RECONCILIATION: Swapo & MK Graves, Border War, Internal Struggle and the Draft.
ON THIS day of National Reconciliation, let me be the first one to extend my apologies to all those soldiers on both sides who died defending the indefensible, who pursued violence and conflict in the expectation that a war could be waged and won. To all those SWAPO and MK fighters who died needlessly, and all the SADF men who were buried at battlegrounds like Cuito Carnivale in Angola, my condolances and apologies for not being more outspoken about War.
As an 18-something draft dodger, I had no choice. Called up to the military and PW Botha’s war machine, I either had to break the law, or kill my fellow South Africans in the townships, or my neighbours in Namibia, Angola and Botswana. I chose university as an escape. I remained silent and resisted the war through non-participation, non-aggression and non-violence. I refused to get involved in the war and when I finally graduated, I simply ducked.
Like so many fellow conscripts, I figured out ways to confuse the military police. I wrote letters ostensibly from London, claiming that although I was AWOL I would return to do my duty to my country “some other time”. Eventually the MP’s gave up on me, sent my mother a polite note telling her to inform them of my wherabouts the minute I arrived back from Europe, and left it at that.
After Mandela was released, the War ended, the system normalised, the emergency in our hearts faded away. Then a casual friend called — he had “erased” my file from a military computer, the SADF were dumping years worth of intelligence files and I was free. Today I apologised to my mother — she had initially threatened to turn me in to the authorities. Like so many South African’s she refused to lie on my behalf, and yet she believed so many of the lies that were being told by the apartheid government and in particular the state propoganda campaign waged by the Nationalists.
Today I would also like to apologise to an “old friend” Johno Handler who was one of the 15 or so “conscientious objectors” in 1987 who came out in support of the End Conscription Campaign, a vibrant campus movement ignited by Ivan Toms, South Africa’s first offical objector. While my resistance took other forms, and lead me to the Congress of South African Writers and other forums, at the end of the day, it is much harder living with the truth, that I was just plain scared of Botha’s torture chambers, Magnus Malan’s secret police and Vlok’s spies and special agents.
MAY THE WOUNDED HEAL, THE FALLEN REST IN PEACE, AND MAY PEACE PREVAIL OVER ALL HUMANITY.
16-12-2005
