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Racist Crimes Spark Struggle: Support Grows In US

By VVAW

New outbursts of rebellion exploded in South Africa on October 20th in the wake of the latest moves by the racist regime of Prime Minister Jon Vorster to crush Black resistance to apartheid and white minority rule. On November 10, police arrested 626 Blacks including 198 schoolchildren in a house-to-house sweep near Pretoria. At the inquest into the murder of Black leader Steve Biko, the police were found "innocent" of any wrongdoing. After watching this farce, angry demonstrators protested in front of the courthouse, taking their lives in their hands. A few days later Biko's family was arrested for distributing literature, the same charge he had been imprisoned on. As of the 11th of November there were more than 300,000 Black students boycotting classes in protest.

Meanwhile, Vorster's strongest backer, the racist ruler of neighboring Rhodesia, Ian Smith, was sending his fighter planes across the border into Mozambique, leveling many villages (which Rhodesia called "guerilla strongholds") and killing hundreds of women and children ("terrorists").

Throughout the world, people hurled new condemnations at the outlaw South African dictatorship. These newest outrage, coming on top of the continuing rule of brutality and terror that keeps the Black majority in bondage have made things quite uncomfortable for even the staunchest backers of these regimes.

In an effort to maintain a position of influence and is image as a "human rights" advocate, the U.S. has attempted to appear as mediator in Africa and head off any really severe action against the Vorster government. So Carter was forced to take action. The U.S. ambassador was called home for "consultation" and UN Ambassador Andrew Young began to circulate a U.S. position paper around the UN calling for "limited sanctions" against South Africa.

Although the UN Security Council voted a resolution ordering all UN members to stop supplying military equipment to South Africa, the actions will have little effect. This arms embargo is a joke. There has been a UN arms embargo against South Africa for years and it has never stopped the U.S. of Western European imperialists from building up the South African military machine, used solely for the repression of the Black majority with occasionally sallies into hot spots like Angola. The U.S. claims it has observed the embargo, but next to Britain and France, it is the largest arms merchant in South Africa. It's done by the simple device of licensing foreign firms to produce U.S. arms for shipment to South Africa.

For example, Ford licensed a major Italian arms manufacturer, Oto Melara, to produce the M11A1 armored personnel carrier for South Africa. Four hundred have already been delivered. The South African regime has M-47 Patton tanks, M-41 Walker Bulldog tanks, Lockheed F104G fighter-bombers, F-51D Cavalier counter-insurgency strike aircraft, and Augusta-Bell Iroquois helicopters--all of these U.S. weapons.

The Carter administration moves to "enforce" UN sanctions against South Africa, like previous "compliance" with the arms embargo, are bald-faced lies. All their anguished cries and denunciations of Vorster and Smith are nothing more than attempts to cover the embarrassment they've suffered in this filthy campaign to prop up the racists in Southern Africa.

The problem facing Carter and Company is that while they are here in the U.S. talking about "human rights" and trying to present themselves as the force for change in Southern Africa, their junior partners in South Africa are in an ever-tightening circle; to maintain their rule they have to resort to open repression of all opposition, but each act of repression only brings for the new waves of struggle by hundreds of thousands of Black South Africans in the fight to overthrow minority rule. Each new desperate act of repression only helps to dig their own grave deeper and exposes them more in the eyes of the world. The latest wave of repression shows just how weak the Pretoria regime has become under the thunderous blows of the masses of Black people, so weak that it cannot abide even the mildest internal criticism of its rule.

The role of the U.S. both the government and big business, is also being increasingly exposed. On December 3rd, in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and cities across the South, people marched to demand and end to U.S. involvement in Southern Africa and specifically an end to sales of the Krugerrand. This gold coin, sold across the U.S., represents the seat and blood of thousands of Black miners in South Africa and is one of the economic props of the racist Vorster government. Marchers celebrated major victories in several cities where stores and banks have been forces to stop sales of the Krugerrand and radio and TV stations have stopped advertising the coin, all under mounting popular pressure.

Organized by the New African Liberation Support Committees, the December 3rd demonstrations were joined by a number of different groups including VVAW. These coast-to-coast demonstrations were one more step in the campaign to support the freedom fighters of Southern Africa, saying "VICTORY TO THE PEOPLES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA"