It's no secret that for many years, our own government carried water for the apartheid regime in South Africa. But in a report that reveals the extent to which we tried to prop up a criminal regime and a criminal system, an exclusive report by NBC News reveals that as late as 2008, this country officially considered Mandela a terrorist.
Presidents Carter and Reagan and Congress had all instituted sanctions against the white minority South African government because of its policy of racial apartheid. But in 1986, Reagan condemned Mandela’s group, the ANC, which was leading the black struggle against the apartheid regime, saying it engaged in "calculated terror ... the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression."
After the apartheid regime in South Africa declared the ANC a terrorist group, the Reagan administration followed suit.
In August of 1988, the State Department listed the ANC among "organizations that engage in terrorism.” It said the group ''disavows a strategy that deliberately targets civilians,” but noted that civilians had “been victims of incidents claimed by or attributed to the ANC.”
Five months later, in January 1989, the Defense Department included the ANC in an official publication, "Terrorist Group Profiles," with a foreword by President-elect George H.W. Bush. The ANC was listed among 52 of the "world's more notorious terrorist groups." (One of the others listed, Yasser Arafat's Fatah, is now the ruling party in the West Bank.)
The Defense Department report also claimed that Mandela and the ANC were in bed with Communists and wanted to "establish a Socialist (read: Communist) government in South Africa." But any charge of Communism against anti-apartheid leaders has zero credibility. For years, one of the most odious laws on South Africa's books was the
Suppression of Communism Act, which defined Communism and its aims so broadly that anyone who opposed the government could be thrown in jail for being a Communist. The law was frequently used to legally gag opponents of apartheid, since it specifically stated that one of Communism's goals was to stir up racial disharmony.
The State Department backed down from its harsh assessment of Mandela after the Pentagon released its report. However, the Pentagon stood by its claim that the ANC was a terrorist organization. As a result, for almost two decades after Mandela was released from prison, whenever he or any ANC member wanted to come to this country, the State Department had to issue a waiver allowing them to come. This included Mandela's historic visit to the White House as a guest of the first President Bush in 1990.
Finally, in April 2008, Secretary of State Condi Rice told a Senate panel that it was "frankly a rather embarrassing matter" that she had to issue waivers for ANC members to come to this country. She later characterized it as a "bureaucratic snafu." To put it mildly, that's an understatement. Congress officially gave the ANC a clean bill of health in a law passed later that year and signed by the second President Bush.
Some of you are no doubt wondering why this didn't happen sooner, under Clinton. I would hazard to guess that it probably would have happened far sooner had the Republicans not won control of Congress only a few months after Mandela was elected president of South Africa. Remember, Jesse Helms, one of the ANC's loudest critics, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Our own government committed a lot of foreign policy crimes in the name of fighting Communism. But this has to stand as one of the worst.