Apartheid

II. A System of Gross Human Rights Violations
Introduction: Apartheid as State of War and Crime against Humanity
What Life has taught me, I would like to share with those who want to learn
That until the philosophy which holds one race superior
And another inferior
Is finally and permanently
Discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war
That until there are no longer first and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
There’s war
That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race
There’s war
That until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, and the rule of
international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
Now, everywhere is war… 170
103
Escaping International Law and Dividing the Resistance
The creation of apartheid systems in South Africa, Egypt, and Israel each constitute
the creation of a ‘State of War’ in the English political philosopher John Locke’s sense:
‘Force, or a declared design of force upon the Person of another, where there is no common
superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the State of War.’ 171
The apartheid states and the elites that upheld them maintained rule for decades (in the
first two cases: for centuries), through the use of engineered racial and ethnic inequalities,
through imposed tension and violence. The indigenous people, the majority of the citizens,
had no superior authority to turn to for any kind of sustained protection or relief.
In retrospect, the role of the international community in bringing about peace in South
Africa and Israel must be said to have been a (so far) minor, though not entirely negligible
one. On the whole, occasional efforts from within the existing superior, though far from
necessarily legitimate authorities, the UN, the USA, the European intergovernmental
organizations, the British Empire, the five permanent UN Security Council powers and others,
have failed rather dismally with bringing peace to apartheid conflicts. In particular, none of
these have succeeded in unequivocally recognizing apartheid as a state of war for which the
invading, privileged ethnic minority must take primary responsibility. Indeed, their role as
‘superior’ authorities has only been made possible through ethnicist measures of their own,
including genocide, colonialism, and collusion with apartheid.
The only partial exception is the global anti-apartheid community, in particular the
civil society initiatives, the majority of developing countries’, the UN General Assembly’s
170 Extracted from a speech on apartheid South Africa by Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, held in California on
February 28, 1968. It was slightly modified by Marley: ‘War’, 1976.
171 Locke: The Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1986 (1690): 3.19. A more recent, corresponding analysis
of my most current apartheid example starts from the other end of the same argument: “Any ‘peace’ which
would be accepted today on the terms put forward by the Israeli government and the United States would not be
peace, nor would it be a solution to the causes and structures of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Instead it would
be a continuation of war by other means.” (Brand-Jacobsen: Israel-Palestine: The Need for a Just Peace, 2000).
Colonialism may similarly be seen as a state of continuous war initiated by the colonialists. See, for instance,
Hardt & Negri 2000: 129. However, the International Criminal Court, for one, has no reference to colonialism
(not yet, in any event) among its principles of severe injustice, among which, however, both genocide and
apartheid can be found.