Special Hearings — Conscription Hearings — 1997-07-23

PROF SEEGERS: The upstairs rooms, as I say they sometimes look very well.  Pamela I have not - well can I register a couple of impressions.  In the first instance I think there was in the White community, certainly as far as military service and defence of apartheid was concerned, there was a shift that I could see and it was a generational shift and it was a generational shift in my view that had much to do with the 1974 coup in Portugal.
 And what is the nature of the shift?  I think, particularly the Afrikaans elite, and as I say I don't see that because I mean Jannie, it's not an elite survey, it's another kind of survey, but my conversations with people who taught at Afrikaans universities in the 1980's and the 1970's bear this out, and the writing that was done in it bears this out, is that the generation that was produced by the Portuguese coup they were still prepared to defend apartheid but they could imagine it coming to an end.  They could imagine it coming to an end, so one's career path, the political choices that you made were going to be slightly different than the generation before. 
 The generation before 1984, the people who, Afrikaners, White people who prepared themselves politically had a fixed universe, but the 1974 generation would produce people like Leon Wessels, Roelf Meyer, the most prominent ones, people whose career paths are not quite the same as the ones -  So I think in the first instance certainly about military service, is that one should ask what is the elite thinking, not what is the White community as a whole thinking, or the male community thinking, but specifically about apartheid, defending apartheid by military means, what is it that they are thinking.  And I think that the Portuguese coup, now that lies more than 20 years in the past but that one has to consider.
 The second point that I would make about the upstairs rooms was the progress of particularly the war in Angola and in the Northern parts of Namibia.  And that, this is national service and what the elite thinks cannot simply be deduced from social statistics, there is a struggle going on and peoples' opinions are being shaped by what happens in the struggle. And here there definite turning points in the elite's attitude.  The first one was, I think, produced by the loss of air power in southern Angola where the likelihood of casualties and particularly conscript casualties was becoming very, very high and one can see this in the rate of casualties between Operation Askari and the ones that came earlier.  It was just a quantum leap and the SADF was hypersensitive to White conscription.  I don't think anti-White resistance to conscription, I don't think White resistance to conscription was a mass movement, I think some people are very generous when they claim that.  The point is slightly different and that is that the SADF was hypersensitive to any, any meddling with that. 
  I think the Operation Askari, the impact of that on the White community was lessened because of international events and particular the Reagan administration, Reagan doctrine, taking over patronage of UNITA, which meant that the SADF would not be that much in the forefront, that somebody else would become the patron, patron of UNITA.   
 So one can see quite clearly from 1983 onwards how in tactical operations and strategic operations how the SADF protects, at all costs, its White national service manpower.  And I think that sensitivity eventually leads to the recognition in he late 1980's, certainly after the - you know this debate is going to go on for ever at Quito, that you have reached the end of utility of military instruments, that something else has to be tried. Now it's a different elite that is considering that option, and that explains....   I have not found a very good account of the Afrikaans elite, unfortunately back in the 1980's and perhaps we need a good study of the Broederbond or something like that.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Annette.  We will take just two more questions, the gentleman behind you Chief, and then Piet Meiring next to me.

MR EDWARDS: Thank you.  My name is George Edwards, I am an Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University in the United States and the Director of our programme in International Human Rights Law.  My question relates to the comment made by Mr Gagiano regarding the media and the influence of the media over the conscripts and I was curious as to who controlled the media during the apartheid era and whether there were governmental censorship controls, controls of other sorts?  Whether there were individuals in the Afrikaans-speaking community and in the English-speaking community who wanted to publish certain things in the White press but were not allowed to because of governmental regulations etc?  And whether there was something equivalent to a Minister of Propaganda that had some role in the media and what the media was able to promulgate?

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Gagiano please.

MR GAGIANO: Sorry, sorry.  The answer is sort-of yes on every count.  If you ask who owned the newspapers of course you are asking if it was a sort-of corporate ownership, these were I can almost say bifocated into an English class of ownership and an Afrikaner class of ownership, Nationale Pers Group, Press Group owned most of the Afrikaans newspapers.  Perskor was the other one but they subsequently were less successful and some of their voices were taken over by Nationale Pers, so that was one group which was very firmly located ideologically in the camp of the National Party which was of course the incumbent to government and there was a blending of party and State at the time.  So that's the one.
 The second question was whether there was censorship, there was certainly tremendous censorship, extensive censorship and all sorts of - I think Annette would be much better equipped to tell you exactly what it took which pertained to security matters and to the actions of the military and aspects of police behaviour and so on, and even the type of thing that was associated with, what is these days called Correctional Services.  No you couldn't tell what was going on in the jails, you couldn't tell what was going on in many parts of the operations of the police and certainly of the military.  Just as an example, I mean everyone "knew" that we were in the southern part of Angola and it was still the official story that int wasn't, never even subscribed to that and you couldn't even say it without becoming subject to the penalties that were in place to do that and so on.
 But the third question was again whether you - ja, you're getting the picture here.  It was very much that sort of thing.  In other words again a State imposed closure on the possibility of bringing to the public attention the type of information that would have rendered perhaps a more rational choice in the situation, or that now, with the advantage of hindsight appears to have been a morally more enlightened type of choice on the part of the people who were subjected to that style of information control.