The Group of 63 was keenly interested to hear of the recent visit of Israeli and Palestinian delegations to South Africa where they according to media reports came to learn from the experiences of the South African constitutional negotiation process. … the Group of 63 believes that there are indeed parallels between the situations in the Middle East and South Africa.
…The Group of 63 was established in May 2000 as a vanguard Afrikaans intellectual group. It owes its existence to the realization among the Afrikaans minority that South Africa has moved from a situation of illegitimate minority domination to one of unacceptable majority domination. This is an anomaly in the present democratic order.
For this very reason the Group of 63 wishes to draw your earnest attention to the imperative need to avoid such an outcome. It will not contribute to an eventual democratic and peaceful dispensation in the Middle East because it involves per se a winner and a loser – a scenario wholly unacceptable in true settlements.
At the same time the Group acknowledges that South Africa’s negotiated settlement deserves great credit for bringing apartheid to an end and for avoiding the possibility of greater conflict in South and Southern Africa.
This however should not be misunderstood as the terminal point of democratic and constitutional development in our country. The reason… is that the process was not concluded with more or less equal concessions by both sides but produced a clear winner (the African National Congress ANC) and a loser (the National Party NP).
There is today a predominant view among the Afrikaans minority that the negotiation process which initially held such promise was undermined by power plays such as rolling mass action and unsubstantiated accusations and persistent threats by leaders against others.
The upshot was that the then NP government midway through the negotiations abandoned its initial commitments to limit majority power and protect minority interests in accordance with modern democratic practices.
They (the NP) caved in on everything Mr. Joe Slovo a leading member of the ANC-Communist Party alliance revealed.
… One of the most unfortunate features of the South African negotiation process has already been alluded to: the power plays and violence used and abused by parties to strengthen their bargaining positions. The outstanding example was the Boipatong massacre of 17 July 1992. The ANC held the Government responsible for the outrage and consequently withdrew from the negotiations. Subsequent court verdicts however showed that the Government was
entirely innocent. Even so the NP made major concessions to entice the ANC back to the negotiation table: it abandoned its original commitment to minority rights in favor of the principle of unfettered majority rule.
This development heralded a decisive power shift towards the ANC – with particularly adverse results for the quality and legitimacy of the eventual constitution.
The true nature of South Africa’s negotiation process is probably best exposed in two of Mr. Nelson Mandela’s utterances addressed to Mr. FW de Klerk: Because you know in the end you are going to have to give in and be humiliated and I am trying to save you that humiliation. The way to strengthen your party is to work with the ANC and working with the ANC means giving in to ANC demands. Because if you don’t give in we are going to humiliate you. (Both quotations are from the book Anatomy of a Miracle by American journalist Patti Waldmeir).
The Afrikaans minority’s disillusionment with the settlement is expressed forcefully in the caption of an editorial in the leading Afrikaans daily Die Burger in 1997: Capitulation.
The historian Prof. Herman Giliomee probably the foremost expert on the South African transition in 1997… referred to the process as surrender without defeat.
Because one party overwhelmed the other during the negotiations the result was a constitution that primarily embodies the values and preferences of the victor. This has in turn led to the large scale alienation of the minority. Thousands of them have already left South Africa while discontentment over the defects in the constitution is growing among those remaining in the country.
It should be abundantly clear to Palestinian and Israeli leaders and negotiators that the methods followed during the South African negotiation process should not serve as a model or example. The outcome of the process the Constitution which does not guarantee the Afrikaans or any other minority even a school or university and fails to prevent the continued disregard for languages other than English – is the ultimate proof that the South African experience should not be emulated by parties in the Middle East.
Mention must also be made of the purge of all Afrikaners from positions of government and the consequent disenfranchisement of the Afrikaans tongue in school and university alike; the brutal racially motivated murder of nearly 2 000 white farmers by blacks (the ANC government attributes such killings to poverty and the legacy of apartheid and has prosecuted very few of the culprits); the race-based policies which seek to eventually turn over the majority share in most businesses (even family owned firms) and farms to Negroes (thereby dooming South Africa to become another Zimbabwe whose President Mugabe murdered and expelled most white agriculturists from his domain); and the expunging of all traces of an Afrikaner presence in the country (the old Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free state have been broken up and renamed while Pretoria named after an Afrikaner hero is to be called Tswane in honor of an obscure tribal chieftain).
The quotations from the above letter as well as the overall situation in South Africa today should make amply clear the dangers that can ensue if a dispirited and confused Israel continues to offer suicidal concessions to an unrelenting Arab foe armed with the arrogance of self-righteousness and cloaked in the mantle of victimhood. Simply substituting the names ofIsrael Arafat and the PLO for South Africa Mandela and the ANC reveals the close resemblance between the two circumstances.
Neither disengagement nor a state of citizens will solve the problems in the Middle East. Only an Israel aware of the gravity of what is at stake and purged of the negative influences of a baseless defeatism can overcome the swamp which has now swallowed the once prosperous South Africa.
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