Apartheid

3. Citizenship
175
This is where the sovereign, independent political entity as the typical state of
apartheid comes into the picture, and where the uniqueness of apartheid becomes apparent.
The independent state will make citizenship a very important and malleable bureaucratic tool
in the hands of the political and military apartheid elites. I am not denying that citizenship can
be an efficient repressive and ethnicist tool for self-rule and colonialist governments as well. It
is only more cumbersome and less flexible as a strategic resource in a colonialist setting,
where it is used against a majority, though more flexible in the self-rule setting, where it can
only be used, however, against a minority.
The institution of citizenship is therefore a more useful instrument of oppression in
apartheid states than anywhere else. However, the condition of political independence is a
tricky one for the definition of apartheid. Although independence is an all-or-nothing affair in
the formal sense, it is not so in practice. The Bantustans in South Africa and the Neo-
Bantustans in Palestine are perfect examples of a formal independence, which is or can be
useless or worse to its citizens in practice. Conversely, colonies such as those of the
Netherlands and of Britain in South Africa and elsewhere were not formally independent, yet
in many ways independent in practice.
It is a well-known paradox of the present stage of general political development that
the power of the state is not centered in its middle, but on its borders and peripheries,
including immigration offices, airports, embassies and consulates. That is where states have
total discretion with granting and revoking citizenship, residency and work permits, visas and
asylum. None of these are officially considered human rights anywhere in today’s world, and
neither is that minimum of political self-determination, voting, nor the other rights and
privileges that sometimes come with citizenship, e.g. health care, pensions, and the many
other kinds of social security. In our currently globalizing society, in which migration
increases steadily, democracy is becoming a casualty, as fewer and fewer residents (including
law-abiding tax-payers) get to decide which representatives will rule them directly and
administer their tax money.
The political crimes of Israel against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories pale in relative significance, relative not only to the violent, economic, etc., crimes
against the occupied people, but also to the fact that these political and inhuman injustices are
currently becoming commonplace elsewhere, or rather, everywhere. 354 Nevertheless, they are
clearly crimes from a moral point of view, as well as under international conventions, for
instance by violating Articles 1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 21 and 28 of the United Nations’ Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. The specific crime against humanity embodied in the peculiar
institution of apartheid citizenship is the veritably perverse situation that the most indigenous
people to the country are the most alien people to the state that rules or controls it.
Interestingly, all three apartheid societies under investigation incorporated a few of the
indigenous among the citizens, far from enough, of course, to enable them to remain a
majority. The books were respectedly cooked to make it appear institutionally as if the
invading minority were instead a majority. This was not to mean equality of rights for the
indigenous groups who did enjoy citizenship. On the contrary, they still suffered
discrimination, though not as much as the vast majority of the indigenous who were denied
citizenship altogether. This was and is another means of successfully dividing resistance: to
make the indigenous non-citizens envy their citizen brethren, and perhaps even to treat them
as collaborators or traitors. It is also an elite way of telling the critics of apartheid that
ethnicism does not exist, since (under the breath: some) privileges are extended to (some of)
the indigenous. But the indigenous citizens and the indigenous non-citizens also suffer in
partly different ways. In particular, the indigenous citizens are under more pressure with
354 See, for example, Sassen 1998: 81ff; Hardt & Negri 2000: 109ff