Cosatu: "Guerrilla military skills of MK needed on ground"

(Excerpts from Politicsweb article)

A speech by Cosatu's president to the MK Military Veterans Association....

Input by Sidumo Dlamini, COSATU President, to the Conference of the MKMVA held at Birchwood Conference Centre, October 15 2012

Comrades,

I think it is important that right from the onset I clarify some of the basic things about COSATU, the African National Congress and MK.

Firstly, we come to address this congress not as friends of the ANC, but as strategic revolutionary allies who shared, and continue to share, the trenches of war against colonialism of a Special Type with the ANC.

Secondly, we did not and continue not to participate in this struggle simply as beneficiaries but as part of the South African working class whose hard conditions of life compelled them to be at the forefront amongst the ranks of the Congress Movement to attain the National Democratic Revolution vision.

We know that we are the most organised detachment of the working class and therefore we subject ourselves to the revolutionary discipline of the working class as a whole, which is the conscious and uncompromising leading detachment of the motive forces of our revolution as led by the ANC.

We know that the working class has the responsibility of uniting the widest range of classes and social strata in a common struggle for the realisation of the strategic objectives of the National Democratic Revolution.

The history of our revolution bears testimony to the facts that you are our own.

It was not a mistake that amongst the members of the Luthuli Detachment who participated in the Wankie Spolilo operation, which was the first MK group...were amongst the first to receive military training in the Soviet Union.

The 1978 Politico-Military Commissions Report contained what was later to be popularly referred as the Green Book said that "the armed struggle must be based on, and grow out of, mass political support and it must eventually involve all our people. All military activities must at every stage be guided by and determined by the need to generate political mobilization, organization and resistance, with the aim of progressively weakening the enemy's grip on his reins of political, economic, social and military power, by a combination of political and military action."

As COSATU, we later saw comrades testifying in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] on their roles as commanders of the MK units.

Amongst those many units was the called "Operation Butterfly Unit".

Amongst those...who testified that the limpet mines which exploded on 27th September 1985 at OK Bazaars, and Game in Durban West Street, were directed at the dispute between unions and management which was refusing to accede to workers demands. 

Sasol had become a symbol of South African independence. It was South Africa's answer to the oil embargo and through those struggles, the apartheid project was disrupted. History will show that MK targeted and bombed SASOL twice.

We want to challenge the MKMVA to make their project to detail the historical facts which must demonstrate the organic relationship between MK activities and trade union struggles.

Actually, you must consider having a joint political education project with COSATU on this matter. The history of our revolution must be written by those with first- hand experience and MKMVA must lead that process.

What we have seen and continue to see happening in the mining sector is not without its own historical, political and economic basis.

And any genuine revolutionary, who is genuine about freedom, will not use those platforms to attack the movement but use them to deepen class war against the class enemy which are the employers.

The fact of the matter is that workers of this country are paid less as compared to the wealth they produce and also incomes of their bosses.

We want to warn those who continue to kill our people, and those who continue to insult the leadership of our movement and setting up units to destabilize and weaken the NUM: Our patience is not endless!

We will soon be calling on our people to defend themselves.

Comrade, Chris Hani taught us that it is those, who knows how to fight, who will be the first to call for peace.

We call on members of the MKMVA to work with our structures on the ground as we explain facts to people...

We've got to have MKMVA members using their guerrilla military skills to work with us on the ground to defend this movement and our revolution as a whole which is being threatened by demagogues, who are seeking political survival by all means and at all costs, even at the cost of the very revolution they claim to advance.

We are coming from our 11th National Congress drawing inspiration from the recommendations of the ANC policy conference which called for radical second phase of our transition. 

We are now preparing for the ANC 53rd Conference to be held in Mangaung and we are going there to argue that the radical phase of the second phase of our transition will require the programme of the movement must be clearly biased towards the working class.

And also that it must be based on an agreed platform which is implemented by government; that we deliberately build an activist interventionist state and that the ANC-led Alliance should constitutes the strategic centre of power which directs the National Democratic Revolution [NDR]. 

And the ANC shall always reflect this dominant character without underplaying the other class interests.

In our view comrades, there can be no radical second phase of transition if the ANC does not prepare to generate a programmes that are driven and supported by the masses.

It is actually the ANC's adherence to the mass line which took us to the 1994 breakthrough, albeit with the emergence of alien tendencies which began to emerge during the negotiations in which the masses began to be treated as secondary.

The period we are going through and the period of the radical second phase of our transition will require the political commissars and real commanders must practically occupy the front ranks of our revolution.

We want practical answers from the MKMVA!

Issued by COSATU, October 14 2012

Narysec, the NDR and the GDR Constitution

Earlier this year the Minister of Defence and Military Veterans stated that   
20 000 young people will be trained by the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) as part of the National Rural Youth Service Corps (Narysec).

The Minister stated that the service would not offer training for military engagement but rather focus on the 'potential of military training to promote discipline, self-esteem and a sense of belonging to the national community'.

One of the aims of Narysec according to its website are "to create a major countryside revolution for socio-economic freedom through nation-building and community service."

Trainees will also be learning of "the impact of land accumulation by dispossession" and "how land reform can be a radical and rapid move from the past without impacting on agricultural production."

According to Rural Affairs Minister Gugil Nkwinti: "These non-military youths will become our Agents of Change…"

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform is in charge of recruitment and has urged recruits “to emulate the young revolutionaries of the 1976 generation.”

According to a budget vote speech by the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, participants of Narysec will be beneficiaries of land under the Pro-Active Land Acquisition Strategy - PLAS.

Members of both the ANC Youth League and Young Communist League have been invited to join Narysec.

It should be noted that Youth groups of opposition political parties have not been invited to take part and are therefore excluded from the training programme. 

The DA states: "This programme poses a huge risk for the Defence Force because it can be used far too easily as a backdoor to provide militia-training for the ANC Youth League," and that "The parliamentary standing committee was never informed about this."

The reply from the Ministry of Defence has been that even though training takes place at military bases, no military training takes place "but we teach them how to salute and parade and we show them the guns".

The fact that the Youth League of a ruling party is being trained at a military base and 'shown' guns should in itself be quite worrying.

Besides the indoctrination of the ruling party's views, the main cause for concern should be of mobilisation.

The ruling party aims to have at least 20 000 people trained, who are loyal to a single political party.

The reason why such schemes are generally not tolerated in a democratic state is because of the potential for the ruling party to have a militarised group available outside the ambit of the Defence Force.

An alternative military unit or militia.

Which instead of serving the state, serves the ruling party.

The main purpose of a militia is to enforce the will of their political party, to ensure implementation of ideological programmes and to serve as a counter-weight to the military and police forces.

A militia serves as the last bastion of defence for its party and leaders.

If elements of the population turn against the government, or the Armed Forces or Police refuse to obey commands, then at least the ruling party still have thousands they can mobilise.

Most of the highest leadership of the ANC and its National Intelligence Agency were educated in the Eastern Bloc, Soviet Union, Cuba, China and even North Korea.

Militias were used in all Eastern Bloc countries, the strongest examples being the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and Czechoslovakia. The militia was independent from the Armed Forces and of course loyal only to the Party. The youth would first be part of a Youth group and indoctrinated to defend the Party. Afterwards, as a young adult they could join the militia where they would also be trained militarily.

In East Germany the older people would joke that the Hitler Youth had only changed its name and the colour of its uniform! 

Even they could see the irony in how the Free German Youth was just a rebadged version of the Hitler Youth.

Interestingly, the forage caps worn by the 'Free German Youth' of East Germany are in fact quite similar to those adopted by Narysec.

For anyone trained and educated in Communist theory and striving for a centralised system to achieve the ANC's claims of 'worker hegemony in all sectors of the state and society ' and the 'workerisation' of society, the forming of a militia is seen as a necessary means to implement such a system.

On the ANC's website, it is claimed that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) was forced to balance its interests due to the collapse of its main international backer; the Soviet Union.
The NDR was therefore forced to compromise or face potential economic collapse of the country.

The aim of creating 'East Germany in Africa' and of total nationalisation and full-scale revolution was no longer possible.

The 'revolution' according to the ANC is therefore only partly complete.

The aim of the NDR is to move the first-phase of the revolution, the so-called 'Democratic Phase' to one of Socialism.
Cadre-deployment of ANC and SACP members into areas of the state which are supposed to be independent from government and the ruling party is one of their stated tactics in implementing the NDR and ensuring 'social cohesion'.

President Zuma himself has even recently mentioned the need for a 'Second Transition' and a new Constitution.

According to the ANC:

The 1996 Constitution ‘may have been appropriate for a political transition, but it has proven inadequate and even inappropriate for a social and economic transformation phase.'

The reason being that the current Constitution had to be created by balancing the interests of all groups in the country. The ANC was forced to compromise in order to gain international acceptance and support. Nelson Mandela has also stated the same.

The proposed new Constitution has been refered to by some critics as the GDR Constitution, due to the reason that it seems to be modelled on the constitution of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

The proposed new 'GDR Constitution' according to an article on Politicsweb has:
"...much emphasis on the role of the courts as a motor of socio-economic transformation. The way in which Minister Radebe has employed the term ‘transformation' is reminiscent of how this is understood in socialist theory of state. 

Since he studied at the Karl Marx University in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1980/81, obtaining an LLM in 1981 and then proceeded to study at the Lenin School in Moscow, it is possible that he may conflate the foundations upon which socialist states rested with central pillars underpinning a constitutional state.

To start with, students who wanted to study law in the GDR were selected for their reliability to implement the Marxist-Leninist concept of law and such studies were supervised by the Stasi. 

Unless you were a member of the communist party, you could not study law or become a judge.

Records in the Stasi Archives preserved information for posterity that 26 ANC students studied at various Stasi universities in the DDR during 1980, including a number of students studying at Leipzig with the blessing of the Stasi."

The new Constitution aims to create a “developmental state” that “drives and controls economic growth. “

Other proposals include “recruiting children for the ANC from the day they are born, establishing a state-owned publishing company to iron out problems with textbook distribution, introducing compulsory community service for all university graduates and pushing ahead with a media appeals tribunal.”

The new Constitution also would introduce a 'BEE code' for the print media sector. 

According to the ANC, SA's “first transition”, was a “political transition” aimed at creating a “framework based on the sunset clauses of the negotiations”.

The sunset clauses refer to land and property ownership.

The ANC states that the current clauses dealing with land and property ownership are “inadequate and even inappropriate for a social and economic transformation phase”, or the “second transition.” 

The ANC claims that South Africa is currently entering the Second Transition.

The ANC says that Constitutions are “living documents and reflect the stage of development of a given society” and as a result, “there may well be elements of our Constitution that require review because they may be an impediment to social and economic transformation”.

Another debilitating factor according to the ANC in achieving the NDR includes the “narrow mandate of the Reserve Bank or the relationship between and powers of the different spheres of government”.

In conclusion, it is arguable that the formation of a militia and the creation of a new Constitution inspired by a Communist state goes hand-in-hand with achieving the proposed outcomes of the so-called National Democratic Revolution.

Sources:
ANC wants new Constitution
SANDF to train 20 000 youths
Jeff Radebe, the Judiciary and the East German Model