Apartheid

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heavily Christian attitude towards the concepts of justice, sin, and forgiveness permeating the
TRC, and possibly even due to a hint of structural pro-White bias as a result of white military
strength in South Africa during the negotiations leading up to the creation of democracy and
the TRC, and as a result of the centuries-old, brutally won, and still well-entrenched white
power throughout the world.
Apartheid cannot be excused – although some of its crimes may thus be forgiven on an
individual basis – because apartheid is and remains a crime against humanity. Resistance
against it, even armed resistance, however, is not. The only exception is when people who can
be considered unequivocally as civilians – such as children and others who cannot be held
responsible for apartheid – are targeted with deadly force by those resisting apartheid. 188 In
such cases of apartheid violence, the main responsibility, the primary liability, can no longer
rest with the perpetrators of apartheid, i.e. with the oppressive ethnic minority elites, although
they must, in my opinion, still carry some of the legal responsibility, even for such cases.
There is not just a grey, amorphous mass of crimes against humanity, each as bad as
the next. We tend to forget this, perhaps mainly because the powerful authors of crimes
against humanity often cover their tracks, and even if they are caught they tend to find or
conjure up ‘fall guys’, people who take the blame for them. The crimes, even the crimes
against humanity, committed to resist apartheid were so far never ultimately provocative, but,
on the contrary, provoked crimes. Nor were they, as we shall now see, ever of the magnitude
of the crime of apartheid itself in terms of casualties and destruction wrought, and they are
never likely to be so, due both to the military inferiority of the oppressed majority and to the
exceptional criminal ruthlessness needed to set up and perpetuate an apartheid system. The
perpetrators of apartheid are so far responsible for the vast majority of killings as long as
apartheid lasts, especially for atrocities such as the slaughter of innocent civilians, as well as
for the vast majority of cases of other kinds of violence.
A third kind of physical apartheid violence is more complicated with regard to
responsibility. I am referring to the violent effects of apartheid elite ‘divide and rule’ policies
as well as the indigenous responsibilities behind this kind of violence. The perhaps least
known of these kinds of violence is what I will refer to as the ‘demographic war’, a term often
used to label an aspect of the violence in Israel and Palestine that is not readily subsumable
under the category of physical violence between Israelis and Palestinians but is nevertheless
intimately related to the conflict. The main form of physical violence in my concept of
demographic war is ‘femicide’, a term coined to call attention to the many instances in which
women and girls are killed because they are women and girls. Femicide is a category of
systematic crime that is sometimes carried out by women, but it is a patriarchal phenomenon:
it is always in the interest, or in the perceived interest, of male elites, and it is carried out for
that reason. 189
188 As can be seen throughout this section this happened, or most probably happened, in all apartheid societies.
Members of the oppressive minority in an ethnicist state who are neither unequivocally civilians nor noncivilians,
but who are not directly threatening to kill members of the oppressed majority, can in my opinion not
be legitimate targets either. To kill them is not a crime against humanity, such as the murder of children, but it is
a crime. It is murder, or at least manslaughter, albeit with a few additional extenuating circumstances, especially
if the victims have the vote (as both South African White and Israeli Jewish adults did and do), if the victims are
armed, if they live on stolen land whose rightful owners have been murdered or chased away, and/or if they are
otherwise personally reaping the benefits of apartheid. Particularly if the rightful owners were first chased away
by the very same persons later killed, then killing them must certainly be considered as something less serious
than murder in the first degree. Both Palestinian and South African freedom fighters have made themselves
guilty of both kinds of transgressions. See, for instance, Al-Mughrabi: Amnesty Condemns Palestinian Attacks
on Israelis, 2002; N.N.: Israel and the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian Authority: Without Distinction -
Attacks on Civilians by Palestinian Armed Groups, July 11, 2002; Ackerman, G.: Amnesty Criticises Israel,
Palestinian Militants, 2003. See further, Part III, Chapters 2-5, below, and footnote 16, above.
189 Abu-Lughod: The Demographic War for Palestine, 1986; Bishara, M.: Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid:
Occupation, Terrorism and the Future, 2 2002 (2001): 104-106 (chapter on ‘Israel’s Demographic War’);
Löwstedt: The Main Victims in the Israeli-Palestinian Demographic War Are Palestinian Women, 2005; Radford