Do this week’s bombings signal the rise of a right-wing ”Boer al-Qaeda”?
No one in authority would say so outright this week, but there seems little doubt that the bombings and attempted bombings in Soweto and Bronkhorstspruit are the work of the far right — and probably connected to a terror network uncovered earlier this year and accused of a treason plot.
Given that 15 men linked to ”Boeremag”, the organisation allegedly at the centre of the treason plot, have been arrested in recent months — with two more added to that list on Wednesday — this week’s bombings demonstrate that far right terror networks have some depth.
Police started moving against the so-called Boeremag treason plotters in April, and struck major blows when large arms and explosives caches were seized around Warmbaths and Lichtenburg. The group’s alleged aims included far-fetched plans to drive blacks out of South Africa and overthrow the government.
As if to confirm the scale of the threat posed by an apparently resurgent far right, national Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi warned after this week’s bombings that ”this is a big organisation” and that more bombings may follow.
The blasts in Soweto and Bronk-horstspruit — on the face of it targeted to disrupt rather than cause extensive loss of life — are not necessarily the last desperate blows of a crumbling movement. Instead they seem designed to advertise discipline and power: a warning of a capacity to escalate violence.
But why is there a resurgence of far right warmongering?
The frightening thing about the September 11 al-Qaeda attacks, says a senior South African police intelligence official, is that extremist groups everywhere have learned from them.
”We have to be worried about the formation of terror groups that suddenly become comfortable with not really seriously planning a coup, but with just being terror groups.”
The destruction of the World Trade Centre showed what a small group of committed, well-organised individuals can achieve, he says. It also showed the propaganda value of large-scale terrors acts, not necessarily aimed at a direct political purpose, but at inflicting serious damage.
Such maverick groups are obviously much harder to police, but the real danger is when what the official calls the ”warlords” at their core begin to gain political legitimacy.
From police sources, the Mail & Guardian has assembled a picture of the network associated with the treason plot.
The network is ”quite widespread” and ”have linkages in every province”. Like al-Qaeda, the rightwingers have a sophisticated communications network, using hidden messages on websites and cellphones. For security reasons, members of the network also travel extensively to make direct contact with other cells.
Like those of al-Qaeda, the targets have been ambitious. Police information suggests that the rightwingers planned to strike during the World Summit on Sustainable Development — while the eyes of the world were on South Africa — and that the targets could have included the Johannesburg Securities Exchange or the main bridge from Sandton across the M1 freeway.
It appears the groups had a common handler who gave different people different tasks. Some were doing the reconnaissance, while others were making and holding the explosives. Some were involved in constructing bomb housings.
Significant planning and preparation went into the World Summit operation: police experts say it is quite a laborious process to extract ammonium nitrate for explosives from ordinary commercial fertiliser. Despite this, it appears that significant stocks were produced. In the raid near Warmbaths police recovered 24 packs of explosive packed in 20kg containers — a total of around 500kg.
A single prepared canister bomb, as found at Warmbaths, could pack about 90kg of explosives. The Bali bomb that caused such destruction was about double that size — 180kg.
In the weeks before the summit police agents picked up the movement of different bomb components and materials from the provinces to Gauteng and also ”some degree of mobilisation” by cells that are part of the network.
Police then took a decision to act, despite the fact that it might have been better from a prosecution point of view to wait until the bombs were fully assembled: ”It would have been expedient to wait, but would possibly have had disastrous consequences,” commented an official.
The police intelligence operation to penetrate the right wing, code named Operation Zealot, began about two years ago.
Operation Zealot is understood to have been prompted by the attempt to steal a large quantity of weapons from Bloemfontein’s Tempe military base in May 1998. During the trial of three rightwingers for that incident one of the accused, Marius Swanepoel, claimed it was the work of a shadowy organisation called Die Volk, which, he alleged, was also involved in a plot to assassinate President Thabo Mbeki.
The reputed leader of Die Volk, Johann Niemoller, has denied the allegations, but the role of Die Volk was again raised this week following reports linking Boeremag and Die Volk.
A news report on Monday, before the bombings, quoted an inmate of Free State’s Grootvlei Prison, former rightwinger Samuel Grobbelaar, as claiming that Die Volk was associated with the Boeremag treason plot. He claimed that the common leaders of the two groups had offered to spring him from jail because of his expertise with explosives.
Police have refused to comment on the claims, but are reportedly taking them seriously.
Niemoller may not be a suspect, but he fits the bill of a ”warlord” around whom right-wing elements might seek to cluster. He has openly mobilised whites to use the National Defence Force commando system for ”white self-defence”.
Niemoller is a former agent of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), the apartheid government assassination and dirty-tricks squad. He has been implicated in the assassination of Swapo leader Anton Lubowski and one United Nations report accused him of being involved in recruiting European mercenaries to fight alongside Angola’s rebel Unita movement.
Niemoller failed to return calls this week.
The alleged underground leader of the Boeremag, Thomas Vogel Vorster, is reported also to have been a member of the CCB.
Fred Rundle, a former Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging spokesperson who now calls himself a ”white consciousness activist” and who has been in contact with Niemoller, commented: ”I say what has started happening here is that the vanguard freedom fighters are starting to show resistance.”
Rundle said he had predicted in 1994 that the country was ”sitting on a time-bomb” unless something was done to resolve white fears. Now, he said, it was clear that ”the resistance against the government is stronger than I expected”.
Rundle said he knew some of the Boeremag treason plot suspects, although he said they were not intimates. ”They are people that we got to know over the years and who walked with us in resistance … as far as I’m concerned, they are patriots, freedom fighters”.
The far right’s primary demand, in so far as there is any ideological purpose behind its new mobilisation effort, is for a volkstaat or the restoration of a Boer republic.
A range of analysts and right-wing politicians this week pointed to perceptions that rightwing expectations or government promises of a Boer volkstaat have so far gone unfulfilled.
Pardoned right-wing killer Barend Strydom told the M&G that after the 1994 election right-wing structures had collapsed and the dream of a Boer republic had faded. Now, he said, there is ”new hope that a Boer republic is attainable” and right-wing structures were ”in a situation of reconstruction and recharging”.
Strydom, who emphasised that he was not involved this time around, said: ”Should [this week’s bombings] be the work of rightwingers then it is part of a freedom struggle. It is always sad that when there is no other means of expression then this is a way to express oneself.”
While a Boer republic is an ideal that can hardly be said to attract a majority of Afrikaners or whites, Rundle points to other reasons for the resurgence of the far right: bread-and-butter issues including perceptions about affirmative action, job losses, the falling rand and divestment.
Rundle runs an organisation called Vryheid2000, which carries stories of black-on-white violence and ”new South Africa decay” on its website.
It forms part of what appears to be growing network of propaganda, often explicitly racist, feeding on a sense of Afrikaner grievance and promoting ”resistance”.
The propaganda ranges from calls for Afrikaners to be ”ready” for the new ”freedom struggle” to more mainstream, but no less ambiguous, calls for a new ”selfish” Afrikaner nationalism, such as those made by Dan Roodt, an Afrikaner commentator.
President Thabo Mbeki has called for calm and warned that those responsible for the blasts would ”not succeed to undermine or disrupt the peace”.
If previous extremist campaigns in South Africa are anything to go by, this week’s bombers are unlikely to get away with it in the long run. But, for now, they seem to have developed the capacity to disrupt and to harm.