Page 162 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

664 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

a breakaway in the 1950s when the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) had been formed, while
both parties had been prohibited, and were driven underground and turned to armed struggle
in the early 1960s. By the time of the Soweto uprisings a new generation of young blacks had
‘rediscovered’ the Africanism of the PAC and dressed it up as Black Consciousness (BC).
By this stage the ANC, by virtue of the rigours of its underground existence and its reliance
on the socialist bloc for support, had become more closely aligned with the South African
Communist Party (SACP) and eschewed racial politics in favour of class struggle (although
with important caveats). There was thus a major fault-line in the anti-apartheid forces around
the issues of the primacy of race and the role of the communist party.
The early exiled war resisters were subject to this schism, in part because some exiled
whites (to varying degrees of anti-communist disposition, although many of them were self-
styled Marxists) perceived that there was an opportunity of building a ‘white consciousness’
to match that of BC. In part no doubt they were driven by the exigencies of their exclusion
from the liberation struggle by the BC activists. One of the most important of these exiles, the
well-known Afrikaner poet and painter Breyten Breytebach, had established a clandestine
organisation in Paris known as Okhela. This organisation, which rapidly collapsed following
Breytenbach’s imprisonment after an ill-conceived secret mission to South Africa, gave rise
indirectly to the South African Liberation Support Committee (SALSCOM) and the South
African Military Refugees Aid Fund (SAMRAF). The latter was specifically set up to assist
South African war resisters, of which there were by then only a handful, and established a
presence in london and New York.
The approach adopted by SAMRAF was deceptively simple: in South Africa blacks were
in the forefront of the struggle, but one of the material bases on which to mobilise whites
in support of the black struggle was war resistance. This, as we will see later, gelled nicely
with a strong tendency in liberal-radical circles in the USA in that period that saw the black
struggle as the leading ‘anti-imperialist’ force, to which whites could only offer support. It
sat much more uneasily with the ANC’s non-racialism and de facto alliance with internatio-
nal socialism, which was a position shared to a large degree by most of the European anti-
apartheid movements.

the formation of cosawr and the earLy years
At the same time, there were a growing number of young South Africans leaving the
country to avoid conscription, or deserting, who did not share the ideological proclivities
of SAMRAF, or indeed any at all, although some of them as a result of their experience in
the anti-apartheid student movement, sympathised with the ANC or the Communist Party.
With support from the ANC and the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), they set up
the Committee on South African War Resistance in London in November 1978 (COSAWR
1979a) and incorporated most of the London-based members of SAMRAF. The cumberso-
me name is instructive: it was not mean to be a grouping of war resisters, nor a membership
movement, but merely a committee working on war resistance. in this sense, it stood in
opposition to SAMRAF’s concept that a ‘support movement’ of whites could be formed. It
also openly aligned itself with the ANC and the Namibian liberation movement the South-
West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO, which was in the fortunate position, unlike the