Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON
We should all be grateful to Kader Asmal for giving a whole new meaning to the term Moral Rearmament. Spawned in the late 1930s, the original Moral Rearmament movement advocated absolute morality, private or public.
Which is more or less what Asmal likes to advocate as the precept for quite a lot of current political behaviour. In this case, however, the “armament” in the phrase denotes lethal weaponry and the means to throw it at one’s enemy. Last week Asmal was again touting a somewhat skittish philosophical tenet, one which states it is possible to be morally absolute and flog lethal ordnance at the same time.
The reason Kader was up on television, wheezing away in that ashtray-whinge he uses when explaining basic ethical verities to us cretins, is that there’s controversy rumbling about South Africa having supplied the Algerian government with some remote-controlled spy aircraft.
There were three main spokes to the Asmal wheel of wisdom. He started off with the obligatory struggle platitude: how the Algerians shared in the “pain and suffering we all had to undergo in the process of the decolonisation of Africa”. Once that affecting libation had been left, Kader went on to explain that selling the Algerian government pilotless model aircraft was quite okay because Algeria’s is a “legitimate” government. This a result of there having been “three rounds of elections”.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, didn’t Germany have a “legitimate” government? Wasn’t the Indonesian government also being “legitimate” when it overran East Timor?
Spoke two was when Kader used the occasion to till the field for some forthcoming seed-hypocrisy when South Africa, almost inevitably, will be supplying the same Algerian government with full-size Rooivalk attack helicopters.
He didn’t quite get around to clarifying an apparent mismatch. South Africa’s guidelines for arms sales state unequivocally that arms may only be sold for use by their buyer-nations as defence against external attack. Asmal did refer to this provision in an oblique remark when he assured his interviewer that, should Rooivalks indeed go to Algeria, they could and would not be used in the casbahs. Presumably he’ll be down there, himself, waving a “Try to avoid shooting here” sign.
Spoke three turned out to be a plea for understanding. After all, only about 70 000 Algerians have died in civil unrest since 1992. According to Kader, the European Union had scrutinised all the warped rubbish about how the Algerian government tortures dissident citizens, and hadn’t found much to be worried about. He shrugged aside an interjection to the effect that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were complaining about how whole shards of Algerian citizens had simply “vanished”.
Governments must have the right to control their countries, puffed Kader. Anyway, South Africa is but a tadpole in the arms supply business. The sharks are much bigger countries. This is also known as being only slightly pregnant.
Asmal should really stop making tricky excuses for manufacturing arms and selling them abroad. Selling arms and being moral are mutually antagonistic. If the African National Congress doesn’t want to beat all apartheid’s swords into ploughshares, at the very least they should have the common humility to say thank you for Denel (ne# Armscor) and the fact that it’s bringing in lots of foreign boodle and employing lots of people. All this ethical flitter-flutter is embarrassing.
To end, some sincere congratulations to Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cal). I am very encouraged to see that my advice to the Cals writers and editors of the printed Buang material has been taken seriously. Cals has really pulled up its socks. The Buang material is showing considerable improvement.
Cals has started attaching numbers to both the questions and answers. What’s more, for a whole month they have published the right answers, too. There are far fewer spelling mistakes and the sentences often make sense. I would suggest they sprinkle a few more commas around, and a few full stops – especially at the ends of sentences.
Occasionally Cals slips and publishes one of their old-style humdingers like last week’s: “Beatrice makes a long speech about how workers work hard in producing goods and management pocketing the profits from those produce.” Still, we can’t get it all right the first few times we try, can we?
Cals should avoid baffling verbal collocations like this one, also from last week: “This does not mean that non-members are not bound if this is not done.”
Otherwise, well done you chaps. I’m giving you a silver star for trying.