Ivor Powell
A leading figure in the pro-gun lobby in South Africa – and a Christian minister – has been accused of running guns to rebels in the troubled Sudan.
According to the Sudanese government, the Reverend Dr Peter Hammond – director of Frontline Fellowship, a Cape Town- based right-wing Christian organisation devoted, ostensibly, to spreading the gospel in conflict situations – has been supplying military hardware and military training to Sudanese Liberation Army rebels.
Intelligence sources have also linked Hammond to Western international intelligence conglomerates.
Hammond however dismissed the allegations saying: “They would say that. But in fact our ministry is focused only on principles of missionary work.” He said Frontline Fellowship has delivered 140 000 Bibles to Sudan, as well as building and equipping clinics and providing assistance to a hospital.
Frontline Fellowship first became active in Sudan – the scene of one of Africa’s most atrocious conflicts – in 1995, when an initial mission and reconnaissance was undertaken over a period of five months.
Since that time the organisation has undertaken numerous missions to the non- Muslim south of the country, specifically in support of the rebel movement the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA).
In an interview with far-right American broadcaster Chuck Baldwin in 1997, Hammond is quoted as saying the holy calling came to him on South African Defence Force (SADF) missions inside Angola.
“We saw burnt-out villages and bombed- out churches. When we asked these starving hungry, thin, sometimes sick people, sometimes wounded and even crippled people, ‘What can we do to help you?’ we heard, ‘Biblia, Biblia’. They wanted Bibles.”
Hammond, an “ex-Rhodesian” (as he describes himself) served in the SADF in the early 1980s as a sniper and later, by his own account to Baldwin, an intelligence officer behind enemy lines. It was during this time that Frontline Fellowship was formed on a military base in Namibia.
Its members were recruited from organisations which included South African parabats and members of reconnaisance regiments; representatives of the ex-Rhodesian elite units, including the Ian Smith regime’s Special Air Services and Selous Scouts; as well as members of the British Special Air Services and Australian elite soldiers.
Interviewed by the Mail & Guardian, however, Hammond had a tamer version of his military career, describing himself as an ordinary rifleman.
He said he had no memory of giving the interview to Baldwin.
In the later 1980s, Frontline Fellowship became prominent in lending support – again supposedly smuggling bibles – to South African-sponsored Renamo rebels in Mozambique.
However, according to a fellow missionary who worked for a time inside the network of supposedly pastoral organisations clustered around Renamo, an Australian by the name of Ian Gray, the Christian basis of the mission work was dubious at best.
Among other things Gray was required to transport communications equipment to Renamo, as well as coded messages from Renamo’s high command.
Gray recalls encountering Hammond on various occasions in the company of former SADF and South African Air Force personnel, whom he described as being more military than missionary.
This is another set of charges denied by Hammond. “I was approached by the security police and the military to work for them, but I sold out for Christ, not for any government.” Inside South Africa, during this period, Hammond was prominent in disseminating pro-Renamo propaganda, notably a 1986 pamphlet entitled Eyewitness Testimonies of Persecution and Atrocities. The allegations contained in the pamphlet – which was widely disseminated in South Africa as well as the United States (where it was used mainly to drum up financial support for Renamo) – were subsequently dismissed by the US ambassador to Mozambique, for among other things, inverting the truth.
Ambassador Melissa Wells concluded that Hammond had attributed to the MPLA government atrocities committed by Renamo.
This propaganda role was highlighted in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 where a secret document identified, among other groupings, United Christian Action (UCA) as a particularly sensitive project undertaken by the South African army.
UCA and other covert projects, including Victims Against Terrorism and the Ada Parker Newsletter, were enlisted in a smear campaign against then United Democratic Front (UDF) activist the Reverend Alan Boesak.
UCA, Victims Against Terrorism and a cluster of other front organisations have been identified as “parallel bodies” set up – in pursuance of a deliberate strategy – by covert arms of the South African security apparatus to counter UDF organisations like the End Conscription Campaign and the Detainees Support Committee.
Hammond is currently the director of UCA, the umbrella body of right-wing Christian groupings to which Frontline Fellowship belongs – though in the 1980s he was not yet an office bearer.
He told the M&G that though organisations like the Ada Parker Newsletter and another front organisation Veterans for Victory still officially belonged to UCA they had been dropped from the letterhead because “they are not primarily Christian”.
Hammond categorically denied any knowledge of UCA having ever been an apartheid-era front organisation.
More recently, Hammond has emerged as a prominent lobbyist against the government’s proposed new gun-control legislation, as well as a leading anti- abortionist and proponent of the death penalty.
Using these platforms he has argued (on the model of the American Rifle Association) for a “right to self- defence” which would be guaranteed by continued gun ownership. This is cast in an argument that “secular government” as opposed to theocracy is a constant danger to its citizens.
Hammond has also developed a thesis based largely on “mission” work in Rwanda, but also enlisting support from Nazi Germany, that the major genocides in history have been presaged by the disarming of the victim population.