Opinion & Analysis

In an otherwise excellent article, Jonathan Katzenellenbogen missed the point that the reason the US never got a piece of the arms deal was that the US arms embargo against apartheid SA continued long after the transition to democracy in 1994, The dangers of SA’s Anti-Americanism (February 28).

Armscor, Barlow Rand and others had been caught pirating state-of-the-art US missile technology during the 1980s in collusion with International Signal Corporation of Harrisburg, Pennsylania, and of on-selling it to Iraq and China.

Understandably, the Americans were not pleased, but the foreign affairs department after 1994 ham-fistedly insisted that US legal action against state-owned Armscor was an attack on SA’s sovereignty.

President Nelson Mandela was despatched to plead with President Bill Clinton to intervene to drop the charges: not surprisingly, he was rebuffed.

In these circumstances, European politicians flocked to SA to pay tribute to Madiba and our new democracy with one hand, and to peddle weapons with the other.

Kickbacks from arms exports are how European political parties are funded, as is now being revealed by British, German and Swedish investigations into the arms deal.

The arms deal unleashed corruption and the resultant crime wave that now threatens both our hard-won democracy and our international standing.

The world expected human rights to be the premise of post-apartheid SA’s diplomacy. Instead, President Thabo Mbeki has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care a fig about human rights in China, Burma, Zimbabwe and — by extension — SA.

With acknowledgement to Terry Crawford-Browne and Business Day.