In early 1994 South Africa appeared to be at the precipice of a civil war. At the beginning of that year the white right was united in the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF). The Conservative Party was the country’s official opposition in the ”white” house of assembly, having received about one in three white votes in the 1989 election.
The AVF in turn was part of the Freedom Alliance, which included black homeland leaders such as KwaZulu’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Bophuthatswana’s Lucas Mangope who were opposed to South Africa’s first election based on universal adult suffrage taking place in April 1994.
At the time of the election a state of emergency was declared in the Western Transvaal. It was declared to counter an elaborate AVF-sponsored plan to establish an independent Boer state in a large part of the then Transvaal. It was the first time that a state of emergency had been declared in South Africa in response to white political activity.
Eventually Chief Buthelezi and the AVF’s General Constand Viljoen decided to participate in the election and war was averted. Nevertheless, a series of bomb blasts occurred just prior to the election, targeted mainly at taxi ranks, bus stops and terminuses where black people usually congregated, and at polling stations and African National Congress offices, killing about two-dozen people and injuring some 200.
The white right has been quiet since 1994. Most rightwingers, disillusioned by the political impotence of their cause, have withdrawn from political activity or joined parties such as the Democratic Party to find protection in a discourse based on individual rights. Some — especially the younger generation — have emigrated.
The silence of the right-wing may, however, have been deceptive. While much of the available information is sketchy at this stage, recent events indicate that some hardcore rightwingers continue to be tenaciously devoted to creating an independent Afrikaner state. About a dozen alleged rightwingers, some of them officers in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), have been arrested and charged with treason.
The prosecution is linking those arrested to documents that set out detailed plans for overthrowing the present constitutional order in large parts of South Africa. These include forcibly taking over strategic points in the country, such as military bases, arms depots, airports, power and radio stations and the SABC. More recently the police discovered an abandoned truck filled with military equipment and right-wing insignia, which the police’s crime intelligence is linking to the arrested men.
Traditionally, the white right in South Africa has had links with like-minded groups in Europe and North America. The right-wing insignia discovered by the police in Lichtenburg is also used by extreme right-wing groups in Northern Europe. Most of these foreign groups are small, with limited financial means. They are unlikely to be able to provide anything beyond moral support and propaganda material to local rightists.
If the police have arrested the people who are actually behind the ”coup documents” it is possible to speculate on who this resurgent right-wing represents and what threat they may pose to stability in the country.
Unlike the typical right-wing saboteur of the early 1990s, those arrested in the current case are not predominantly farmers, blue- collar mineworkers or obviously dysfunctional individuals. Many of them have senior positions in the SANDF and appear to be middle-class family men. One of the alleged kingpins of the group, who is still on the run, has a home in a leafy eastern suburb of Pretoria.
The level of detail contained in the ”coup documents” reveals that its authors are methodical and well informed about the personnel and military equipment kept at virtually every military base in the country. The technical detail contained in the documents was not dreamed up by a delusional idealist. It was written by someone with a sound under- standing of the military strengths and weaknesses of the SANDF.
It can be deduced from one of the documents that it was written more than a year ago. It is likely that its authors had some time to identify and connect with like-minded people before the state’s security agencies began observing them. The fact that those arrested, and the individuals sought by the police, are spread across four provinces is also indicative of this.
One of the documents gives a populist spin to the coup plotters’ cause. The document cites post-1994 levels of crime, unjust affirmative action policies and the sidelining of Afrikaans as reasons why an independent Boer state is justified. Given the real high levels of violent crime, rising white unemployment and the state-sponsored campaign against farmers in neighbouring Zimbabwe, such arguments are capable of eliciting widespread sympathy among conservatively minded Afrikaners.
However, another document reveals a deeply fundamentalist and conspiratorial view of the world. Virtually everyone from traditional right-wing bugbears such as Zionism, the United Nations, the World Bank and freemasonry, to materialist values, ”globalisation” and the Rotarians are perceived to be the tangible and spiritual enemies of the Afrikaner. Moreover, the document alleges, some of the Afrikaner’s enemies are actively plotting to establish a world government ruled by the Anti-Christ.
It is this tendency to see diabolical conspiracies everywhere that limits the extreme right’s appeal, and prevents it from building tactical alliances with virtually anyone. Even Freedom Front leader Pieter Mulder has received death threats, allegedly from right-wing circles.
This is not to say that a small group of people cannot sow destruction and mayhem. From the available evidence, it would appear that a right-wing sabotage campaign could be driven by people with fundamentalist religious views and a sense of God-given purpose, combined with a sound knowledge of military strategy: a lethal cocktail, given the damage religiously-inspired terrorism has caused in other parts of the world.
Moreover, in South Africa wealth, human capital and communication links with the outside world are extremely concentrated. An attack on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange coupled with a disruption of communication links between a few square kilometres around Sandton City and the outside world would cause considerable harm to South Africa’s already fragile economy.
Timothy McVeigh, a 27-year-old with a hatred for the United States federal government, used a rental truck and two tons of garden-variety fertiliser mixed with fuel oil to blow up a federal government building in Oklahoma in 1995. The blast killed 168 and injured another 500.
The Oklahoma bombing is an example of the damage a single-minded and fanatical individual can cause. In the milieu of the extreme right in South Africa there could be many such individuals. Moreover, there now appears to be concrete evidence that some such individuals are networking and cooperating to maximise their impact.
The extreme right has neither the capacity nor the allies to pose a real threat to the South African government. It would be naive, however, to presume that they cannot create disorder and destruction on a significant scale.
Martin Schonteich is senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies