ABSTRACT: All democrats are "rooting" for the rebellion and the violent clash of the opposing sides in South Africa without thinking of the "Iranian" consequences that may be forthcoming. On the contrary, it is necessary to understand the reasons and the source of strength of the South African regime (the decidedly higher living standards than elsewhere in Africa; its desire to be, apartheid notwithstanding, a "constitutional state") in order to utilise them for conceive "a system and a federal civilisation of interdependence based on tolerance, liberty and justice".

(AVANTI!, September 6, 1985)

This is not a provocation but the expression of reflections which some of us Radicals have been making for years and which I myself have had the occasion to make officially as a member of the EEC-ACP Joint Committee, in Rome as well, two years ago, with the most respectful and also confident attention of the 61 (at that time) African, Caribbean and Pacific countries who participated. Thus it is even more serious.

It is only due to timidness, perhaps cowardliness, or possibly the necessary virtue of prudence (not calculation), if I have not been very punctual or vigorous about expressing these things up to now in the national political debate. But in the next few weeks, in the Italian as well as the European Parliament, there cannot fail to be a debate. It is just as well then to begin it at once and in the sacred precincts.

The images that reach us every day by now from Cape Town and all of South Africa are of manifestations that would not be tolerated in any Western capital (except, it would seem, in Santiago, Chile). The television networks of the whole world is free and able to broadcast these images (as they did for Sabra and Chatila, or for any even minor infraction "attributable" to Israel; but not for the daily or weekly Sabras and Chatilas "due" to this or that Lebanese-Syrian faction). After two months of incidents, we know that by now the number of dead has reached more than a thousand including "blacks", "mulattos", "Indians", traitors and collaborators.

In the next few days we will have great tests of strength, probably with many victims and an increase in the state of civil war. Bishop Tutu has also by now considered it necessary to renounce the non-violent choice which Mandela has considered must be excluded from the very possibilities of the fight against apartheid. President Reagan, even in the midst of contradictions and improvised "moderate" declarations, has also held up the banner of the abolishment of apartheid. There is hardly any democratic or serious person in the world who is considered or considers himself to be such who is not "rooting" for the rebellion of the opposition and its victory.

It is as if South African "liberals" did not exist: this is the result which has been obtained, finally, after decades, by the intransigent elements among the oppressors and the oppressed.

Twenty or twenty five years ago it was possible for a few Radicals to try to accredit the "political" representatives of Indo-China's non-violent Buddhist majority who very soon were dragged with them into a struggle where "international" public opinion became in reality the only source of investiture and the strength to survive of the factions in battle and in war. Today not even this possibility appears to remain. In any case we are in no position to cultivate it.

Then as now everything was supposed to be contained within a bourgeois ideology which from a culture had become a civilisation and so in its very essence totalitarian and terrorist. The parameters of the judgement are unambiguous: the "apartheid" regime is barbarous, the regimes that fight it are civil, or as civil as possible in the given circumstances.

The civil and political rights of black citizens are denied, are trampled on. The law is racist. it is founded on race war and thus founded on fear, the fear that the privileged, dominant and oppressor race feels and wants to inculcate into the one which is dominated and oppressed. The laws say so. "Laws which are respected"; which have no democratic origin and based only on whatever cultural and moral claim the white race feels itself to possess. The riches of South Africa are divided in a scandalously unfair way. In the diamond and copper mines the working conditions were bestial, the mortality rate of the miners at constantly massacre levels. The laws did not recognise occupational diseases, or else recognised them only for a privileged few. And when the laws were changed the state administration responsible for applying them no longer functioned for a long time, and still functions in an intolerable way. The principle of "one man, one vote" is not yet accepted even in principle...

What is the point in continuing the list? The entire South African system is shot through with Nazi-type thinking. As in the Germany of 1930? As in our Europe? The question is not rhetorical.

Thus we must, and we must at once (here at least a revolution is needed, a revolutionary process: that is to say, maybe only a millimetre a day, but always and implacably in the attempt to go in the right direction) create an alternative. We must take what exists as the point of departure, otherwise we risk repeating history, worsening it, in the illusion of destroying everything and at once, in order to change it down to its very roots. That is to say we must make history, we must have our conception of it, with all of the madness, reasonable and necessary in situations of the kind (and maybe in others too).

Therefore one must make analyses and also reflections coincide with a theoretical necessity which by now, I believe, is recognised by all. One must understand (and not merely deprecate) what the foundations or what the sources of strength are of this system and this regime. Otherwise they can never be beaten. At most one might - as happened in Cambodia or in many parts of the former Indo-China, in Iran, in Uganda, or in Central Africa (and let me blaspheme: perhaps in Cuba) - succeed to power, become the legitimate heirs, if not otherwise, of their worst aspects.

One reason of objective historical force, I think, is to be found in the fact that the mortality rate of South African blacks and their standard of living is immeasurably better than that of the other African peoples who are in the enormous majority. There is no comparison if not that which relates to the shameful conditions of injustice in living and in civil life such as exist in the black territories of South Africa on the one hand, and the absolute hunger, unrecorded and unrecordable, literally destined to early death, with no relationship to living and to civil life, not only for the 80% of the population heaped together in Lagos or dispersed and destroyed in the Sahel or the Horn of Africa, or "self-governing" in Uganda, in Central Africa and elsewhere. There are a few oases: the nearest one is Ruanda after the radical practice of apartheid, which is not written down anywhere, has assured public order by having the Burandese exterminate the Ruandese and the Ruandese exterminate the Burandese.

The help of television - this time in South Africa - is great. When "our" troops arrive, in the rebellion for civil rights and to win them for themselves and others, we see them in the streets, in the midst of uprisings, and they seem really "ours", physically, for the clothes they wear, for their street tactics, for their attitudes during their trials in court. And it is a horror to think that they will sometimes be condemned to death as tens of thousands of others, primarily blacks, will have been during the Eighties, but not only in that USA, a society which quite rightly many of us Radicals are accused of watching with great interest and sometimes with love.

Bishop Tutu's son was arrested for one day and will have to be given a summary trial at once. He risks having to go to prison immediately for months because he shouted "clowns!" at the judges who - in application of the local Cossiga or Reale laws (1) - were interrogating defendants ten years old. I, instead, am still free in spite of a quickly obtained order to proceed, because, being a deputy, they couldn't arrest me even if caught in the act of shouting "felons!" at the judges of the military court who had arrested Captain Margheriṭ although he clearly belonged in the hands of civilian justice. But what would have happened to any hypothetical son of mine? How long would he have waited in prison to be tried? How long a sentence would he have received?

Furthermore I have the impression that the ignorance regarding the facts of South African life (together with others, closer to us and more "noble" to our minds, such as the Middle East) is as great as it can be in our country. No idea at all about the true condition of the South African constitutional and institutional "system"; on the formal but (at the moment) hypocritical plurality of the territorial and state set ups; on the ways imagined by liberal South African thought, not rarely travelled in recent years by the authoritarian and undemocratic parties in power, even though their true condition is bad. There is no reflection and no evaluation of the fact that South Africa is and intends to be a constitutional state, being an "ethical" state, like Italy has been for twenty and Germany for more than ten years, the "popular democracies" of Soviet stamp and dominion. All of which involves, I think, evaluations different from those considered "good" (because of the usual Euro-centric and progressive

racism) in Iran or to a great degree in the Third World.

"Much more" may happen in South Africa than happened in Iran if violent clashes and strategies are imposed. South Africa's riches, its order, its injustice, its oppression can perhaps be destroyed, but at a huge price (not the one to which the Teheran Court and its few loyal followers consented).

Excuse the simple truth that follows: for twenty years South Africa, like the Middle East or the Horn of Africa and more so, for twenty years and more "at war", constituted and will offer the most beguiling prospect (and perhaps the necessity too) for the production and trade of arms. Here too may be the reason for this decision, here too.

It would mean frightful epochs in which the "front line" would truly be the site of massacres and madness.

The Shah did not offer a thousandth part of the profits that have been offered to the cannon merchants and the death dealers of two peoples with the Iran-Iraq war, with the constant attention given to maintaining the Arab-Israeli powder keg. And the Somalia-Ethiopia war turned out to be short in wind and in profits...

It has to be stated very clearly that if what has been discovered (it seems!) was right for the management of states and societies which, after all, were organised and existing for centuries in the industrialised and now post-industrial world, it has to be right now too for the countries and peoples of the Third World. It is always necessary to win power as an alternative to those who hold it, having the ideas and ability and strength for governing better, if not at once, at least - "but, of course" - in the medium and long range.

What is the project for government (and is there one?) of the South African society of Mandela, Tutu, the progressive forces, the social liberation forces, of us their "objective" or aware or determined allies?

What are the possible lines of development, of well being, of justice, of liberty, in terms of institutional, state social service and ethnic provisions? (The whites are one of the African and South African ethnic groups, after three centuries of being there, just as the blacks are one of the North American ethnic groups on the level of the Irish, the Italians, the French in Quebec, etc.) It seems to me a duty to apply oneself to this problem.

This is the urgent contribution, the necessary, vital, humanistic and political one which perhaps one should supply; it is not Euro-centric and intimately racist like the traditional crypto-liberal and crypto-Marxist ones.

We must "become" South Africans, take on the rational and reasonable commitment of the government of hope in order to conceive that which still appears impossible, rather than recklessly and prodigally to use up the last cartridges of the possible.