Author and anti-corruption activist Hennie van Vuuren’s latest 610-page book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profits, has blown open the lid on some of the apartheid government’s economic crimes.
Speaking to the Saturday Dispatch this week, Van Vuuren said the work was an exposé which “navigated South Africa’s long historic shadow of state capture”.
Most of the sanctions-busting companies who fed the apartheid regime with weapons are still doing business with the new democratic regime.
He said he had had to endure numerous “security concerns” during the five years it took to research the tome.
That is how long it took him and a team of dedicated researchers to trawl through two-million pages of secret evidence to finally shed light on a covert global network crossing 50 countries which was initially set up to bypass and counter sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Their task was made difficult by the “huge volumes of documents” which were pulped and shredded in the dying days of apartheid.
In his book, Van Vuuren says the country’s National Intelligence Agency alone destroyed 44 tons of documents that could have shed more light on the apartheid network’s dark deals in guns and money.
“With this, the written record of countless acts of individual culpability were destroyed,” he wrote.
Van Vuuren is a director of Open Secrets, a non-profit organisation working on private sector accountability for economic crime and related human rights violations.
He is a past fellow of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and director at the Institute for Security Studies. He is also active in the Right2Know campaign.
His latest book, among many other revelations, exposes how the apartheid government blew R501-billion between 1974 and 1994 on weapons and intelligence in a bid to counter the international sanctions imposed upon South Africa.
Van Vuuren says they discovered that the network spawned to defend apartheid worked like a machine.
Explosive findings in his book include:
l Banks were at the centre of economic malfeasance, and ran at the centre of their business a secret “arms money machine”, which cut across nations and worked to break the arms embargo;
l A trail of money laundering that enabled the old SA Defence Force (SADF) to move secret funds to the value of over R500-billion (current value) on covert defence projects and weapons in violation of apartheid-era sanctions;
l Details of the National Party’s key funders during the revolutionary 1980s; and
l Details of how crimes of the past continue to haunt and cost the South African public today.
The team worked closely with the South African History archives and other civic society partners such as the Lawyers for Human Rights.
“There were many challenges that we encountered during this journey. Many government departments tried to block us from gaining access to crucial information.
“Lawyers for Human Rights provided legal services for us to use the law to force our right to access such information,” said Van Vuuren. — asandan@dispatch.co.za
l See Page 15 for an extract
Apartheid dodgy deals laid bar
Speaking to the Saturday Dispatch this week, Van Vuuren said the work was an exposé which “navigated South Africa’s long historic shadow of state capture”.
Most of the sanctions-busting companies who fed the apartheid regime with weapons are still doing business with the new democratic regime.
He said he had had to endure numerous “security concerns” during the five years it took to research the tome.
That is how long it took him and a team of dedicated researchers to trawl through two-million pages of secret evidence to finally shed light on a covert global network crossing 50 countries which was initially set up to bypass and counter sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Their task was made difficult by the “huge volumes of documents” which were pulped and shredded in the dying days of apartheid.
In his book, Van Vuuren says the country’s National Intelligence Agency alone destroyed 44 tons of documents that could have shed more light on the apartheid network’s dark deals in guns and money.
“With this, the written record of countless acts of individual culpability were destroyed,” he wrote.
Van Vuuren is a director of Open Secrets, a non-profit organisation working on private sector accountability for economic crime and related human rights violations.
He is a past fellow of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and director at the Institute for Security Studies. He is also active in the Right2Know campaign.
His latest book, among many other revelations, exposes how the apartheid government blew R501-billion between 1974 and 1994 on weapons and intelligence in a bid to counter the international sanctions imposed upon South Africa.
Van Vuuren says they discovered that the network spawned to defend apartheid worked like a machine.
Explosive findings in his book include:
l Banks were at the centre of economic malfeasance, and ran at the centre of their business a secret “arms money machine”, which cut across nations and worked to break the arms embargo;
l A trail of money laundering that enabled the old SA Defence Force (SADF) to move secret funds to the value of over R500-billion (current value) on covert defence projects and weapons in violation of apartheid-era sanctions;
l Details of the National Party’s key funders during the revolutionary 1980s; and
l Details of how crimes of the past continue to haunt and cost the South African public today.
The team worked closely with the South African History archives and other civic society partners such as the Lawyers for Human Rights.
“There were many challenges that we encountered during this journey. Many government departments tried to block us from gaining access to crucial information.
“Lawyers for Human Rights provided legal services for us to use the law to force our right to access such information,” said Van Vuuren. — asandan@dispatch.co.za
l See Page 15 for an extract
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