The director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, has written a personal letter of apology to South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Defence, Ronnie Kasrils, over the “Squillacote Affair” – the forging of his signature to trap three alleged spies. While the apology represents an achievement of sorts for the deputy minister who, much to his credit, has taken such an outspoken stand on the issue, it points to the continued inability of the United States to understand the principle at stake.
Clearly a country needs to move decisively against citizens who knowingly and deliberately undermine national security. The days when an American secretary of state was able to tell Congress indignantly that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail” have long gone. And, while it might arouse some misgivings about mankind’s progress down a slippery slope, it is perhaps time to recognise that the rubric of national security also offers justification for gentlemen to forge other gentlemen’s signatures.
The forging of the signature of a senior official in the government of a friendly power is, however, a different matter. Kasrils’s person, if he were travelling in the US, would attract diplomatic immunity, as would the immediate premises where he was staying and the vehicle in which he might be travelling.
The violation of his integrity represented by the FBI’s act of forgery amounts to an attack on this country. Director Freeh’s apology is for that reason misdirected; it should be addressed to the president.
Coming on top of the FBI’s earlier statement of regret for causing “embarrassment” to South Africa – a statement which implied, outrageously, that Kasrils or our government had grounds for embarrassment – the American handling of the “Squillacote Affair” leaves a foul taste in the mouth.
On its own it could perhaps be dismissed as the bungling of a law-enforcement agency which does not have a particularly impressive tradition (remember J Edgar Hoover and his frilly negliges. Or was it a pink chemise?). But, taken in conjunction with the bloody-minded approach to the Armscor-Fuchs arms-smuggling scandal – in which the US Department of Justice arrogantly refused to recognise the distinction between the old and new South Africas in imposing punitive fines – it seems symptomatic of a wider contempt shown by the US towards an ally.
The rest of the world is there merely to service the US, seems to be the attitude – whether as a market, or as bait to ensnare a couple of batty idealists. There is no apparent recognition, for example, of our efforts to meet its strategic interests. Our willingness to forgo the status of a nuclear power, which we have already demonstrated is well within our technical grasp. The lengths to which we have gone to keep a lid on the Pandora’s box represented by our chemical and biological weapons programme (and there, incidentally, Kasrils appears to have played a personal role in addressing the concerns of American as well as British intelligence services).
We have shown our desire for friendship with the US. If it would reciprocate, we would commend to them the wisdom of its own Ralph Waldo Emerson – “the only way to have a friend is to be one” – and point out to them that, whatever “gentlemen” might descend to, friends do not forge friends’ signatures.
Broken promise
Press Freedom Day on Monday should surely be a moment for celebration. The annual report of the Media Institute of Southern Africa is full of praise for the strides that freedom of expression has made in South Africa, citing it as the only country in the region paying more than lip-service to the concept.
But there are unsettling indications that not everyone is keen on strident and independent media. The government’s initial burst of enthusiasm for the Open Democracy Bill has been tempered by its inevitable run-ins with the press, and now a watered- down version is being offered to the public with little explanation for the cuts.
The original draft of the law could have placed us among the countries with the best public rights to information. But somebody has gone through the Bill with a machete, hacking out those sections allowing the public access to meetings at all levels of government and requiring the government to provide the reasons for the decisions it makes.
We do not buy the argument that some provisions will be included in other legislation yet to be formulated, or that we require four different Acts for effective freedom of information. These are bureaucratic excuses behind which lurks the common malady of governments all over the world: the dislike of conducting their business in the open.
Couple this with the hostility that many in the ANC feel towards the press, and the amount of media-bashing that is routinely fired off from podiums these days, and one has to ask whether the government is backing off from the principles of accountablity and transparency.
The purpose of the Bill was to grant the public easier access to how the government works and to state information. What has changed that this is no longer a suitable ideal?
The previous rulers of this country had a visceral antagonism to concepts such as the public’s right to know. A shroud of secrecy enabled them to commit the abominations that we are now hearing about before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Without suggesting that the present government is anything like its predecessor, secrecy is not a healthy principle. The only real beneficiaries are apparatchiks. The South African public are the losers.