South Africa Chris Merritt President F W de Klerk is a man with an international media image as a moderate democrat. However, while the world has reacted with the lifting of boycotts and sanctions, violence aimed at disorganization of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and their trade union ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has reached such proportions that it has been described as a pre-emptive coup. Since February 1990 South Africa has experienced an apparent freedom of expression unknown since the 1950s. In the initial euphoria the situation was accepted by many as a genuine change of heart on the part of the National Party government. It has since become clear that this was a skilful public relations job. There is plenty of evidence that the authorities are still employing methods developed during the emergency years to suppress opposition. On assuming office, President de Klerk abolished the National Security Management System (NSMS), a security force shadow government which had underpinned the State of Emergency. The Harms Commission set up to investigate the covert military action arm of the NSMS, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) revealed a programme of arson, intimidation, murder and sabotage, often using criminals, amounting to a covert war against anti-apartheid organizations in terms of Low Intensity Conflict theory. This was develo ped by the US army as a method of fighting wars abroad where political sensitivity ruled out the use of large numbers of American ground troops. In Southern Africa this method of warfare has been used so often against the surrounding states as to make it instinctive for the South African army to turn it upon its own population once threatened at home. The NSMS in fact had merely been replaced by the National Coordinating Mechanism (NCM), a new, almost informal, system with a simplified chain of command avoiding the need for a large bureaucracy. The NCM is the mechanism linking the top levels of governm ent to what Nico Basson, an ex-Military Intelligence officer, calls a Third Force. The nature of this army, which can be seen as the son of the CCB, is of a diverse and seemingly out of control array of =D4bad apples=D5 within the security services, ex-state security personnel, extrem= e right wingers, Inkatha, criminal gangs and mercenaries. These diverse elements allow the State to distance itself from actions carried out by groups which the State refuses to disarm. The new flexible structure by its nature al lows the State to deny responsibility for actions carried out by these groups. Thus the occasional operation directly controlled by the NCM becomes lost amongst the arbitrary violence committed by agents implicitly linked to the State let lose on the civilian population. During 1991, hit squads were responsible for 60 deaths and 45 people injured; vigilantes for 2011 killed and 2604 injured; and right wingers for 21 deaths and 178 injured (figures supplied by the Human Rights Comm-ission). Politics can be manipulat-ed and enemies undermined behind a facade of =D4democracy=D5 which replaced the more overt apparatus of the State of Emergency. The state is weakening the ANC without being directly connected with the agents who are fighting the war on its behalf. The atmosphere of officially sanctioned lawlessness created by the 1985-90 Emergency has become an integral part of the military's strategy in the new South Africa. Naturally the agents the state uses in its dirty war are also beneficiaries of the situation in their own right. Inkatha and the KwaZulu government particularly so. Inkatha Inkatha has an ideology based on ethnicity, reverence of and subservience to leaders, and collaboration with the apartheid regime, although it has shrewdly held out against 'independent' status for KwaZulu. It has required oaths of loyalty from public ser vants, employed a rhetoric of threatened violence, and practised human rights abuses orchestrated by highly placed officials. Its political objective is regional hegemony and recognition in the national negotiation process. It is now clear that Inkatha has had a relationship with Military Intelligence since the mid-1970s. During the Pietermaritzburg civil war of March-April 1990 Inkatha was aided by acts of commission and omission: large, well-armed bodies of men thousands strong could hardly have operated without security force compliance. In the South Coast region of Natal around Port Shepstone the security forces in collusion with Inkatha have acted as if the ANC were still banned, and routinely raided meetings or placed restrictions upon them. When the ANC was launched in Northern Natal in February 1991 only the chairperson and secretary were named: this is the slowest growing region in the country, venues are hard to obtain, and activity is almost clandestine. In mid 1992 the ANC in the Bulwer area of the Natal Midlands was obstructed b y persistent denial of township venues. Inkatha is being openly described as a potential South African Renamo (the Rhodesian organised terror group used to destablise Mozam-bique). Apart from its military trained operatives, it has a security police organization (commanded by Jac Buchner, who, when he headed the security police in Pietermaritzburg during the emergency, was reputed to be one of the government's experts on the ANC) and the support of the KwaZulu Police, virtually a military wing of Inkatha. The latter's potential for banditry res ts on its ethnocentrism, devotion to a strong leader, lack of internal democracy, absence of clear ideology and an increasingly marginal national role. The 'Third Force' Nico Basson and other commentators placed Military Intelligence at the centre of township violence, either through its own operatives or via conservative black groups funded, trained and directed by shadowy official agencies such as Creed. Human rights mo nitors have noted a pattern of increased violence whenever a significant point is reached in the negotiations process. Inside information such as that from Basson and Mbongeni Khumalo, former leader of the Inkatha Youth Brigade, as well as evidence on the ground, show that the State of Emergency continues in a new form. The methods of the 'Third Force' vary from random slaughter on trains, to targeted assassination. Chief Mhlabunzima Maphumulo, leader of the ANC-aligned Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), and a man who had showed admirable even- handedness to people of different political persuasions in the Table Mountain area, was assassinated in the middle of Pietermaritzburg on the 25th February 1991. A tape recording of the confession of the chief's killer, implicating the security forces, wa s confiscated by police from The Natal Witness, Pieter-maritzburg's daily newspaper. In March 1992 an inquest court found that Maphumulo was killed by 'persons unknown', a throwback to standard verdicts passed down by magistrates in the days of hardline a partheid. By this time (8th February) Skhumbuzo Mbatha Ngwenya, an Imbali ANC official and a pacifist, had been gunned down outside a Pietermaritzburg restaurant. On the 27th October he was followed by Reggie Hadebe, ANC Natal Midlands deputy chairperson assassinated as he was driving from Ixopo to Richmond after peace talks. There is a consistent pattern: elimination of influential anti-apartheid figures (including some from Inkatha) heavily involved in the peace process. The police and security forces, ruthless in tracking down cadres of the liberation movement in the 1980s, have proved suspiciously inept at basic detective work in these cases. The George Goch hostel near Johannesburg was named as Inkatha's operational base on the Reef, a depot for arms channelled by the SADF from Mozambique. Those present at assaults on vigils and trains noted that attackers spoke with Natal accents. When thirt een people died at a vigil at Alexandra (Johannesburg) on the 27th March 1991, amaSinyoras (members of a criminal gang) from Durban were blamed. It is well known that they have close links with the military and immunity from the police: one member was see n wearing a SADF uniform. Disinformation. A state agency called COMOPS (Combined Operations) was set up to channel funding to phantom groups and run disinformation projects. Some of its suspected activities are the boosting of Inkatha's image in the same way as the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA) had been assisted in Namibia; creation of bantustan parties (such as Oupa Gqozo's African Democratic Movement in Ciskei); encouragement of tribalism; and the launch of a 'moderate', multiparty front named the Christian Democratic Alliance (CDA). The SA Special Forces. This is made up of four SADF reconnaissance units, 32 (Buffalo) battalion, 44 parachute battalion, Military Intelligence, the Police 'Askari' unit (of turned Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters), and the ex-CCB. They have absorbed Koevoet, the most vicious of the destabilizing units in Namibia; use mercenaries, including some forcibly conscripted after abduction from Mozambique; and have strong ex-Rhodesian and Renamo connections. A defector from 5 Recce, Felix Ndimene, described how his unit was involved in one o f the Johannesburg train massacres. Other Agents There is also overlap with the ubiquitous and trigger happy private security industry which is teeming with ex-Rhodesians of special forces origins. Recent evidence shows that KwaZulu paramilitary forces numbering about 200 men were trained by Military In telligence in the Caprivi Strip, and also in Israel during 1986, before being based at Mkuze in Northern Zululand. Vigilantes in the Eastern Cape calling themselves Ama-Afrika were similarly trained. With their deep involvement in the ivory trade and gun running, such groups are specially active in the Eastern Transvaal and Northern Natal in collaboration with Renamo. Africa Confidential has pointed out that these units, characterised by lack of accou ntability, immunity from prosecution, and increasingly embittered by the trend of national political events, could get out of control. Renamo, after all, is a classic example of a Rhodesian fashioned pseudo-terrorist operation which ran amok. The Mozambic an government found great difficulty negotiating with it, simply because it is a bandit organization with no discernible political objectives. Overview At present extra-legal methods of political control are gaining the ascendancy. Other forms nevertheless remain extremely powerful. Apartheid legislation, educational inequalities, security legislation, publications control, official secrecy, limitations on journalists, and defamation law are significant restraints. The 'independent' bantustans have their own security and emergency legislation which is wielded with gusto, as seen in spectacular fashion in Ciskei and Bophuthatswana. The censorship of silence, traditional in South Africa, is implicit in the ambience of the 'new' South Africa as recognised by the writer Breyten Breytenbach: "...authority [is] now attempting to stifle the needed debate on public ethics by pretending tha t apartheid was not, and is not, the crime against humanity as experienced by the majority of South Africans". In Hugo Young's celebrated phrase, President de Klerk and his supporters "... have seen the light, not of righteousness but of survival". The ri ght media images are thus crucial to them. So too, apparently, is protection from prosecution for human rights crimes, judging from the speed and ruthlessness with which a Further Indemnity Bill was forced through the legislative system in October 1992 ag ainst furious opposition from all parties to the left of the Nationalists. It is all too probable that indemnity is required for current and past members of de Klerk's government. When security legislation was amended in 1991, the Democratic Party put forward ludicrous claims that South Africa had embraced the rule of law and individual freedom, joining the ranks of free nations. This sort of misrepresentation has earned South Afri ca a totally unjustified liberal image, reinforced by the result of the referendum which has virtually deified De Klerk. The latter and his supporters in the business community and across the centre-right political spectrum have adopted a new orthodoxy in the 'new' South Africa. This argues that apartheid is dead, South Africans must forget the past and pull together towards a glorious new future in which private enterprise will swiftly iron out the inequities in society. Those who challenge this amoral a nd ahistoric approach are increasingly marginalised. The NCM mechanism creates outrages to provoke splits in the ANC which cannot be traced back to the state. The Chris Hani assassination was the perfect example of this, it greatly weakened the ANC=D5s authority in the townships and was blamed on the far Righ t. The outside world receives this image of =D4dark forces=D5 creating chaos and a= n image of the increasingly acceptable, white, South African state. These are the unedifying tactics used by the National Party as it strives for renewed power within a conserv ative coalition. Behind a facade of 'normality' a covert war is being waged against the ANC. Its leaders can behave like national politicians at negotiations, but at grassroots level destabilisation is having a serious effect on the movement's ability to organise as a political party, attract members after thirty years as a banned organization, and win an election. Christopher Merrett works at the University of Natal and has published on a wide range of human rights issues; he was an activist with the local Detainees Support Committee during the State of Emergency. He is presently writing a book on the history of ce nsorship in South Africa.