states, and cannot be called terrorist in
character. (See Chapter 11 on Anarchism.)
Chapter 20 Political violence 449