DURING 1978, the apartheid government of South Africa conducted a series of airborne raids and military assaults against the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) in Angola. Most notable was the raid by the SADF against the town of Cassinga which resulted in the Cassinga Massacre.
On 11 May 1978 Foreign Minister Roelof “Pik” Botha was interviewed regarding the country’s “Special Military Operation”.
He said the raid “had to be made because SWAPO escalated its “terrorist” activities after South Africa accepted the western powers’ plan for Namibia.’ This was classic Pik — at first denying SWAPO had any legitimate grievance, then reducing the organisation to a mere puppet of the Soviet Bloc at the same time as pumping a counter-narrative, one that cast Botha himself as some kind of liberation hero.
It would take another 12 years for Namibia to extricate itself from under the jackboot of South African colonialism.
This week foreign minister Naledi Pandor elicited much the same narrative when she shook the hand of Sergey Lavrov.
Lavrov said Russia was willing to negotiate with Ukraine in the early months of the war, but the United States and other Western nations advised Kyiv against holding talks.
“It is well known that we supported the proposal of the Ukrainian side to negotiate early in the special military operation and by the end of March, the two delegations agreed on the principle to settle this conflict,” Lavrov said.
“It is well known and was published openly that our American, British, and some European colleagues told Ukraine that it is too early to deal, and the arrangement which was almost agreed was never revisited by the Kyiv regime.”
Both defended the planned war games and Imperialist endeavours next month which are certainly a breach of South Africa’s pacifist constitution. Allowing Russian nuclear weapons into SA waters, calls into question the nation’s commitment to nuclear disarmament, as the first country to willingly forego a nuclear weapons program.
The country unilaterally ended its nuclear weapons programme in 1989.
#StoptheWar
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