How apartheid state was able to buy guns

Van Vuuren’s book provides a brilliant exposé of how an international criminal conspiracy was set up to enable the apartheid state to buy guns and other weapons. File photo

Van Vuuren’s book provides a brilliant exposé of how an international criminal conspiracy was set up to enable the apartheid state to buy guns and other weapons. File photo

Published May 21, 2017

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Hennie van Vuuren’s myth-busting new book, Apartheid, Guns and Money, is something of a Molotov cocktail, writes Imraan Buccus.

Hennie van Vuuren’s myth-busting new book, Apartheid, Guns and Money, is explosive. It is a meticulously researched, and very readable, account of how the apartheid state developed a global criminal network to evade sanctions.

Van Vuuren undertook a vast amount of research for this book. He was supported by a team of experts from Open Secrets, the Right to Know Campaign, Lawyers for Human Rights, the South African History Archive and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.

Together, the author and his researchers went through more than 2 million documents and conducted numerous interviews as they worked on this book.

In a world where opinion, substantiated or not, is rapidly replacing evidence, a book as thoroughly researched as this is something of a Molotov cocktail.

The vast amount of empirical evidence presented simply cannot be dismissed as mere opinion.

As former Constitutional Court judge Kate O’Regan has written: “This is an exposé of that machinery created in defence of apartheid and the people who made this possible: heads of state, arms dealers, aristocrats, plutocrats, senators, bankers, spies, journalists and members of secret lobby groups.”

Van Vuuren’s book provides a brilliant exposé of how an international criminal conspiracy was set up to enable the apartheid state to buy guns and other weapons, including flame-throwers.

This network included bankers, politicians, spies and shady businessmen around the world. And this network was vast.

The book shows that Armscor (the state arms company that later became Denel) had 844 bank accounts in 196 banks in at least 27 countries - the majority in Europe.

The myth that the apartheid state was isolated during the sanctions era was first bust by Sasha Polakow Suransky’s important 2010 book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa. The book showed that the apartheid state and Israel collaborated closely on military matters. It is also well known that the apartheid state had links to Taiwan and also Chile, under the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. 

Van Vuuren’s book shows that bankers, right-wing politicians and spies across Europe, and especially in Switzerland and Belgium, were deeply implicated in working to support the apartheid state. Reading this story is a bit like reading a spy novel. And among the many villains that emerge in the story is one André Vlérick, a Flemish banker and professor based in Belgium. 

He set up a network of right-wing politicians to support apartheid and, as head of Kredietbank, ran a huge money-laundering system for apartheid. The business school at the University of Ghent is today named the Vlérick Business School. As Van Vuuren argues in his book, staff and students at the university have a moral obligation that the name of this odious, racist and deeply corrupt man is removed.

And some of the actors in this pro-apartheid network are well known organisations in South Africa today. The role of the banks, especially in Belgium and Switzerland, in propping up apartheid is particularly nauseating.

The old Volkskas Bank, now part of Absa, also played a central role. Absa has blood on its hands and must be forced to pay reparations.

Lonmin, the infamous British mining company implicated in the Marikana massacre, was also part of this network, under the name of LonRho. A number of well-known individuals are also part of this story. For instance, Christo Wiese, owner of Shoprite and one of the richest men in South Africa, was a regular donor to the National Party.

Van Vuuren also shows that the international criminal network set up to support apartheid continued to operate after apartheid fell. After apartheid, this criminal network intersected with the corruption that had also festered in the ANC in exile.

The arms deal, which originated the rot of the democratic state, brought both networks into a toxic alliance. It is this toxic alliance that is rotting our democracy and our economy from the inside.

Many commentators have argued that under Jacob Zuma we have collapsed into a kleptocratic or Mafia state. These commentators are correct. But what is often lacking in this analysis is a history of corruption, and, in particular, how the foundation for the present crisis was laid in the 1970s and 1980s.

South Africa cannot progress until all who have been complicit with this rule are removed from public office. We need to have a well-

informed and honest conversation about just how deep the rot runs, how long it has run for, and what will be required to finally root it out.

Organisations like Lonmin and Absa all need to be dealt with. Reparations must be paid. We also need to reopen the investigation into the arms deal and to have an honest conversation about corruption in the ANC in exile. There can be no holy cows.

This book is not a quick read; it is 624 pages long. But it is absolutely vital reading for anyone who seriously wants to understand how a society that was born in such a wellspring of hope has collapsed into a kleptrocracy.

Van Vuuren has done his country a great service. If you read one book this year, make it Apartheid, Guns and Money.

* Buccus is senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation. He promotes #Reading Revolution via Books@Antique at Antique Café in Morningside, Durban.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

The Sunday Independent

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