Transcript

Well, first of all, the Vela incident itself was showing that, confirming again what we had been saying. Remember, many Western countries were not supporting us, were against us, were attacking us, and so on. And then, when this kind of information came out, they couldn’t attack us in the same way. And they didn’t. And we then built up more support in those countries and political parties, trade unions, churches, and so on. So we all realise the danger of the apartheid law clearly. Vela confirmed that what we believed for long and said so-- that we were right. People said we were not right. We were wrong. South Africa was only-- I was told by numerous foreign ministers, France, Germany, and Italy, that South Africa is only interested in peaceful nuisance. And so when this happened, we had to take a wider context and say, look, South Africa relies on police and military. And South Africa, at that time, 1980, didn’t have enough money for defence. So a defence force that has to rely on mirage planes that are very old would not be a very secure defence force. And so we had already stopped many aircraft going to South Africa. South Africa later made a copy of the mirage with the help from the French. But that was different to the original old ones. So we argued that if we effectively stopped all arms to South Africa, the regime will collapse. Many people challenged us. It can’t be true. How can a whole regime collapse? We said because it relies on the police and the military as its main instrument of government. And that is what it does in the neighbourhood as well. And so we need all-round sanctions if we can. But if an effective arms embargo is implemented, we didn’t mention nuclear in that context, you can collapse the apartheid regime because it will have no capacity to fight these wars. And it was involved in a number of wars in the region. So this is what one of the things we said. We had some other experiences, which I think is important to mention. You see, in our work, we’d hear from somebody who works in a factory in Britain or Germany that South Africa has ordered X, Y, Z, and this is a military item. We would have to decide whether we go public with that. But we also had to do our research because our credibility would be involved. So we’ve got a lot of false information as well. One was even a printed letterhead of an American company claiming that that letter was supposed to be a letter to a South African military, telling them, we will supply you with these things. Others were, we will look into this for you. Different kinds of material. We didn’t publish any of that. But they were all--