| Home
> Special
Projects > Governance
Project> 2003
PASSIA
workshop on
Democratization: Learning from the Lessons of Others
9 September 2003, Ramallah
The
South African Experience in the Democratization Process
Speaker: Dr. Pallo Jordan
I am a member in the South African
Parliament. For the first five of the nine years since we have
had democracy, I was minister in the government led by Nelson Mandela.
Now, I am chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Committee in our national
parliament. Before 1990, in terms of the definitions employed by
Dick Cheney (Vice -President. of the USA), I was considered a “terrorist”,
because I was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) serving
in many capacities, My last assignment was as a chief of communications
for the African National Congress. Prior to that I served in various
posts in the ANC, which is the leading liberation movement in South
Africa . In my view the democratization process in South Africa is an on-going
progress. You can't say that it is a process that has been competed.
I am also going to differ very radically with my Czech and Spanish
co-panelists, because the South African transition is very different
from their experience. I will also try to bring out what I consider
similarities and dissimilarities between the South African situation
and Palestinian situation, because there are always temptations
on the part of many people to draw parallels.
I think much more significant than the similarities, are the dissimilarities,
and we should bear the dissimilarities in mind all the time.
As a national liberation movement, we used to characterize the
system of apartheid as a system of colonialism of a special type.
The principal difference between apartheid South Africa and the
others, in our view, was that the colonizing power in South Africa
and the colonized people lived within the boundaries of the same
country. They shared the same territory. Unlike conventional colonialism,
as in the case of Senegal and France ; India and Britain , where
there are two different territories. In South Africa it is one
and the same territory.
But if you look at the institutions of the apartheid regime, you
will then recognize their identity as typical of the colonial system:
- The majority- the colonized
people were not considered citizens. Rights of citizenship were
exclusively preserved to people of European descent. If you had
the slightest drop of non-European blood, that disqualified you
from inclusion in the political system and the rights of citizenship.
South Africa , for the White minority had many of the features
of democracy. They had regular elections, they had parliament,
a judiciary that was nominally independent of the executive. It
was however undemocratic in that the Whites in South Africa , at
no time in the history of the country, ever exceeded 15% of the
total population.
- The majority – the colonized
people, were governed as conquered people with no rights. They
were governed without their consent.
- The apartheid system necessarily
was authoritarian and repressive, employing its security forces
to hold down the oppressed majority.
There are dissimilarities with reference to Palestine and Israel
. The crucial distinction between Palestine and South Africa is
that here you have two mutually dependent communities. But they
don't live in the same nation state. They don't live within a single
political economy. Israel and Palestine are mutually dependent,
but in many respects are two discrete political economies and societies.
Despite the institutions of apartheid, in South Africa the black
majority was very much integrated into the political economy of
South Africa . In SA if you called a general strike and the majority
of the black people observed the strike, you could bring the economy
to a halt. The same couldn't be said about Israel and Palestine
, which is why it is possible here to do the things that Israelis
are doing: have road blocks, impose curfews, shut people up in
houses for days. In South Africa it would have been foolhardy to
do that.
The historic moments at which the respective states came into
existence: In the case of South Africa, it came into being as a
state when Britain was at the height of its power, exactly 4 years
before the outbreak of World War I. Israel, on the other hand,
came into being at the moment when the British Empire was in decline.
Israel was a direct outcome of the two world wars. World War I
had given birth to the Balfour declaration and World War 2 was
accompanied by the holocaust of the Jews of Europe that had created
this vast population of European Jewish refugees looking for a
safe haven. That helped bring into existence the state of Israel
. Those two historic moments had significance in many other respects,
which will become clearer as we proceed.
The paradox of apartheid in South Africa was, much as the white
minority, the colonizing power, had been responsible for the modernization
of the economy of that country. The same white minority did not
want to live with the consequences of that modernization.
Apartheid, in a way, was a political system, which was trying
to squeeze a square peg into a very round hole. If it hadn't been
for the modernization of the economy of South Africa , you would
probably have ended up with a white minority living on the territory
of SA but living in an economy separate and apart from the rest
of the population. But having modernized the economy, they had
to draw the black majority into that economy. There was no way
to modernize the economy and sustain it without drawing in the
black majority. But the Whites also wanted to keep them out, make
them something separate and apart from this political economy.
White South Africa was swimming against the current of international
opinion. After World War II, there was that huge wave of decolonization
beginning with the independence of Indian 1947; gathering momentum
during the 1950s. In February 1960, when the British Prime Minister,
Macmillan, visited SA and addressed the South Africa Parliament
one of things he thought necessary was to draw the attention of
White SA to the need for them to come to terms with what he referred
to as “the winds of change” blowing through the continent. That
is, to come to terms with the rise of the African nationalism.
The implication was that SA itself would have to change. The White
South African prime minister rejected the lecture.
It took another 44 years before change actually came to SA.
The interesting point about the struggle for democracy in SA is
that it differs very sharply from struggles for democracy in many
other parts of the world, hence my differences with my co-panelists.
In SA the religious community, rather than playing a conservative
role, played an important role in the struggle for democracy. That
applies to Christians, Muslims, and others Unlike in Czechoslovakia
, the Communists played a central role in the struggle for democracy.
This bears out the notion that the specifics of every particular
society are going to make for very different roles for different
players in that society. One cannot derive conclusions from the
examination of one situation and make the same assumptions about
another. We shouldn't draw conclusions from one and apply them
to the others.
The actual creation of the democratic state in SA, as against
the democratization process, happened in a very short space of
time, 1990-1994. In 1990 there was the re- legalization of the
national liberation movements; moving very quickly to a national
convention for democratic South Africa (CODESA) at the end of 1991.We
held national elections in 1994 having agreed on a democratic system
for SA.
South African democracy rests on two kinds of institutions: one,
institutions of state; and the other, institutions of civil society.
Both of which have been assigned roles in the society. As question
was earlier posed: How does one instruct people in democracy in
the absence of a state?
It is necessary to mention that in South Africa (SA) democratization
came about as a result of huge mass movements, consisting of ordinary
people. That meant you had to slowly but steadily build up a democratic
political culture among the people. People became familiar with
certain ways of doing things: e.g. those leaders don't come from
above and are imposed on you. They have to be elected into office
by ordinary people. You had to familiarize people with systems
of democracy.
Power in colonial systems is arbitrary. The idea of freedom of
expression and freedom of the press was not there under apartheid.
You had to educate people in these new values and in the exercise
of their power. By the time we arrived at democracy in SA, in spite
of the constraints, people had managed to build media institutions
that produced newspapers that spoke about their needs and their
demands and about their struggles. These would regularly be banned
by the apartheid regime. The editor s would be arrested and tortured,
but ordinary people fought for these rights. Democracy was achieved
in the heat of struggle. Because they had struggled for them, ordinary
people understood that democratic values derived from their movement.
They had built up democratic institutions, inside their own country.
They were not imported from the USA or UK .
The struggle also required that the roles of people in the society
change. In the course of actual struggle, women were drawn into
the struggle. This in itself taught new social mores such as the
equality of men and women. After June 1976 youth played a central
role in the struggle. That too required people to re-define the
roles of young people and old people. The struggle also taught
new lessons about the roles that can be played by different segments
of society, the most important being not the elite, but the ordinary
men and women. Democracy came to South Africa not as an elite compact,
but as a mass driven democratization, to which the dominant White
elite was forced to concede.
In our constitution, there are institutional arrangements to support
and sustain democracy like the bill of rights, that protects the
people's rights and secularized society. We separated the church
from the state.
South Africa is multicultural, multi-religious,
multilingual and multiracial. Because South Africa is a multi-lingual
society, English and Afrikaans ( Cape Dutch ) were the official
languages of apartheid South Africa . But we also have people of
who speak another nine languages. All these languages are now official
languages and those who speak them are free to use them in the
courts, in all government offices, in parliament, etc.
The constitution is based on a separation of powers.
We have an executive, which like in the British model derives from
the party that enjoys the majority in the National Assembly. Then
we have the legislatures – all elected in general elections. The
Constitution also contains a number of provisions, under Chapter
Nine, establishing institutions to protect and support democracy,
These are the Human Rights Commission; the Constitutional Court
, the Office of the Public Protector; the Office of the Auditor-General;
the Gender Commission.
In addition there are also institutions for empowerment because
apartheid left us with a highly divided society in which poverty,
powerlessness and disadvantage still are associated with a black
skin. Black women are specifically the most disadvantaged. To address
this, our party, the ANC, has striven to have at least 33.3% of
all its public representatives as women. As a result we have a
very high rate of women representation in our parliament. We already
exceed both the USA and the UK in the number of women representatives
in our parliament, 33%.
The biggest single threat to our democracy is the
AIDS pandemic. The most vulnerable are young people between the
ages of 18 and 45, who are the economically most active sector
of the population. If this segment of our population is decimated,
there will be a serious threat to our democracy.
The other is high rates of unemployment. If people
cannot find jobs, and they see their future as joblessness, they
could become disillusioned with democracy.
South African Freedom came as a
result of a combination of armed struggle, mass struggles, underground
organization and international solidarity. But what we understood
was that all armed struggles are essentially political struggles.
The implication is that you can pursue the same objectives using
armed or non-armed means. The second is that the means you use
to achieve your political objectives should be appropriate to your
objectives.
In the case of Palestine and Israel , we are living
in a given international political environment and configuration
of regional power. The military option is not very likely to succeed.
That means that the Palestinian movement is going to have to evolve
a number of strategies, which must include diplomacy, to succeed.
The Israeli state has demonstrated its military
superiority in this region on a number of occasions. One of the
things that the Palestinian movement will have to do is devise
a strategy to neutralize that military superiority. That dies not
mean taking on Israel militarily – no country in this region, let
alone Palestine , can do that.
I will illustrate what I mean with an example drawn
from our experience. Before September/October 1987 the apartheid
regime regularly sent its forces into neighboring countries to
launch raids, aimed at destroying the ANC. It did that with impunity
because it had air superiority and its military were stronger than
ours. In May 1987, the Commonwealth (ex-British colonies) sent
a mission of eminent persons to South Africa . In an attempt to
resolve the issue of apartheid. At that very time we were agitating
for full sanctions against Apartheid South Africa . There was a
bill before the US Congress, sponsored by Congressman Dellums.
No one was certain that it would pass. In the midst of these events,
the apartheid government wanted to deliver a rebuff to the Commonwealth
Eminent Persons Group (EPG) and decided to bomb. Z imbabwe , Z
ambia and Botswana , three Commonwealth countries.
The bombings delivered a rebuff to the EPG alright,
but by so doing the Apartheid regime produced a result it had not
expected and definitely did not want. Its actions galvanized the
US congress. In spite of the very pro-apartheid Reagan administration
(please note it was the Reagan administration and not congress
that was pro-apartheid) congress passed the sanctions law (the
triple A legislation) with such an overwhelming majority that President
Reagan could not withhold his assent. As a result Dellums bill
became law.
What the apartheid regime had done was in demonstrating
its military power; it had shot itself in the foot. Consequently,
the floodgates of international sanctions were opened. In 1988
when they were engaged against the Cuban/Angolan forces at Cuito
Cuenavale, after losing one plane, they could no longer put their
planes in the air because they could not be certain they could
replace them. Thus, though still with the best air force in the
region, it was effectively neutralized.
One of the realities of any struggle armed or otherwise,
is that it is ea sier to defeat an opponent who is divided than
one who is united. That means that a dimension of your political
strategy should aim at dividing your antagonist and eroding his
cohesion; creating divisions within his ranks; even recruiting
allies for your side amongst his potential supporters.
In South Africa there was always a minority of White
who did not support apartheid. There was an even smaller minority
who were prepared to oppose it. An even tinier minority was prepared
to join in active struggle through the liberation movement, to
destroy apartheid. All Whites, those for and those opposed to apartheid
knew that we were not fighting with Whites as Whites; we were struggling
against a system of oppression. That was an important distinction
because it meant that those White who opposed or did not support
apartheid did not feel that they had to support the apartheid regime
because our aim was to destroy them as Whites When finally those
Whites who supported apartheid felt constrained to negotiate, they
could do so certain that the outcome would not be the destruction
of Whites as such.
Our strategy also aimed at mobilising international
support. In the case of Palestine and Israel it will be necessary
for the Palestinians to understand how Israel and the institutions
that support it internationally operate. It is necessary to understand
also the sources of that support. The Palestinian movement has
to communicate with those communities and countries, even if today
that looks like a daunting task. We were in the fortunate position
of having the African-American community in the USA . It was they
that placed the issue of apartheid in South Africa on the USA 's
political agenda. The African-American community is networked through
the churches and they were a significant factor too in winning
support in the World Council of Churches (WCC). Because of the
strength of support we received from the WCC, many welfare functions – like
support for the families of political prisoners, care for refugees,
assistance in defence in political trials – could be handled by
the WCC.
All these factors - armed struggle, underground
organisation, mass struggles and international solidarity - came
together at a critical moment, making possible the breakthrough.
But to reach that point, we had to persuade a critical mass within
Western societies in support of our cause. You will need that too
in your case to make a breakthrough.
I am still convinced of the two
state solution. Dr Nadim is very skeptical of a two state solution,
and I appreciate his skepticism. Why I doubt the viability of his
proposal is that I do not see any forces in Israel who would support
a single, non- Zionist state. The other states in this region too
are not ready to accept that either. What is needed is an international
coalition of forces that can stop the Israelis from doing what
they are doing.
Dr.
Pallo Jordan, Member of the South African Parliament & African
National Congress (ANC), Western Cape, South Africa
Photos
& Participants | Speakers
|
