Apartheid

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the equality of rights have eroded disastrously, but additionally natural environments have
been lost, and so have biodiversity as well as cultural diversity, in South Africa as well as in
Egypt. 227
South Africa’s total population increased tenfold in just one century, namely, the 20 th
century CE. Only just coming out of its demographic war, furthermore, South Africa is today
among the most violent countries. In relative terms South Africa has perhaps the highest rape
figure and the perhaps highest violent crime figure in the world. Symptomatically for
apartheid demographic war, black women are the main victims of violent crimes in South
Africa today. 228
Finally, direct attacks on Blacks by Whites in southern Africa are part of an
exceptionally strong, centuries-old European and white pattern – or even tradition – of
targeting African civilians with lethal military or paramilitary force, most of all connected
with the transatlantic slave industry, but also with the colonialist invasions of African
countries (and perhaps also, much earlier, with Roman and ancient Greek atrocities, although
these powers were mainly anti-barbarian in nature, i.e. they were also used by the ancient
southern Europeans against Northerners). For instance, although the bombing attack on
Guernica in 1937 by German aviators working for the fascists under Franco during the
Spanish civil war has become widely considered as the first major aerial bombing attack
targeting civilians, there is a little known precedent: Chechaouen in Morocco was bombed by
American mercenary pilots working for the French and Spanish colonialist invaders in 1925.
Although it was known by the attackers that there were no liberation fighters in the town,
bombs were dropped on it, killing and maiming many women and children. The Times
correspondent, Walter Harris, considered this attack the worst in the entire colonialist
campaign in Morocco, although the invaders were also using poison gas and other brutal
methods in ‘combat’ during this war. A modern-day commentator says: ‘everybody in
Chechaouen knows of Guernica’, a town of similar size with a similar number of civilian
victims in those bombings, ‘but no one in Guernica has heard of Chechaouen’. 229
Africans, Muslims, and Arabs were and, to a great extent, still are non-victims,
ignored and forgotten, not only to South African Whites, but also to Whites in general and to
many others around the world. This has created a climate of impunity, useful for some of the
227
Lewis, N. 1983: 107f. describes how the Fayyum, the lake southwest of Cairo, has halved in size since Greek
rule. Its surface is today ten meters lower than in late antiquity. Yet, the arable land around it has not increased
(the land reclaimed from the lake would have made this possible), rather it has decreased due to ‘inexorable
fiscal demands’ by the Roman authorities, which made farmers on the periphery of the arable land have to give
up against the encroaching desert. Similarly, there are huge arsenic-infested mounds lying around the city of
Johannesburg and elsewhere on the Witwatersrand from the goldmines. The poison was used to extract gold
from the mined rock and has been left there by the mine operators. Nothing has grown in or around these mounds
for up to a hundred years. The main environmental challenges, however, stem from the population growth,
perhaps steeper in apartheid societies than anywhere else.
228
Stoddard: South Africa’s Mbeki Faces Huge Crime Challenge, 2000; The Rape Crisis Center (South Africa);
Amnesty International, Report 2005, South Africa
229
Lindqvist: Nu Dog Du: Bombernas Århundrade [‘Now You Died: The Century of The Bombs’], 1999: 9, 119.
In fact, the very first bombardment of civilian targets from airplanes took place already in 1913, by Spanish
pilots on a Moroccan village (ibid: 88). The first bombardment from the air of military targets was also
perpetrated by Europeans in North Africa, the Italians in Libya in 1911 (ibid: 4). Significantly, Europeans and
other Whites had realized the horrific potential of aerial war three years before airplanes were even invented, and
they had outlawed bombardment from air balloons in the Hague Convention of 1899 (ibid: 33, only Britain voted
against this part of the Hague Convention, while the USA played a ‘mediating’ role between what was still the
world’s leading military power and the rest of the world, ibid: 58). When airplanes came around, it appears that it
was just too good a weapon for the Whites to ban, especially since non-white ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’, i.e.
Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and others, were then widely expected to become the only losers in the process. They
were not to become the only losers, but they were and still remain the main losers to a kind of warfare that
should have been and very well could have been banned from the very start. Today 95 per cent of war casualties
are civilian, whereas a century ago 95 per cent of war casualties were military (see Philipose 2003). Much of this
dramatic reversal can be put down to the introduction of airborne weapons.