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IFP: Statement by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha Freedom Party president, on Freedom Day (25/04/2012)

25th April 2012

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Dear friends and fellow South Africans,

Every year, on Freedom Day, our country's President bestows National
Orders on individuals who have made an extraordinary contribution to
South Africa, and the world. Acclaimed musicians, artists and
sportsmen are honoured, alongside lesser known heroes who risked their
lives to save the lives of others. It is a moment that draws us
together as a nation, with a shared sense of dignity and goodwill.

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This year, however, is different. Monday's announcement of the 2012
National Orders nominees left no room for doubt that the ANC wants to
use this year's ceremony as another opportunity to further the
centennial agenda.

This year the President will bestow the Order of Mapungubwe on Mr
Oliver Tambo, for "leading a militant struggle for freedom", and on
Inkosi Albert Luthuli for "leading a militant peaceful struggle". The
oxymoron of a "militant peaceful struggle" expresses the ANC's
personal conflict of wanting to portray Africa's first Nobel Peace
Prize winner as supportive of the ANC's deviation into an armed
struggle.

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That takes care of one part of the centennial agenda. In the words of
the ANC's Concept Document on the centenary, every opportunity must be
used this year to "leave an imprint on the South African consciousness
(of) the role of the ANC as the liberator of South Africa's people".
No other political formations were mentioned in the Document. No space
was given to their contribution at all.

That brings us to the second part of the centennial agenda;
discrediting the role of the IFP in the liberation struggle.

The continued presence of the IFP on the political landscape is a
reminder of the ANC's deviation into violence. We hinder the
sanctified image the ANC wants to portray. When I first read the ANC's
Concept Document on the centenary, I sounded a warning to my
colleagues that we were about to see the most profound and complete
rewrite of history imaginable.

So I have not been surprised by the ANC's many slights since the 8th
of January 2012, which range from excluding me from the unveiling of a
statue of the ANC's founder, Dr Seme, who rather inconveniently was my
uncle, to excluding the IFP from the unveiling of a Heroes' Arch to
victims of the black-on-black violence.

By now, the ANC's revitalized anti-Buthelezi stance is becoming clear
to outside observers, so much so that jokes were made about me at the
Zuma wedding last weekend.

But there is no humour in what the ANC is doing. On Friday, through
the National Orders Awards Ceremony, the ANC will further entrench the
propaganda that the violence that rocked South Africa in the years
before liberation was perpetrated by the Apartheid Government and the
IFP. The implicit message is that the ANC was just a victim.

The President will bestow the Order of the Baobab, Gold, on Frank
Kennan Dutton and Lwandle Wilson Magadla for "exposing the apartheid
government's ?Third Force'" and for exposing "collusion between the
Inkatha Freedom Party and the apartheid security forces."

Why not rather bestow the Order of the Baobab on Dr Anthea Jeffreys,
for exposing the ANC's strategy of People's War that saw thousands of
innocents slaughtered?

Lwandle Magadla, who passed away last year, began clandestine work for
the ANC in the sixties, as a courier. By the early nineties, his
extensive contacts in the intelligence community enabled him to warn
ANC and UDF cadres of imminent attacks, which saved Jacob Zuma's life.

In 1991, as a warrant officer with the South African Police, Magadla
and Captain Frank Dutton uncovered evidence that New Hanover Station
Commander Brian Mitchell had organized the Trust Feeds Massacre of 3
December 1988, in which eleven people were killed.

On 28 April 1992, Nelson Mandela addressed a meeting of the OAU in
Arusha and declared that the Trust Feeds Massacre had concretely
identified a "Third Force" for the first time. On this singular
foundation, the ANC constructed its extravagant artifice that a "Third
Force" was responsible for the violence between the ANC and its
political opponents.

Magadla retired as a warrant officer and became the ANC's Head of
Intelligence in KwaZulu Natal.

After liberation, Magadla became the first Provincial Head of the
National Intelligence Agency and, in 1996, he was appointed to the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission as Chief of Special
Investigations. The IFP disputed his appointment, just as we disputed
the appointment of Archbishop Tutu as Chairperson of the TRC based on
the fact that he was a former patron of the UDF and was aligned with
the ANC.

The TRC process demanded non-partisan leadership. What it got was ANC cadres.

When Magadla passed away last year, his daughter told the media that
President Jacob Zuma and National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele had
constantly asked for his advice.

After the Trust Feeds Massacre saga, Captain Frank Dutton's unit was
disbanded. Professor Mary de Haas describes how she, Professor Paulus
Zulu and Lwandle Magadla worked "behind the scenes through a variety
of contacts ? political and legal ? to include Dutton in the Goldstone
investigations." She writes, "We were successful, and the provincial
investigative arm of the commission under Major Dutton was established
in September 1992, comprising mainly top-notch black African
detectives hand-picked by Magadla."

The IFP disputed the findings of the Goldstone Commission, and the TRC
admitted that "it received few first-hand accounts of violations
committed against the IFP to draw on in the preparation of its report.
It was thus forced to resort to secondary sources in an attempt to
produce a balanced report on the virtual civil war that raged in
KwaZulu-Natal for many years."

In the end, it was not a balanced report. But it did find in Volume 5,
chapter 6, that "In the period 1990 ? 1994, the ANC was responsible
for killings, assaults and attacks on political opponents including
members of the IFP, PAC, AZAPO and the SAP" and that the ANC
contributed "to a spiral of violence in the country through the
creation and arming of SDUs".

That is not something we remember on Freedom Day, or any other day.

On 5 October 1992, the ANC released a press statement that read, "The
IFP leadership will serve South Africa best if it contributes towards
the creation of a climate that will lead to the resolution of
differences between the two parties." Twenty years later, the IFP has
the same message for the ANC.

The ANC's abandonment of reconciliation with the IFP does not serve
the best interests of South Africa. It serves only the interests of
the ANC.

Yours in the service of our nation,
 

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