Apartheid

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with the vast majority of attending delegates, on the other hand, the ANC, the main liberation
movement against South African apartheid and now governing party in South Africa,
reiterated its opposition to Israeli ‘apartheid’ and ‘racism’. 737
Similarly, in a later condemnation of Israeli apartheid, the Chairperson of South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel
Peace Laureate of 1984, does not mince his words with regard to Israeli oppression, to its
supporters and apologists and to what he believes is its inevitable fate:
I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it
reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South
Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints
and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers
prevented us from moving about. . . I have experienced Palestinians
pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. .
. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the
apartheid government on security measures? People are scared in this
US withdrawal, Charles Ogletree, co-chairman of the (Atlantic slavery) Reparations Coordinating Committee, a
US pressure group, said that Washington’s decision to turn its back on all other issues just because of its anger at
the treatment of Israel was offensive to the South Africans. ‘It offends our hosts (South Africa) who have
succeeded in carrying out a bloodless revolution with the overthrow of apartheid,’ he said. See Waddington:
African Americans Blast Bush over UN Race Meet, 2001. The final declaration made by the conference, under
continued pressure from the US (the UN’s main financial resource) and Israel, mainly through the detour over
representatives from Canada and the EU countries, stopped short of condemning Israel and merely expressed
‘concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation’ and ‘recognised the inalienable
right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state’. N.N.:
Highlights from U.N. Global Plan to Combat Racism, September 8, 2001. The total withheld US debt to the UN
at this time stood at over $2 billion, much more due to elite maneuvering than to popular sentiments in the USA.
See Arieff: Americans Want Washington to Pay Its UN Dues -Poll, September 10, 2001 (the next morning’s
terrorist attacks on the USA came as a godsend to Washington’s foreign policy and diplomacy, and to the main
US elites, in general, both with regard to the UN and the subsequently deteriorating state of international law,
and with regard to racism and profits made from it). The EU countries also served their own and US interests by
staying on at the conference in order to make sure that the Atlantic slavery system, though condemned as a crime
against humanity, was not to become subject to reparation payments, such as those now being issued to victims
of Nazi crimes against humanity (see footnote 758). English-language literature usually refers to the Atlantic
system of slavery as ‘the Atlantic Slave Trade’, thereby more or less consciously sweeping under the carpet both
the genocidal and value-creating aspects (work-aspects) of the phenomenon. With regard to the issue of slavery,
the official British comment was: ‘What is important now is to move on’, which appears to imply that the issue
would best be buried. The EU was even more adamant: ‘The declaration and the programme of action are
political, not legal documents. These documents cannot impose obligations or liability or a right to compensation
on anyone. Nor are they intended to do so.’ They thus refused to pay for or apologize for slavery in the same way
that white South African politicians, soldiers and businessmen refused to pay for or apologize for apartheid.
N.N.: States Voice Reservations to U.N. Race Pact, September 8, 2001. The western European and western
European descendant elites were the instigators and the greatest profiteers from the Atlantic slave trade and the
American slave-labor-powered industries, which lasted for 400 years and whose brutal exploitation of tens of
millions of unpaid black laborers, not to mention the violent deaths of tens of millions more, could arguably be
considered to have provided the capital accumulation and some of the crucial industrial cornerstones responsible
for their countries’ and companies’ wealth and power today. More than ever before, the North Atlantic
governments and corporations, in some instances so rich that they do not know what to do with all their money,
are able to contribute to peace and reconciliation on a worldwide scale, but it appears that they refuse to do so for
fear of short-term losses, and in some cases also perhaps out of lingering racism. See also Ankomah 1999: 16-19.
737 N.N.: World Cannot Ignore the Plight of the Palestinian People, August 24-30, 2001. See also Boyle: South
Africa Hardens Policy on Middle East Crisis, 2001, which reports on how the South African cabinet minister and
ANC member, Ronnie Kasrils, himself a Jew, officially ‘equated the Palestinian struggle for self determination
with the black fight against apartheid’. Jews in apartheid South Africa were classified as Whites, some of them
profited a great deal from apartheid, but they were kept out of government by the Afrikaners. See further Jeter:
South African Jews Polarized over Israel: Anti-Racism Leaders Equate Country’s Treatment of Palestinians to
Apartheid, 2001. A few weeks later, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, South African president Thabo
Mbeki asked the world to stop ‘sacrificing’ Palestinians, without, however, going into specific details. See N.N.:
Mbeki Urges End to Palestinian ‘Sacrifice’, November 10, 2001.