Page 160 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

662 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

The south african ‘war resistance’ movement 1974-1994

1
GAvIN CAWThrA

introduction: the impact of confLict on conscripts
‘Universal’ military conscription has been all but abandoned in liberal democracies, with
the principal exception of some of the Scandinavian countries. There are many reasons for
the changeover to professional armed forces, the main one of which is usually cited as being
the need for more flexible, lighter forces suited for force projection (this may change as the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq progress – indeed the extensive call-up of reservists in the USA
is a form of selective conscription). However, another factor is almost certainly the perceived
social and political costs and consequences of conscription – not least the impact of domestic
anti-war movements and the potential for reluctant conscripts to undermine the morale and
fighting capacity of armed forces, even to threaten their internal cohesion.
The focus of this article is on the political consequences of conscription in South Africa’s
wars of 1974-1994, concentrating on the growth of a resistance movement, known variously
as war resistance, anti-conscription and conscientious objection. However, the South African
movement borrowed some of its tactics from two specific cases where mass conscription,
coupled with unpopular external wars, led to similar phenomena: the anti-Vietnam war mo-
vement in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s, which eventually contributed
significantly to the withdrawal of the US from Vietnam, and the movement of resistance to
Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa (Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau) from the early
1960s to the military coup in Portugal in April 1974. 2
These two movements were quite different in nature. The anti-Vietnam movement was
essentially a broad-based mass movement of citizens and conscripts against the war, with
little ideological coherence, which practiced the politics of mass protest and popular theatre,
while the Portuguese movement was to a large extent rooted inside the military itself – invol-
ving both professional officers and conscripts – and was eventually structured as a cohesive
underground force, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), which staged the coup leading to
Portugal’s withdrawal from its colonies. Both these models to some extent informed the Sou-
th African war resistance movement, especially COSAWR (COSAWR 1982a).
There are of course, many other examples in history of conscript-based resistance mo-

1 Professor Gavin Cawthra holds the Chair in Defence and Security Management at the Graduate School of
Public and Development Management (P&DM) at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He
is Director of the Centre for Defence and Security Management which co-ordinates a Southern African
network of institutions carrying out education and research on security management and transformation,
peacekeeping and peace-building.
2 Notes from a COSAWR study class of 1982 speak approvingly of the fact that ‘between 1961-74 110000
conscripts deserted’ from the Portuguese armed forces ‘while from 1973 there were 50 incidents of opposi-
tion inside the army, not only by soldiers but also officers and NCOs’. It went on to note ‘draft-card burning,
avoidance of service, … sabotage … mutiny …mass demonstrations, meetings and pickets … and over 300
underground soldiers’ newspapers’ in the US conflict in Vietnam (COSAWR 1982a: 1)