A sidewalk of Soweto
Post date: Nov 15, 2008 8:29:24 PM
Winnie Mandela was accused of kidnap and murder by her bodyguards, during a time of political unrest, of a 14 year-old boy, popularly known as Stompie, who is accused of being an informer. It is a killing that for political mileage has been made into a murder. Nelson Mandela spent decades in jail because he and the African National Congress (ANC) stood for violence against apartheid. This cannot be changed. Now that Mandela is President he supports the government owned armament corporation, Armscor, which exports weapons it built to protect the apartheid state and oppress South African blacks, all over Africa and beyond, in the name of jobs and profits he said.
Armscor made everything from heavy guns to trucks to jeeps because of the international boycott. Its enemy was black Africa. The Rhino is an Armscor special - pure un-mitigating terror: an armoured vehicle designed for combat in the townships, in which South African riot-police were safe from Molotov cocktails and bullets and from which they shot tear gas and bullets through gun ports, and descended en masse with helmets, shields, body armour, and bull whips on black demonstrators. Photographs showed in the background a Rhino and in the foreground white men with whips pursuing men, women and children like dogs.
In 1976 Space Research Corporation of Barbados, SRC, under another name, acquired shares in Armscor and provided the South Africans with a deadly new weapon for their growing impressive arsenal.
SPRING 1987
It was 1987 and Oliver Tambo had come to visit Antigua and Barbuda at the invitation of the Prime Minister. The not so honourable Prime Minister of Barbados must have been afraid of what could be disclosed about his government and party’s involvement in the supply of arms to South Africa’s apartheid regime and refused Tambo’s offer to visit. Tambo disclosed that Antigua had sent money to the ANC since the 1940’s and ANC members had used Antiguan passports for decades.
“Is Zola Zemba still alive?” I asked.
“Yes.” Tambo replied. “But how do you know Zola Zemba?”
AUTUMN 1981
“I am from Barbados and I would like to co-ordinate what you have on Space Research and an arms deal to South Africa? May I come and see what you have?” I said to a voice at ae wire service on St. Jacques Street in Montreal, producers of a documentary series called “The Third Estate.”
In one of their earlier programmes they had claimed that SRC had supplied arms, which were tested in Barbados to South Africa and shipped clandestinely through Antigua. The programme was full of errors and was picked to bits. Gerald Bull, owner of SRC and Carlton, General Manager continued to insist that they knew nothing about the shipped arms even though Bull was about to be released from Allenwood minimum security prison for the breach of the UN arms embargo against South Africa.
“Bull was set up. It was Colonel Gregory and the Democrats.” Colonel Gregory was a U.S retired army, and SRC official, who was also sentenced along with Bull. According to William Lowther, author of “Arms and the Man,” Col. Gregory, this CIA and National Security Agency, NSA, officer destroyed all documents incriminating the CIA. Democrats then pressurised Bull financially to a point of bankruptcy in order to force him to make a deal. They promised that if he pleaded guilty and accepted single responsibility; he would be fined and not sent to jail. Bull, out of mounting financially difficulties, agreed, pleaded guilty and a judge sentenced him to a year. He was confined in, Allenwood, a jail with no walls and many generous facilities for the rich and famous and the high and the mighty.
I believed, the original meeting for the supply had been organised in 1975 by a close family member to a minister in the Belgium government and a further meeting took place at a dinner party at the home with a circular driveway in the outskirts of Brussels, of a family member of the minister. A company called Poudreries Reunies de Belique (PRB), which represented the combined gun powder manufacturers’ association of Belguim, was to be used and the Israelis at dinner, talked about the order.
“Are you an employee of Space Research?”
“No, I just want to co-ordinate what you have here with what I have from at home.”
“Are you a family member?”
“No, I just want to see what you have to compare with what I have.”
On such hesitancy and vagueness we made an appointment for the next morning. I dressed with the thought to impress but just enough to blend in - a pair of large ribbed corduroy brown pants, Cartier belt, beige cashmere sweater and cardigan, Rolex watch and a pair of burgundy Charles Jourdan boots to match the belt. In the foyer at an entrance I signed in, was directed upstairs, identified myself, was chirpy and was given a pile of files and placed at the messenger’s desk.
“May I make some notes?” I asked after half and hour.
“Certainly.”
I spent five hours. They went to lunch and realised by that time that I must know something.
“Our editor is in New York and he wants to speak with you.” A man at A desk handed me a telephone.
“Do you think Bull supplied arms to South Africa?” He asked after he introduced himself.
“Yes.”
“Do you think Bull got his just rewards?”
“No.”
“Do you think justice was done?”
“No.”
“I want to talk with you. I will fly in tonight. Let us meet tomorrow at ten.”
I made an appointment, which I had no intention to keep. Downstairs, I signed out and thought that I should have used a fictitious name. All the information was there but the Third Estate had not been able to piece it together. Zola Zemba was African National Congress (ANC) guerrilla fighter, who brought news from Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front in Rhodesia to Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau. He said that Bull’s guns were on South African soil.
The proof was in the financial transfers and companies.
Re-entry patterns, firepower and kill capacity: my education in the arms business started at twenty-four years old - Gary two-years-old - when I met Bull. The business and its secrets took us into the true world and its real politics - arms dealers, Israelis, Generals and military experts, politicians and prime ministers, and companies. Bull designed a shell for Israel, which they used on the Golan Heights to bombard miles away. The men in the machine shop in Barbados neatly packed thousands of half-inch darts into a prototype artillery shell to test them for the American army in Vietnam. These shells were exploded with devastating effect in the fields and jungles. Carlton, the General Manger of Bull’s project in Barbados who was also my live-in lover kept one of the darts stuck in the tail of a small wooden mouse on his desk.
I left the building with a crescendo of music in my head, walked along St. Jacques Street, looked behind and to the side and was scared out of my mind. I came to the brand new subway and kept close to the side of the building for safety. I expected a knife in my side or a bullet in my back at any moment for I knew that I knew something that very few people knew. Guns roared and whirred through my head and I saw the size of craters they left in the ground and the human devastation. …