South Africa

South Africa's lesson for the Middle East

From The Seattle Times

Monday, May 24, 2004

By Allister Sparks
Special to The Washington Post

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001936701_allister24.html

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Ten years ago, as South Africa prepared to hold its first democratic election, the air was heavy with foreboding.

Just getting to that moment had been traumatic. A factional war between supporters of the African National Congress and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party had claimed the lives of 12,000 people. Armed members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement had driven a truck through the plate-glass facade of the building where the constitutional negotiations were taking place. A right-wing militia had battled to seize control of a nominally independent tribal "homeland" to use as a base for launching a counter-revolutionary war.

Some wondered whether we were just another African disaster waiting to happen. Miraculously, the answer turned out to be no.

Last month, I reported on my country's third election in its decade of democracy, and the remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was. It was peaceful and orderly. Turnout was heavy. Although the African National Congress dominated once again, 12 groups in all won representation in the national parliament.

The country still faces grave problems. It has one of the world's worst incidences of AIDS, and stubborn unemployment confines large numbers of black South Africans to sprawling, dirt-poor shantytowns. Crime is rampant.

But this bad news is, in one sense, good news. These problems, while severe, are the problems of many developing nations and democracies. Contentious issues of race, ethnicity and religion no longer dominate our political debate. In a world going through a frightening phase of ethnic cleansing and religious fundamentalism, the new integrated South Africa is an unsung success story.

Yet the biggest achievement of all is one seldom noted — the resolution of the conflict between two nationalisms.

To most outsiders, apartheid was seen simply as an extreme form of racial oppression. Though often compared with segregation in the United States, apartheid was much more than a matter of separate schools, park benches, buses and lunch counters. At bottom it was a struggle over ownership of the country.

Whose country was South Africa? Afrikaner nationalists claimed it as theirs. Descended from Dutch settlers who landed three and a half centuries ago, the Afrikaners saw South Africa as a white nation. They believed their pioneering ancestors had come here on a divine mission to Christianize and civilize the "dark continent." They regarded South Africa as theirs by God-given right, a view inscribed in the theological teachings of the local branch of the Dutch Reformed Church.

The African nationalists, led by the African National Congress, rejected that notion and claimed their right to be full citizens of South Africa, which should be ruled over by the majority — i.e., themselves.

Where else do you find such a struggle with rival claims to the same piece of territory? Not in the United States, but between Israelis and Palestinians, the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus, or the Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. And how are they doing? Not very well. South Africa alone has cracked it, at least so far.

It has done so by recognizing, as others have not, that there comes a point of violent equilibrium in such struggles where there can be no victor, where the struggle can only drag on and on, grinding down both sides.

There came a moment when the National Party government, once thought to be irredeemably pigheaded, woke up to the fact that you cannot defeat a freedom struggle supported by an oppressed majority by military means alone. You may repress it for a time, but it will always bounce back, more militant than ever.

The only way to end the conflict is to seek a solution negotiated not with "moderates" of the regime's own choosing, as the old South Africa tried repeatedly, but with authentic leaders whose authority extends to the most militant elements of the liberation struggle.

South Africa was fortunate in having leaders of rare quality in then-President Frederik W. de Klerk and then-prisoner Nelson Mandela, who together were able to chart a way forward to a new constitution.

Ultimately, this do-it-yourself agreement was the key to success. Although international sanctions supplied some pressure, no agreement was ever imposed or even proposed from outside. The adversaries thrashed it out for themselves, painfully, laboriously. That it was of their own making is what has given it stability.

To appreciate what an exceptional achievement this has been, imagine this model for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don't mean the two-state solution of the Oslo accords or the Bush administration's so-called "roadmap," for those are segregationist, apartheid solutions (like those used in divided Cyprus and the ethnically segregated former Yugoslavia).

No, a South African solution in the Middle East would consolidate Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into one country ruled by an elected majority, which soon would be Palestinian. The Jewish people would live as a minority group, albeit an economically dominant one.

If that strikes anyone as improbable, then let it be the measure of judging South Africa's achievement — one that has turned this country, so recently the racist polecat of the world, into a paradigm for a world riven by racial, ethnic and religious strife.

Allister Sparks is a veteran South African journalist and former Washington Post correspondent. He is the author of "Beyond the Miracle" (University of Chicago Press), an assessment of South Africa's 10 years of democracy.

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MAARIV

11 June 2004-06-12

An irrelevant lesson

A rebuttal to veteran South African journalist Allister Sparks recently published column, which appeared in several major international newspapers, in which he basically negated Israel’s right to exist.
Jonathan Schwartz

Several days ago a column titled “South Africa’s lesson for the Middle East” written by veteran journalist Allister Sparks appeared in several major publications.

The main point of the article was what he described as the peaceful reconciliation of two conflicting nationalisms, Afrikaner and African, over who would own South Africa. He called on Israel to learn from, and adopt South Africa’s successful solution to a supposedly similar problem, how two conflicting nationalisms can share a common land.

Afrikaner nationalism claimed ownership by right of prolonged and enlightening conquest, colonization and development. The tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church, the leading force in Afrikaner society called for Afrikaner rule in order to assure the civilizing and development of the so-called “dark continent”. The only way to ensure this was to totally disenfranchise the majority, which was apartheid’s main purpose.

The other nationalism was African nationalism, founded and headed by the ANC. The ANC, the first African movement to ignore traditional tribal identities and animosities, and call for a pan-African nationalism, was a direct response and reaction to European conquest of South Africa. It called for ownership of the country by virtue of majority self-determination. Unlike Afrikaner nationalism, it was willing to share the country on a basis of constitutional equality. As a massive majority it could afford to do so.

In this regard there is a correlation between the ANC and the PLO, since Palestinian nationalism also came into the world as a reaction to their exposure to modern European nationalism via the Jewish settlers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However unlike African nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, heavily influenced by Islam and Islamic thinking, does not and cannot equally share one political entity with Jewish nationalism, since such a move runs counter to centuries of Moslem political thought and tradition.

However this is precisely what Allister Sparks calls for. He rejects a two state solution, describing it as “an segregation apartheid solution”, and suggests the establishment of a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. He admits this would be, in effect the demise of Israel, since it is clear that within 10-15 years the Palestinians would be the majority, and thus assume political control. Israelis, he assures us, would still remain the economically dominant minority, and would maintain all the benefits and privileges of such a status, just as South Africa’s whites have done.

On the surface this argument sounds logical and appealing, especially when coming from such an eloquent pen, or more precisely, keyboard. He talks about the success of such a solution, citing the political stability of the new South Africa, which has gone, within a decade from being “the world’s prime racial polecat”, into a paradigm of tolerance, freedom and reconciliation. To clinch the argument, he compares the South African success story with the failures registered in other trouble spots where a two state solution has been attempted, such as Cyprus.

As soon as one begins to dig beneath the surface, and reaches the substrata on which Middle Eastern societies are founded, serious flaws in this line of reasoning become exposed, to the point where the entire argument becomes false rather than logical.

Firstly, a decade is too short a period of time. It is a mere ten years since liberation, too soon to know for sure whether the South African success is here to stay. I, for one believe, hope and pray that it is, but we cannot know for sure. Perhaps after a generation of proven success, it can become a recipe for solving other intractable problems elsewhere, but not yet.

Secondly, one cannot ignore the profound differences between African and Palestinian nationalisms, which far outweigh their shared heritage of having been spawned as reaction to contact with an alien nationalism. African nationalism is not rooted in any religious political tradition, since it came into being long after the Western world had, for the most part separated church from state.

This is in sharp contrast to Palestinian nationalism. Like all Arab nationalism, it is deeply rooted in Islamic political tradition and thought, which unlike parallel western thought, has not yet, with the exception of Turkey (a non Arab Moslem country), separated mosque from state.

Islamic political tradition does not recognize any non-Islamic sovereignty in what is called Dar el Islam, the heart of which is the Middle East. Moreover Islam does not recognize the idea of Jewish nationhood. It regards both Judaism and Christianity as protected religions, by virtue of being monotheistic. Jews and Christians living in Islamic lands were not required, like pagans, to convert on pain of death.

They did not however enjoy equality, but had (and still do) the status of “dhimmi”. This was (still is) a second-class status given to practitioners of other monotheistic faiths, which gave them a protected religious status in return for their acknowledging Moslem sovereignty, and agreeing to being subject to unequal taxation and other forms of civil discrimination. They were not accorded full civil rights of Moslems, which could only be attained via conversion to Islam.

Since Islam has yet to undergo its reformation, this is still the traditional and dominant Islamic political thinking and philosophy. This being the case, there is no possible way Israeli Jews could ever live in Palestine like South African whites do in South Africa.

Allister Sparks ignores this crucial difference. If it was done out of ignorance, it is a pity that such an esteemed journalist saw fit to write an article on a matter in which his knowledge is deficient. If he wrote the article armed with the relevant information than it is a different matter altogether, looking less like a lapse of good judgment than a lapse in intellectual integrity. If this is the case, one can but wonder what sentiments have driven such an illustrious journalist to peddle what could be construed as new age anti-Semitism, under a masquerade of new age geo-political correctness.
Whatever the truth of the author’s motives, it cannot be denied that the South African lesson is a good lesson, one of humanity’s few beacons of hope in a century that as witnessed a Holocaust, several genocides, two world wars and a gulag. It is not, however relevant to Israel, and any attempt to portray it as such does a gross injustice to both Israel and the new South Africa.

The writer is an ANC apartheid era political exile from SA, resident in Israel.

(2004-06-08 12:35:22.0)