Kwame M.A. Somburu: 'Namibian peace accords violate principle of self-determination'

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South African troops on one of their many search-and-destroy operations in Namibia. SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1989 Kwame M.A. Somburu, a leading activist in the struggle for Black rights and a staffwriter for Socialist Action newspaper, was invited by the United Nation's Decolonization Committee to address the 44th session of the U.N.'s General Assembly on the issues of Namibia and New Caledonia.

Scheduling changes, which may have resulted from the political content of Somburu's speech, prevented him from addressing the General Assembly. Instead, Somburu was constricted to present perfunctory remarks to an Oct. 12 meeting of the U.N.'s Decolonization Committee on the topic of New Caledonia.

Because of the importance of the Nov. 6 elections in Namibia-and given the great controversy over the recent "peace" accords in that country we are reprinting major excerpts from the speech Somburu had prepared but was unable to present. Copies of Somburu's prepared speech were distributed to many of the U.N. delegates.

United Nations Resolution 435 proclaimed 11 years ago that the people of Namibia were to be freed from bondage. After 63 years under the lash of the capitalist/apartheid state of South Africa, the United Nations decreed that the pain, humiliation, and pillage inflicted by the colonial rulers was to end.

But slavemasters, as we know—including the modern wage-slavers who hold sway in the world today under the banner of freeenterprise capitalism-are a peculiar lot. Their pearly teeth, attached to the rapacious laws of profit and greed, are not to be separated from their victim-voluntarily that is— and certainly not by passive declarations of principle devoid of the power of implementation.

Where do we stand today 11 years after adoption of U.N. Resolution 435?

Brought to bargaining table The slavemasters have been brought to the world's bargaining table. Apartheid's deaf ear, we are told, has tuned in to the modern freedom song. Pretoria has finally promised adherence to 435. Under the terms of the new accords, "free elections" are to take place on Nov. 6, 1989.

First of all, why this shift?

Cuito Cuanavale. This is the name of a little-known place in southern Angola where in 1988 South Africa's armed forces, the most powerful on the African continent, were handed a mighty defeat at the hands of the combined forces of SWAPO, the Angolan army, and the internationalist fighters of revolutionary Cuba.

Of course, South African troops were not supposed to be in sovereign Angola, just as the United States and South Africa are not supposed to provide the terrorist Jonas Savimbi with weapons of war. But they were defeated in combat. The all-powerful white army was defeated by those it had harried for a decade, by those it has denied the right to self-determination.

Cuito Cuanavale registered an important victory for Black South Africa, but not a decisive victory. The slavemasters were merely made to realize that they were not invincible, that their military might could not endure forever.

But the slavemasters are not unclever in their ways, especially when advised, or should I say, compelled, by their superiors to pursue a less dangerous course. "What is the robbing of a bank, to the founding of a bank?" asked the revolutionary playwright Bertold Brecht in his "Beggar's Opera."

"Can we not deny yet another victory to the oppressed by changing the rules of the game?" the slavemasters ask.

The United States and the Soviet Union agree. They are negotiating to achieve a kinder and gentler South Africa-a South Africa which sheds the onerous image of apartheid and yet maintains its imperial relations with its neighbors and at the same time its wealth and power in the hands of the few. Their plan for Namibia is little different.

Regional agreements to mute the class and national liberation struggles are quite the thing these days. Self-determination is a negotiable item, not as we previously thought, an inalienable right.

Let us have free elections on November 6, 1989, say the new accords. Let the Namibian refugees return to participate. Let them choose a constituent assembly and if SWAPO wins—not by a simple majority like everywhere in the world—but by two-thirds-they can form a government and write their nation's constitution.

The world watches Namibia closely. What does it see?

The real meaning of the accords The accords say that the paramilitary units must be dissolved, that the terrorist armed thugs of Koevoet must be eliminated.

But South Africa's appointed Administrator gently urged the terrorists back to their barracks where they were reclad and integrated into the regular oppressor force, which will remain to help with the "fair elections."

The overlord government which drafted the Voter Registration Act remembered to include its own among those eligible to vote. Today they are mobilizing to transport some 150,000 racist whites to Namibia to help ensure the success of their neocolonial solution.

Under the aegis of the "mixed economy," the nation's riches are to remain in unchanged hands. The diamond mines, Namibia's chief resource, will remain the property of the multinational cartels.

The fiction of an independent economy is further undermined by South Africa's declaration that Namibia's main and only deep-water port at Walvis Bay will not be considered part of the nation-to-be. And of course, Namibians resident in this area have been denied the right to register to vote.

The negotiated timetable provided that all but 8000 of South Africa's 100,000 regular armed forces were to be withdrawn by June. Yet 100,000 remain. Today one of every 14 Namibians is armed by the oppressor and organized into one of its repressive forces designed to convince everyone that the exercise of the right to vote may be answered with immediate punishment, if not death.

All political prisoners were to be released and the refugees allowed to return home. The political prisoners remain incarcerated and the return of the refugees has been postponed indefinitely.

The proinised 7500 U.N. troops has been reduced with the approval of the Security Council to less than 5000—mostly unarmed men, powerless to resist the organized intimidation and violence which is an integral part of South Africa's "freedom" plan.

The United Nations was not so timid when it sent in tens of thousands of so-called peacekeepers to fight on the wrong side of the freedom struggle in the Congo and Korea.

Jonas Savimbi's Namibian UNITA terrorists are today enlisted in the drive to add to the vote totals of the apartheid political creation, the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance.

But when SWAPO soldiers returned to their country to participate in the elections, they were slaughtered in a war that had supposedly ended, a war that has already cost the lives of 11,000 Namibians and created 100,000 refugees.

And the U.S.S.R., which cast its Security Council vote to reduce the number of observers in the United Nations Transitional Assistance Group, scolded SWAPO for its error of returning home unannounced, thereby provoking the colonial occupier to retaliate!

Behind the backs of the people At Yalta and Potsdam, secret agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union were concluded at the close of World War II. These were agreements behind the backs of the world's people to maintain the power and prerogatives of imperialism, on the one hand, and of Stalin's murderous bureaucracy, on the other.

Similar agreements-ostensibly on a "regional scale" but in fact covering the globe from Angola, South Africa, and Namibia to Afghanistan, and from Kampuchea, Central America, to Eastern Europe-are under negotiation today. Their aim? To preserve the power and privilege of the few against the many.

And the liberation struggle? The people's victories are to be sacrificed as pawns in the international game of peaceful coexistence.

Still, the principle of self-determination will in the end prevail, not because it is written into the text of ignored doctrine, but because it inspires the majority everywhere, and the majority, as the history of the world tells us, will-despite every setbackprevail and write its own chapter in humanity's glorious future.

Capitalism and Stalinism

For now I close with these simple words. The South Africans must leave Namibia today. They have no recognized right, aside from the rejected right of naked power, to negotiate any aspect of the future of the Namibian people.

To those who have come to believe that capitalism is the way of the future, I will observe that without the support and encouragement of the United States, the world's leading representative of military intervention against oppressed people, the apartheid/capitalist state of South Africa would have been defeated long ago.

The maximization of profit is the driving force of capitalism, a predatory social system based on a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

The capitalist balance sheet records the enslavement of the African continent for 100 years or more. It records the history of colonialism itself.

To those who have been taught that the Joseph Ryan/Socialist Action Kwame M. A. Somburu Soviet Union is a socialist state as opposed to a Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship, I would respond as follows.

Socialism is workers' democracy.. It is government based on the direct rule of the workers and peasants themselves-rule through their own institutions in their own name. Socialism and democracy are inseparable.

Socialism has nothing in common with privilege, labor camps, corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, national oppression, sexism, peaceful coexistence, or collaboration with the class enemy. By these standards, President Mikhail Gorbachev has changed nothing. Neither has Deng's China, where Stalin's heirs resorted to murderous violence when workers' democracy and student protest challenged bureaucratic rule.

The scientific socialist ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky have long inspired the oppressed with the vision of a future free from all forms of oppression and exploitation.

Struggle's true allies

The struggle of the people of Namibia for self-determination is not isolated from the worldwide struggles of billions of people who are in varying kinds of conflicts with many of the governments represented here today.

The true allies of the oppressed cannot and will not be found among the governments committed to capitalist or Stalinist rule. To the contrary, they will be found among all those committed to struggle against these evils.

They will be found among the Black and Latino masses and among the women in the United States struggling for elementary democratic rights.

They will be found among the Palestinian victims of Zionist Gestapo-like terrorism. Is there a difference between Israeli apartheid and its South African ally's version of oppression!

Today, U.S. Marines and other armed agencies of the U.S. ruling class, with the complicity of its allies in South Africa, operate with impunity, not on three continents, but worldwide. They are the enemies of humankind. There will be no liberation without the destruction of their predatory social system and its replacement by world socialism.

This task is the sole property of the workers and peasants the world over.