Peter Vale: A SECOND LOOK
We made the military, now the military makes us: to recognise this bromide is to understand the inevitability of what historians one day will surely call Georg Meiring’s Folly.
Far too quickly for democratic comfort have searching questions over the military been driven to the corners of our national life.
When, perhaps, we ought to have asked if there was anything more than just habit in maintaining a defence force, military historians paraded the importance to South Africa of military tradition.
When we ought to have asked questions about the defence drain on public resources, military economists linked foreign exchange (and somewhat later job creation) to continued arms sales.
When we ought to have asked how our neighbours might look at continuity, rather than change, in our defence posture, military strategists spoke of regional balances of power.
And when we might have asked about the skeletons in the cupboards of our various militaries, politicians, under the guise of progress, gave them all a clean bill of health.
Anaesthetised by these imagined facts, in my view, South Africans have not insisted on meaningful change within the military.
Certainly, there are well-intentioned constitutional clauses, but they remain to be tested. Certainly there has been a defence review process, but it was entirely scripted in defence headquarters.
Certainly, there is a civilian defence secretariat; its director however is a retired general, And yes, there is a minister who represents the country’s majority, but like his influential predecessor Magnus Malan, his proud boast is that he was, and remains, a soldier first.
Evidence of this non-change in the military is everywhere to be seen. A visit to any base (the Military Academy at Saldahna will do) shows that the streets remained named for Frans Erasmus, John Vorster, PW Botha and DF Malan while the mosaic on military buildings (take the Infantry College in Oudshoorn) and statues (at Voortrekkerhoogte) continue to depict only one side of South Africa’s story.
Pick up the military’s in-house magazine and all that’s changed is the name – its message draws the idea of a rainbow nation into an ideology of violence, in the same way as it once drew minority power towards the inevitability of war.
Or recite the names of those teaching at military colleges – depressingly, they remain the same as those who taught there a decade ago. This, incidentally, explains why military libraries remain stocked with the same reading material that inspired the total onslaught.
But for me the most depressing symbol of non-change is the dowdy old South African military parade – replete with the unrepentant uniforms of the country’s apartheid past – the new South Africa insists on presenting for foreign heads of state.
The high public profile of military specialists has made these continuities appear as normal as Soweto winter smog.
Located in output-oriented security think-tanks, they first deified the professionalism of apartheid’s military without revealing that they, too, once served same masters.
They then reconciled the lack of change within South Africa’s military with the spirit of the new Constitution. And finally, by casting the debate over the military as a management problem, they side-stepped deep-seated issues of power and control which have, as Meiring’s Folly, returned to haunt this democracy these past weeks.
Unfortunately, there is more: in their efforts to regularise the military’s hold on the public purse, these experts were supported by a private sector which insisted on deep cuts for social welfare, education and health, but not, as it happens, in defence.
And foreign governments, both directly and through embassies (that should have shown better judgment), have financially assisted the same experts to help us believe that the very officers who wreaked havoc in Southern Africa less than a decade ago, should now keep the sub-continent’s peace in the name of the United Nations.
The cumulative result is a collective amnesia which borders on the permissive. South Africa’s people, it seems, unquestioningly believe that the continent’s strongest military knows what’s best for them.
This acceptance of the doctrine of “military might is always right” helps explain, I believe, why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has found it difficult – no, near impossible – to draw files from military archives. And it explains the dark intrigue over the alleged coup attempt.
Its logic was unassailable, near routine: feed the leader a line rooted in conspiracy theory in order to isolate him from his civilian advisers; to preserve the state, convince him to imperil democracy; as rituals of power survive, the leader will be beholden to the military.
Simplistic, it certainly is, but its efficacy has been tested a thousand times over; not the least under apartheid, as the gruesome stories before the same truth commission so readily recount.
If we make the military, can we unmake it? This question is too seldom asked. Had it been addressed with greater passion, purpose and persuasion during the formal transition, I believe, there would have been no General Georg Meiring, certainly no Meiring’s Folly.
As every child knows, it’s never possible to have Easter Sunday before Good Friday – so there is no putting back the clock on the making of South Africa’s military.
But we can unmask its continuing hold on our national life by asking relentless questions over its true purpose, and by asserting the moral authority of a national desire for an open accountable democracy which brooks no single exception in the need for purposeful transformation – not now, not ever.