Institute of Race Relations president says apartheid was not a crime against humanity, reports Mungo Soggot
IN a furious debate over apartheid’s status as a crime against humanity, Mpumalanga Premier Mathews Phosa this week lashed out at Cape Town academic Professor Hermann Giliomee as “standing in the trenches of apartheid”.
At the eye of the storm, involving politicans, academics and journalists, is a book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, co-authored by Water Affairs Minister Kader Asmal, which was the subject of a stinging review by Giliomee in The Cape Times. Giliomee, who opposes the truth commission, lambasted the book which offers a compendium of apartheid atrocities and expands the philosophy underpinning the truth commission as being amateurish and extmely one-sided.
But his particular opinion triggering the furore which has since raged in the newspaper was his challenge to the book’s thesis that apartheid was a crime against humanity. One reason Giliomee gives for this conclusion is that, given the close association of the term with the Holocaust, “it would be necessary to back up such a charge with evidence of deliberate government intent to kill or starve blacks to death”.
Giliomee, who is also president of the South African Institute of Race Relations, concludes: “The book will please those who want to criminalise the apartheid regime regardless of the consequences.”
The review provoked an aggressive response from Asmal’s co-author, Ronald Roberts, an associate of Johannesburg law firm Moseneke and Partners. Roberts said Giliomee, whom he claims was a writer of Cabinet memoranda for the apartheid government, was behaving “like an over-aged infant throwing his toys from some strange, geriatric cot. As Giliomee would know had he read the book, crimes against humanity are not limited to deliberate killing but also include … acts of persecution on racial or religious grounds.”
While Roberts, Asmal, Giliomee, The Cape Times’s contributing editor Gerald Shaw and African National Congress MP Dave Dalling were slugging it out at the Cape, Phosa inadvertently dived into the scrum. He said at the opening of a new newspaper, Mpumalanga Times: “There is an unbecoming tendency developing which seeks to equate the struggle against apartheid with those who enforced it, despite the fact that apartheid was declared a crime against humanity by the United Nations.” He added the ANC should not apply for amnesty for legitimate acts against apartheid.
Phosa told the Mail & Guardian afterwards that from his comments, Giliomee appeared to be standing “four feet in the trenches of apartheid”. He said it was “preposterous” to claim apartheid had not been a crime against humanity. “Who is he to say that? Is he saying the rest of the world is wrong?”
Phosa said it was inevitable that the truth commission would concentrate on apartheid atrocities as opposed to acts committed by the ANC. “Although there was no military victory, there was a moral and political defeat of National Party policy. It is in fact a miracle that the ANC broke so few eggs to make such a large omelette for South Africa.”
A leading legal academic, who may not be named for professional reasons, said that the Holocaust was of course the ultimate crime against humanity but that did not mean that anything less was not. “If you believe only half of what [Colonel Eugene] de Kock said then of course apartheid was a crime against humanity.” He expressed the fear that as Giliomee claimed to be a liberal, his approach could “undermine the future of liberalism in South Africa”.
Dalling wrote that it could be that Giliomee previously viewed “the underdog as black and now as white and Afrikaner”.