The latest discovery adds weight to the call for an inquiry into Swiss relations with the apartheid regime
Evidence wa ka Ngobeni
Former apartheid president PW Botha secretly awarded the highest national honours to Swiss industrialists for supplying the apartheid regime against a United Nations arms embargo with war matriel.
Some details of the secret arms deals between the apartheid regime and Swiss arms manufacturer and industrialist Dieter Bhrle and his colleague, Gabrield Lebedinsky, are revealed in a “secret” file at the National Archive in Pretoria.
The file, uncovered by Apartheid-Caused Debt Cancellation and Reparations Campaign researcher Gottfried Wellmer, shows that Brle, a director of Swiss weapons manufacturer Oerlikon-Buhrle Holdings, received the order First Class: Grand Gross. Bhrle’s colleague Lebedinsky, once manager of the military production and sales department of the company, was honoured by the apartheid regime with Second Class: Star of South Africa: Grand Officer.
Botha approved both awards in 1978. Bhrle and Lebedinsky were honoured for their “personal intervention, which culminated in the export to South Africa of vital munitions of various kinds”.
The commendations motivating the awards state that Bhrle and Lebedinsky’s active support of the apartheid regime “indeed led to other important implications, namely that efforts to boycott the exports of the Republic and to place an embargo upon the provision to her of strategic and other imports have failed”.
Bhrle, who is also former director of the Swiss Bank Corporation (now UBS), has stated that he has no regrets about his support for the apartheid state because the black government “now oppresses the white minority”, says Jubilee South Africa, an NGO campaigning against apartheid dept.
Jubilee continues: “Bhrle explains the secrecy of the awards by the ‘very private’ character of the recognition. But timing and circumstances point to the probability that the award not only threatened Bhrle with the possibility of a Swiss penal sentence, but that the apartheid regime recognised that Bhrle had contravened Switzerland’s arms embargo and that of the UN by granting production licences to South Africa and supporting the build up of the South African arms industry.”
Jubilee South Africa officials said the new “secret” file has added weight to their existing call for a commission of inquiry into Swiss military, political and economic relations with the apartheid regime. For the past few years Jubilee has been calling for such a commission and for the cancellation of the “apartheid debt” South Africa still owes Swiss financial institutions.
This week the organisation said the Swiss Parliament has finally “given in to pressure” to constitute a commission of inquiry into military links between the Switzerland and the apartheid regime. Jubilee believes that the new “secret” file shows that the Swiss government made “unjust profits from the suffering of the victims of apartheid”.
The organisation says the Swiss government should cancel apartheid debt and pay reparations to the apartheid state’s survivors.
“The new evidence clearly demonstrates the need for the whole truth to be told, and justifies the call for apartheid debt cancellation and reparations for the reconstruction and development of the new South Africa,” said Jubilee.
“In addition,” Jubilee said, “we must ask why the details of shady apartheid-era international deals were not made available to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and are still being kept secret. The books should be opened and justice must be sought for the victims.”