Special Hearings — Political Party Hearings — 1996-08-20

MR EGLIN: Chairperson, members of the Commission, I want to continue what is the historical narrative after 1974.
 In 1974 the Progressive Party representation in Parliament had grown to seven.  Seeing we mentioning Commissioner Wynand Malan later on, I think it is only fair to mention Commissioner Alex Boraine had joined us by that time as a Member of Parliament.
 It had grown to seven, the following year it merged with the Reformed Party led by Mr Harry Schwartz, to become the Progressive Reform Party with 11 MP's and two Senators.  Shortly before the 1977 general election, it merged again to become the Progressive Federal Party and emerged from that election as the official opposition in Parliament.
 In 1989 the PFP merged with the Independent Party, that is 11 years later, led by Dr Dennis Worral and the National Democratic Movement, led by Mr Wynand Malan to form what is now known as the Democratic Party.
 In all its forms, the Party like Mrs Suzman, used the platform which Parliament created, to attempt to hold the government of the day to account for its actions, as well as to use the privilege of free speech in that institution, to wedge in different perspectives from those which we common currently at that time.
 Not all of the activities of the Progressive Party and its successors were confined to Parliament.  It organised public protest meetings against government laws and marches such as the one organised in 1962 against the house arrest bill.
 Several initiatives were launched by the party to monitor the effects of apartheid at grassroots level and public representatives were expected to use the institutional position to see for themselves the apartheid in practise.
 The decision by the Progressive Federal Party, then led by Dr Van Zyl Slabbert, to participate in Parliament especially after the tri-cameral Parliament or tri-cameral constitution of 1983, was controversial.
 However, it was a constant and deliberate decision based on our belief that it was important to use what mechanism was available to project to the electorate a policy that was totally different from that of the ruling party and to demonstrate that there was a white opposition to apartheid in South Africa.
 Ironically this view was shared by Dr Slabbert, he resigned from Parliament in 1986.  In a letter sent to the then Chairperson of the Progressive Federal Party in Natal, Slabbert wrote, I tried to make it clear although some confusion still remains, that I saw a continuing role for the PFP in Parliament and that it was important to oppose, expose and to question the government.
 Participation however, did have costs and limits chiefly through being coopted into the Parliamentary conventions, the party was obliged in Parliament, to accept the information supplied, was truthful.
 On occasions and more frequently as a sense of seas deepened subsequent information proved to be false.  Dr Slabbert, later the leader of the Party for instance, was informed during November of 1975 that South African troops were not in Angola, whereas they were at that stage within 125 kilometres from Luanda.
 Even during the 1976 no confidence debate, P.W. Botha then the Minister of Defence, asserted that South African troops were only in Angola to protect refugees and installations that Kaloec and Ruwakana.
 Over the years, information supplied to the PFP, in particular in connection with preemptive cross-border raids were patently inaccurate, if not deliberately untruthful.
 And some of our reactions to or comments on such raids, in which many people died, were influenced by such false information.  This is still a source of regret to us.  Once we realised the extent to which we were being manipulated, the Party stopped attending briefing sessions and started sending its own representatives to see for themselves, as it did when alleged ANC targets near Lusaka, Harare and Gaberone, were bombed by the South African Military aircraft in 1986.
 But in spite of this, the Party repeatedly pointed out that a lasting solution to the security situation could only be achieved by fundamental political change and so writing after the Maseru raid in The Argus, on behalf of the Party, I wrote we can respond to these external factors by tightening our security network, by increasing our military might, by mobilising our young men and by occasionally knocking the hell out of targets in neighbouring states, when the head of our security apparatus believes that these targets are used for terror attacks on South Africa, but if that is our total response to the situation, then we in South Africa are dooming ourselves to a future of increasing violence, increasing stabilisation and what is more, a future of increased division and polarisation and bitterness within South Africa.
 If today, there is a significant number of black South Africans mobilising from outside our borders, with the object of bringing about revolutionary change within South Africa, let us not only see external forces as the cause.  Let us face up to the facts that factors inside South Africa which have contributed to the situation,  having finished pointing the finger of blame outwards, start looking inwards and we will find events such as the shootings at Sharpville in 1961 and in Soweto in 1976 and the death of Steve Biko and the banning and detention and trial of many black leaders, we will find the policies that have the results in the denial of fundamental human rights, political rights, the hurt of apartheid, the deprivations of discrimination, the harassment of the pass laws, the human trauma of evictions and relocations and the anger at the loss of citizenship.
 We will find that these things have fuelled the fire of political militants while frustration and at times despair, have helped to steer them towards violence.  
 Chairperson, I would go on from the quote to put what I say the other side of the coin, because it wasn't merely saying this is what is wrong, we went on to say what should you do to put it right.  So if I may just quote a little bit further from this particular text.
 Why have young black South Africans left this country in such numbers, why are they now working outside to overthrow the system etc?  One of the most chilling findings of the Buthelezi Commission were that 99 percent of blacks believed that unless conditions of blacks in South Africa improved in the next decade, violence will be inevitable.
 Equally chilling and perhaps more immediate, was the finding that 50 percent of the blacks believed that more young people will leave South Africa for military training.  This was in 1982.  
 We cannot call back or wipe out the past, but we can do something about the future.  We can commit ourselves to get rid of discrimination.  We can commit ourselves to the principle of citizenship and citizenship rights for all South Africans.
 We can commit ourselves to a South Africa in which every child, women, man, child and woman is treated as a human being with equal dignity or we can continue as we have been doing with apartheid, with discrimination, with the denial of basic human rights, with the exclusion of blacks from our political system.
 Yes, we can make a new start involving urgent and fundamental changes or we can carry on as before.  If we decide on this latter course, carry on as before, our future will be marked not only with terror attacks within our borders, not only with retaliating raids across or borders, but increasing racial polarisation and the steady sapping of energies and the resources and hopes of our people.
 We refuse to believe that his ugly pattern is the inevitable pattern for the years that lie ahead.  That was the philosophical approach to this traumatic problem of the conflict that was being generated from within South Africa and which spilled over across our borders.
 Tony, I think it is now my colleague ... (intervention)