Apartheid

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against apartheid also commits occasional crimes against humanity, e.g. by targeting innocent
civilians, such as children. But the crimes against humanity cannot all simply be put on an
equal footing. There are more kinds of crimes and much larger numbers of victims in the
crimes perpetrated by the initiators and upholders of apartheid. Thus the violent crimes of
apartheid are mainly consequences of the initial invasion. That invasion is the original
provocation. The same goes for the third kind of apartheid violence: demographic warfare,
which mainly consists of ‘femicide’, killings of women because they are women. But its
background is in each case a racist immigration and ethnic cleansing policy, pursued and
practiced by the ethnic apartheid elites and their allies. As we shall see: in Graeco-Roman
Egypt there was female genital mutilation; in South Africa there are still witch-burnings
today, and in Palestine ‘honor’ killings. Although femicide in apartheid societies is carried out
mainly by indigenous perpetrators, responsibility should, according to my analysis, be
shouldered by the individual perpetrators, the indigenous society and its institutions (e.g. the
Palestinian National Authority, the African National Congress, the ancient tribal or clan
authorities) and, crucially, also by the apartheid society’s ethnic elite, without whose existence
femicide might not exist either, certainly not to the same extent. By having initiated a
demographic race, ethnicist immigration laws and practices, as well as ethnicist physical and
structural violence amounting to ethnic cleansing, can only be legally countered with a high
birth rate by the indigenous people. Palestinian and black South African birth rates are
therefore among the highest in the world. And indigenous women who do not marry early to
produce more offspring are often directly punished, sometimes murdered, for not doing so.
The following eight categories are also violent, though in a less direct manner. They are
sometimes referred to as ‘structural violence’.
2. Repopulation: Apartheid is also a continuation of depopulation, i.e. violence, including
forced expulsion, by other means, in particular by immigration policies and practices, birth
control measures and techniques, marriage laws, and marriage practices. It thus establishes a
sizeable, privileged ethnic minority, which constitutes a civil society separated from the
indigenous population, within the invaded territories. If this minority should develop into a
majority, as in the USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’
obviously become more apt labels than ‘apartheid’. Yet, some degree of ethnic cleansing is
obviously necessary in apartheid. Statistically, as long as apartheid conditions exist, the
oppressed majority will exhibit a faster natural population growth, for a variety of compelling
reasons. This growth, however, is not in the interest of the oppressive minority in an apartheid
society. If it finds itself shrinking in relation to the ethnic majority, it finds and perceives itself
fighting a losing battle in the demographic war, and will therefore often turn to genocide or to
more or less forced expulsions of large groups of indigenous people. My main three examples
of apartheid also manifest the formation of a third ethnic group, comprising mixed-race
descendants of the two main ethnic groups (though not (yet) so in Israel), as well as imported
foreigners from third countries. This group of people, imported to do exploitable work, is
given rights and privileges that sometimes extend further than those of the indigenous but are
always a great deal more restricted than those of the invading ethnic elite and its supposedly
‘pure-blooded’ descendants.
3. Citizenship: This is a means to exclude all or portions of the indigenous population and
any actual or potential allies of theirs from all kinds of rights and benefits. Nowhere, in fact, is
citizenship such an efficient tool of oppression as it is in apartheid states. Many or most of the
indigenous are often denied citizenship in their own country by the apartheid state authorities,
which are, somewhat ironically and irrationally, run and staffed by the more recent arrivals to
the country. In practice, however, there are always exceptions, a few members of the
oppressed majority who do obtain citizenship, though with fewer rights and privileges than
those of the citizens from the oppressive minority. It is the power to bestow or withhold
citizenship which makes the independence of the apartheid state a hallmark of apartheid itself.