Thanks Cde Castro for sharing this interview. It would be great to the full interview.
Regards, Thembela. Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you! -----Original Message----- From: Castro Ngobese <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:14:20 To: Communist!!<[email protected]>; <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: [YCLSA Discussion] This interview with Jeremy Cronin MP by Dr Helena Sheehan was recorded on digital video on 24 January 2002 in his offices in the South African Parliament in Cape Town. It is a follow up to a previous interview recorded on 17 April 2001 at University of Cape Town. These interviews were intended for publication and these transcripts are accurate, whatever has been said in response to the considerable controversy they have caused. This interview with Jeremy Cronin MP by Dr Helena Sheehan was recorded on digital video on 24 January 2002 in his offices in the South African Parliament in Cape Town. It is a follow up to a previous interview recorded on 17 April 2001 at University of Cape Town. These interviews were intended for publication and these transcripts are accurate, whatever has been said in response to the considerable controversy they have caused. HS: We're taking up this interview from where we left off some months ago. So, Jeremy, I'd like to just take up the story from the 1990s, the period before the 1994 election, but I'd like to concentrate particularly on the period since 1994. So the story … JC: I think that the period before 1994 is important, because it begins to show what's going to be at play through the latter part of the 1990s into 2000. What's at play includes the confusions and uncertainties and weaknesses of the liberation movement itself, which were beginning to show themselves already at the beginning of the 1990s. So it's not as though there's some kind of huge dramatic watershed in 1994. The 1994 breakthrough is the result obviously of both external and internal south african realities. In both cases, from a left perspective, both the domestic as well as the external realities are of a mixed kind. It's not as though it's an entirely favourable set of circumstances, which permits finally some kind of democratic breakthrough in South Africa. Externally, through the latter part of the 1980s, the soviet bloc, which had been one very important material support base for the ANC and indeed for other 3rd world national liberation movements, not least in southern Africa, were clearly in full decline. I mean, long before they actually collapsed, it was quite apparent that the levels of support had melted. Even strategic understanding of national liberation struggles in the south, these things were diminishing quite considerably. When I was in Lusaka between 1987 and early 1990, somewhere in the middle of that, I remember comrades from the SACP being called into the soviet embassy and told that we could no longer expect the same levels of support. We needed to move rapidly towards some kind of negotiation. The ability of the Soviet Union to sustain that kind of cold war position was diminishing quite rapidly. So there was that and then in the endgame, in the run-up to the negotiations, there was quite a lot of activity. I was located in the internal political committee as it was called in the ANC headquarters in Lusaka and we were beginning to do brainstorming exercises and strategic planning around negotiations in 1988–89. We were being briefed quite a bit by Oliver Tambo, who was then the ANC president. The soviets were saying and the ANC led by Tambo was saying that it's very important to be quite pro-active in the negotiations process. The comparison with what had happened in Zimbabwe where ZANU and ZAPU had, out of the blue, found themselves pitched into the Lancaster House negotiations was underlined very firmly to us. The anecdote which Tambo told, I don't know if it was true, but it was pointed and it was that on a given day, it must have been in 1979 or early 1980, Mugabe was pulled in by Samora Machel and given a one-way air ticket to London and told: "You go and negotiate with the brits. If you fail to reach a settlement, well that's fine, but you're not coming back to Mozambique." And Joshua Nkomo head of ZAPU, on the same day was given exactly the same message by Kenneth Kaunda in Lusaka. So Tambo was saying that we must be in command as much as possible of the process ourselves and set the agenda. So, although it was fairly late in the day, nonetheless, the ANC poised itself, positioned itself, quite well in terms of the negotiation process. Tambo described it as an inverted pyramid and said that the opposition must be at the apex of this inverted pyramid and behind that would assemble a whole range of our own people, the UDF and COSATU and so forth, the southern african region, the OAU, the UN and so on. By and large, that succeeded. So there was from a negotiations point of view, a fairly clear strategic direction led by the ANC and the other forces, like the apartheid regime, were always off balance from a strategic point of view. All in the midst of it the people who were giving us the worst advice often was advice not to be tough. For instance, one of the key demands was that there needed to be some arrangements before going into elections, that we could not allow the first democratic elections to be run by the apartheid regime, that there had to be some kind of interim government arrangement. They said that it's impossible; it's unprecedented internationally, and so forth. This was what the soviet embassy was telling the ANC/SACP in the late 80s and clearly they were just desperate to remove the burden of solidarity and support, which had been very substantial though the later 60s, 70s and 80s. So there were those pressures, the beginnings of the collapse of the soviet bloc, which were obviously fundamentally unfavourable circumstances for us. Equally unfavourable was the decline of the region. The progressive or relatively progressive regimes in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, in particular Angola, were really beginning to feel the brunt of the destabilisation programmes launched from the south, but also the consequences of their own errors, structural adjustment programmes and so forth, so that levels of support were also beginning to dwindle quite considerably. On the flip side, positively, in terms of the international situation, one: the broad anti-apartheid movement had grown to considerable strength. I mean, I don't think that when looks at other oppressed peoples, the chileans early on in the 70s, the palestinians currently, or the kurds currently, then I think the levels of global support the anti-apartheid movement received in South Africa were unprecedented and was one of the high points perhaps of the of post-1968 ferment of social movements and one of the great achievements of that post-68 movement. It was this global anti-apartheid movement, which had produced then by the mid-80s, from 1976 onwards, a growing movement of sanctions imposed reluctantly by northern governments, but increasingly imposed, and the early 90s became the crunch period, because the financial sanctions in particular meant that the south african government and business in South Africa were very exposed and were going into a cul-de-sac. HS: It also meant that the people who were engaged in that internationally had a lot of hope about what would happen in South Africa. JC: I'll come to that in a moment, because that became its own burden, a responsibility and a burden on the movement in South Africa. HS: I'll give you just a small anecdote, which is very recent. You know the anti-apartheid strike at Dunnes Stores in Dublin in the 1980s? You know the song that Ewan MacColl wrote and my daughter sang on that CD I produced? Just since I've arrived back here in South Africa, there's been a picket on the SA embassy in Dublin by the same trade union. Do you know about it? JC: Around what? HS: Around trade union recognition and national wage agreements. It's the Irish workers who work at the SA embassy in Dublin. The embassy is claiming diplomatic immunity and not recognising the union or paying nationally negotiated wage increases since 1998. The irony of it being the same union is playing badly for SA. The 1980s strike was an almost unprecedented thing. These were just girls on the checkout in Dunnes Stores who wouldn't process outspan oranges and lost their jobs. I am told in my e-mail that there was a big photo in The Irish Times of the picket on the SA embassy from that union. It's just a small anecdote, but … JC: It captures something. HS: Anyway we want to discuss the expectations and events in larger terms. However, this is how it is playing in Ireland at the moment. People in the trade union movement, who were active in the anti-apartheid movement, ask: how can this be the ANC ? JC: I'm glad to hear that they're not just keeping quiet, that they actually are picketing and mounting actions. I've not been aware of it in South Africa. HS: There was a tiny item in The Cape Times one day saying that there was a strike threatened and that the department of foreign affairs said they were confident it would be settled soon, but it wasn't settled. Anyway back to the early 90s … JC: Clearly there were the domestically popular forces. The guerrilla struggle had never really got going and its principal impact was at a propaganda and mobilisational level rather than as a guerrilla struggle that was particularly liberating areas, for instance. I think the ANC liberation movement was slow really to understand the reality of the SA terrain. They spent a lot of time through the 60s, 70s and 80s trying to be something like Vietnam or Cuba, or the example that we had in our region, the struggle in Zimbabwe or Angola or Mozambique. There was a kind of disjuncture between a principal focus of the ANC liberation movement through the 80s, which was very much on assembling an army that was going to fight a guerrilla struggle, and the actual reality that was propelling the struggle here at home, which was largely a struggle of mobilised popular forces on the terrain of an unevenly but relatively developed capitalist economy. So the principal sites of struggle were in factory workplaces, mine compounds, consumer boycotts, civic struggles, struggles in churches, struggles in the media, in the schools and so forth. So it was within the texture of a relatively developed capitalist economy that the struggle took place and it was characteristically the struggle of a people that was the majority black population, but was included into the texture of a capitalist economy as consumers, as students, as workers, as commuters, who were deeply included in it, but also then excluded racially. A lot of the struggle took place in that disjuncture between the exclusion and inclusion. Exclusion into a township was used then as a weapon, so that the township became a kind of semi-liberated zone. The black campuses stuck away far away in a bantustan became zones to challenge the ways in which they were being integrated at the same time as students, as consumers, as users of buses or whatever. I think that that reality remains very resonant now in the present. HS: In what way? JC: Because I think that if you look at the evolution of 3rd world national liberation movements, by and large they did a lot better than we did and liberated themselves a lot sooner. Inspiring examples are of a Vietnam or Zimbabwe or a Mozambique. The beginnings of independence happened before independence in liberated zones, which were often of a considerable extent, and eventually the countryside surrounded the capital city and the colonial power departed hastily. But they then arrived in a post-independence situation, essentially with the popular mobilisation that had been largely of a peasant army recruited, fed, equipped in a remote countryside, where the writ of the colonial or neo-colonial power was shaky. So what liberated the city was often some kind of peasant army, usually led by urban working class, intellectuals or professionals of one kind or another. But the mass base was this peasant army. So what you see, say in Zimbabwe, what is now playing itself out in Zimbabwe, is that the liberating force post-independence, the very upper echelons become the government, the next layer become the generals and senior officers in the security forces. Others get integrated into either parastatal functions or the security forces and then the rest are demobilised back into often a very remote countryside. You see then written into that is the tendency for the bureaucratisation of the struggle, there being real popular energies and real heroic struggle inspired by liberatory ideals but continued, very often with good intentions by the new bureaucracy, but the institutionalisation that it assumes and then the remoteness of the mobilised mass base, there's a great disjuncture between them. A geographical and social distance opens up. HS: Was there much of an atmosphere of analysing this, what had happened in the rest of Africa, and reading Fanon and so on ? Was there much of an atmosphere of that in the movement ? JC: In South Africa? Well I think that the leading cadres of the ANC, not all of it, but the bulk of it, was in exile through this complicated period in southern Africa and in Africa of the 70s and 80s. So there's an experience of high expectations and expectations even beginning to be fulfilled, for instance in Mozambique there were outstanding advances made in the second half of the 70s after independence, in health care, education, democratisation of many things, but it lost its impetus. HS: Why? JC: Mainly because of brutal destabilisation through RENAMO, armed and equipped by Rhodesians and then taken over by the apartheid regime, but also because of mistakes made by the liberation movement, but also because of the socio-economic reality that the liberation movement was essentially a peasant people's army. It was hard then to sustain a popular dynamism and a popular energy through the 80s and I think that has been another reality. The fact that our liberation was different, slower, less successful, the model we were using probably was inappropriate to the reality of who was fighting the struggle and the way in which they were fighting the struggle. It's a very important asset now in the present. I think there are tendencies now of what some of us refer to as the zanufication of the ANC. You can see features of that, of a bureaucratisation of the struggle: Thanks very much. It was important that you were mobilised then, but now we are in power, in power on your behalf. Relax and we'll deliver. The struggle now is counter-productive. Mass mobilisation gets in the way. Don't worry. We've got a plan. Yes, it'll be slow, but be patient and so on. That kind of message has come through. HS: Then In Zimbabwe there's been the maoist remobilisation of the movement for specific purposes. JC: I'll come to that. Post-independence, probably you have to demobilise and incorporate in some way a peasant army, but it's not that easy to do the same to a trade union movement, even if that's what you want to do, stupidly perhaps you might want to do that for whatever reason, or to demobilise a student movement or civics or women's organisations or whatever or the press, traditions of progressive campaigning journalism and so forth. So those energies are still present. They've been dispersed. They're confused. Often they get suppressed by the very forces that they aligned themselves with originally, the broad ANC and so on, but it bubbles through a great deal. I think therefore there's a lot of fluidity still in the situation, which should be neither underrated nor exaggerated. There are levels of disorganisation, demobilisation, disappointment, demoralisation. I personally don't think it's all played out at all. There were already the signs of all of what I'm talking about present prior to 1994, in the multi-party negotiations period and I wrote about it at the time in a piece which John Saul refers to, which I think I called "The boat, the tap and the Leipzig way". I was trying to typify/characterise what I thought were three different views about the mass mobilisation, popular involvement in this period of negotiations. The position in the ANC, which I characterised as the boat position, was: don't rock the boat. Basically the royal road to democracy, to achieving our strategic objectives, was negotiations and nothing should be done to rock the boat in that process and, if we mobilised people in the midst of the negotiations, the apartheid regime would walk away or unleash its own mobilisation of one kind or another, the dirty war and so forth. So don't rock the boat. That was coming through from very senior quarters in the ANC, some of those elements in the ANC who were taking that position in the early 1990s, are very powerful inside the ANC at present. The second position, which I characterised as the tap, was the attitude of: mass mobilisation is important, at particular moments, so it has to be turned on and off. In my view, Mandela typified that perspective. He had an understanding and an experience from the 50s, his own experience from the 1950s, of mass mobilisation being very much at the heart of the revitalisation of the ANC. As a youth leader in the late 1940s, it led a revolt of the activists against a rather moribund, middle-class ANC leadership at the time and that had spearheaded a decade on ANC revitalisation, of strikes, of stay-aways, of boycotts, many of the tactics of mobilisation which became so central in the 1980s again. So you had a feel and an understanding of that, but tended in my view to have a somewhat mechanical attitude to popular participation. The third position at the time we called the Leipzig way, in the light of events in Leipzig, was that sustained and continued popular pressure was critical for the negotiations itself. Far from undermining the negotiations, it would serve two purposes. It was critical in exchanging the balance of forces in the negotiations process itself. We used to say at the time, obviously I was a leipziger, that what transpires in the negotiations was as the result of the balances of forces outside of the negotiating chamber. And that wasn't a static reality. The regime,the apartheid regime at the time, understood that very well and was unleashing a very brutal, low-intensity warfare strategy against us, the assassination of key cadres, including Chris Hani But that was just one of the thousands of key cadres. It wasn't the negotiators, I was one of them, we weren't particularly targeted, it was the critical organisational link between the organisers and the massed ranks, which was our one strength at the time, but were being targeted for assassination. Then also the general unleashing of violence: random, terrorist violence against trains, taxi-ranks, schools, townships and so forth, to sow confusion and demoralisation and so on and basically to knock away the link between the ANC leadership and its one strength. We needed to mount, not our own counter-terror, but we needed to mobilise mass forces partly to defend ourselves in the face of this so that, and this was critical, so that they were themselves part and parcel of the negotiation process. I would say that none of those 3 schools of thought within the ANC had a clear-cut hegemony over the process within the ANC itself. It was a contested perspective and there was mutual suspicion. The don’t-rock-the-boaters thought that many of us were endangering the negotiations process and delaying it with some of those strategies. We really felt that they were not understanding what we were up against. So there were waves of significant mobilisation in that period. I think that those waves were critical in actually bringing about eventually the negotiations and the relatively favourable outcome to those negotiations. After the Hani assassination, there was a major mobilisation wave that occurred then in a response. That was clearly critical. Within three weeks of his assassination, the final outcome to the negotiations was then settled and the elections then happened in exactly one year and three weeks after his assassination. It was mass mobilisation that did it. What was interesting was that in the course of the mobilisation, the response to Hani's assassination was: we must go and kill whites and what are we negotiating for? The ANC was able to inject political leadership into that to say: no, the assassins want you to say that. We have got to now demand the immediate implementation of the process leading up to elections. We were well able to do that. In doing that and also getting mobilised massed forces to take up the national negotiating demands, we began to find they were also taking up their own local negotiating demands. So they would take up the demand for one-person, one-vote elections and so forth, for a unitary dispensation and so on, but at the same time in their mobilisation they would raise issues around non-access to the local town hall for meetings or the treatment that the white police were meting out to the people in the township in this particular police station and so on. They began to find that for once, their counterparts, the white mayor or the white police commander or local white business (for example, there were boycotts of shops in this process) began to negotiate with them, something that they hadn’t particularly found before. So in my opinion it’s very important to understand what happened in the 1990s, but to hold onto that as an understanding for the future: that the negotiations themselves were mass-based and there were local-level negotiations happening. The transformation of South Africa wasn’t just the product of two wise men, a DeKlerk and a Mandela, shaking hands on a deal and having the farsightedness to understand that South Africa… HS: That’s important to explain to the rest of the world. JC: It is very important, yes indeed. There is this kind of elite pacting, which is of course the desired outcome in US think-tanks and so on, and the view of how negotiations have to be if they are going to be successful, and indeed the model that was imposed on Nicaragua and the Philippines and so on, with some success and those countries from an imperialist perspective, whereas the negotiations and the outcomes were different here. But you can forget that, even the participants themselves can forget that, and begin to imagine that South Africa was delivered into freedom by two great men. It helped, that there was a degree of strategic maturity from DeKlerk and a great deal of strategic intelligence from someone like Mandela, but the outcome would have been quite different if we had simply folded our arms and allowed two gentlemen from two different sides to do it. There is a retrospective attempt, including from within quarters of the ANC itself, to portray the outcome like that: you see, we delivered, and now from on high again, we will continue to deliver transformation and change and so forth. So it’s good to remember what happened in the negotiations and to draw the right lessons rather that the wrong ones. Just as prior to 1994 it was at play, that continues in its different ways now to be at play. HS: So, Jeremy, what was the thinking about the whole traditional left demand for expropriating the expropriators? I mean, one of the things that is said is that, basically they have got away with it. They had to give over state power, but they got to keep all of the wealth. What was the thinking about that? JC: I think that first of all that it was not just some of the left critics saying it, but we were saying it ourselves at the time. However, I’m not wrong in saying that, as a liberation movement, we were not so well-positioned, intellectually, theoretically, in terms of policy formation, in terms of socio-economic transformation. It was understandable, but not strong enough to forgive ourselves too easily. We had been very focused on the political tasks, democratisation, mobilisation, fighting a guerrilla struggle and so forth. I think the ANC and broader liberation movement proved itself quite adept, quite smart on the broader political terrain in terms of building a global consensus on what we were trying to do in terms of out-manoeuvring the apartheid regime, exposing what it was still doing in the midst of the negotiations and so on. So the political terrain was one that I think we were quite good at. The socio-economic terrain…I don’t think we were very literate, all of us. We’d not profoundly thought about that. We began to spot that as the SACP and key comrades from the ANC late in 1992-93 and began to say that we’ve really actually got to put a lot more effort into that. While we are busy dealing with a low-intensity conflict, the terrible violence, assassination and the complicated negotiations, we’ve actually got to prepare for governance in terms of socio-economic policy as well. There continued to be some parallel processes, but there was a beginning of momentum. It didn’t come from nowhere. Obviously many of the struggles of the 80s were on the terrain of the socio-economic: education struggles, trade union struggles, civic struggles and so forth. They had begun to advance, but they tended to be sort of bottom-up, grass-roots type solutions, not wrong ones and very progressive ones, but they would often be about a developmental issue in a particular township or in a remote rural area, or changing the syllabus in a school or whatever. So there were popular demands, which were not just of a political kind, but of a social and economic and transformational kind. The unions had obviously also advanced largely trade union kinds of demands around labour market reforms and so on. So the important components of socio-economic policy were relatively in place. Those energies then got taken up by the reconstruction and development programme process, driven often by those forces and then more by the social movements within the ANC fold. They were taken up by some of us who were policy-makers in the ANC, often university graduates returning from exile, who were part of the middle-ranking ANC leadership at the time, but the senior ANC leadership was not very focused on that. Castro's iPad -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
