Suspected mpumalanga military camp violated security regulations:
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu says the alleged military camp, which Libyan nationals were conducting in Mpumalanga, flouted the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSIRA) regulations.
On Friday, Mpumalanga police arrested 95 Libyan nationals after uncovering a suspected secret military training camp operating from a farm in White River.
Speaking at the makeshift military camp on Saturday, that included barracks and trenches, Mchunu told the journalists during the site visit that the facility was illegal in terms of PSIRA processes.
PSIRA is the body that regulates all private security activities in the country.
The minister added that what was being done at the camp was not applied for nor approved by PSIRA, saying a training of this nature, which appears to be “basically and fundamentally military”, raises questions about the security of the country.
“All indications are pointing to this being more of a military training facility than an ordinary security training centre. It’s more military than security,” he asserted.
The Libyan nationals allegedly entered South Africa in April on study permits, but have had their visas revoked after their nabbing.
They claimed to be here to study to be security guards.
In a statement on Friday, the SA Police Service said the operation was carried out in conjunction with the provincial joint operations structure, including the home affairs department and other role players like the police’s crime intelligence.
The police added that acting provincial commissioner in Mpumalanga, Major General Zeph Mkhwanazi, convened the joint operations body on Thursday after receiving information about the suspected camp, which led to the raid on Friday, and subsequent arrests.
Responding to questions about their status in the country, Mchunu confirmed their stay in South Africa was illegal.
“We are saying that because in the application process, a violation of these processes has been identified — it would mean that their being here is illegal. Once a person is illegal, you think of deportation as soon as possible,” he said
“To that effect, we would want them to be out of the country as soon as possible, but we will follow due process and discussion.”
He said police could also not rule out that there were other camps like the one they had discovered in the province.
“We are not going to confine ourselves to what we have established now. [We] are going to expand our checks because this might be one at a pointer. But if there’s any other thing that we come across, we will follow those.”
The minister said there were indications of the Libyan government’s involvement, but shied away from saying whether the camp’s existence was an act of treason.
“Saying so [treason] would mean that you have completed the investigations, and you come to that particular conclusion looking at relevant laws and so on.”
National commissioner Fannie Masemola said all weapons found were legal to do training. Masemola said there were traces of the weapons being used.
The top cop said the place was accredited as a security training provider, and there are still investigations ongoing
“We can not pinpoint to you all the wrong. We do not want to jeopardise our case going to court.”
A tale of two risings: Ireland and South Africa:
The Irish revolutionary Michael Collins has been pictured in a back room of the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin, shaking his head in disgust over the chaotic miscarriage of the 1916 republican uprising against British rule.
The rebellion seemed a disaster for the independence movement. Sixteen leaders were executed for treason and thousands interned after British shells smashed their GPO headquarters.
The Royal Navy had intercepted a shipload of arms destined for the rebels and a planned national uprising failed to happen.
“And what if excess of love/Bewildered them till they died?” lamented the poet WB Yeats, while admiring their suicidal bravery.
How was it, then, that just five years later British prime minister Lloyd George would settle with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in a treaty that gave Ireland self-government?
The pre-World War I outlook for what historians call “advanced nationalism” in Ireland was glum — the IRA’s forerunner, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had just 1??500 members.
But, as in apartheid South Africa, resistance snowballed and became more militant as the British tightened the screws and the domestic and international cost of repression mounted.
In the 1918 election the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin (“We ourselves”), swept away the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had sought Home Rule — essentially dominion status along Australian lines under the British Crown — by working through Westminster.
Britain refused to recognise Dáil Éireann, the Irish counter-parliament formed after the republican electoral landslide, setting the stage for armed revolt.
Throughout the gathering storm, the British government showed thinly veiled support for Protestants that had been injected into the northern counties in a series of anti-Catholic “plantations” initiated in the 16th century.
On the principle that “Home Rule is Rome Rule”, Protestant unionists implacably opposed any move towards even limited independence.
They and the Tories who courted their parliamentary support forced a postponement of Home Rule legislation for the duration of the World War. By then the struggle had moved on.
In part, British policy on Ireland was driven by imperial arrogance and racism. For Tory leader Bonar Law the Irish were “an inferior race”; Winston Churchill wrote of “a diabolical strain in the Irish character … a treacherous, assassinating, conspiring trait … that prevented them from being a great responsible nation”.
The British reply to Irish resistance was, as in South Africa, escalating brutality.
The leaders of the 1916 uprising were shot after being court-marshalled, with the barrister Patrick Pearse so badly wounded that he died strapped to a chair.
Yet the executions backfired. Crowds had jeered the arrested republicans as they were marched to Richmond Barracks — after their “blood sacrifice” public sympathy veered sharply behind them.
In the shift to guerrilla war, the opening salvo was the assassination of two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) men in rural Tipperary in January 1919.
The Dáil Éireann then called for the social ostracism of the RIC, considered “the eyes and ears of the enemy”. Police barracks were attacked and burnt when abandoned.
By September 1??900 members had quit and the RIC was largely driven from the Irish countryside, allowing alternative state structures such as republican courts to spring up.
Britain’s response was to install Field-Marshal John French as lord lieutenant of Ireland — a man who, remarks historian Michael Hopkinson, typified the “bone-headed stubbornness” of military men confronting political disorder.
His solution was to arrest Sinn Féin leaders for treason and ban its meetings. He also backed Lloyd George’s abortive attempt to extend conscription to Ireland, resisted by radicals and moderates alike.
The policy was never adopted, but French is known to have favoured population removals to allow the bombing of the IRA from the air.
Then in a dramatic escalation in March 1920, Churchill sent in a reserve army to bolster the RIC.
The “Black and Tans”, so called because of their patchwork of police and army outfits, were an ill-trained and undisciplined force of mainly demobbed soldiers who took revenge on civilians up and down Ireland when attacked.
Yeats described the 8??000 Tans as “partly drunk and wholly mad”.
In a deadly cycle of tit-for-tat reprisals, the Tans gutted the centre of Ireland’s second city, Cork. “I never experienced such orgies of murder, arson and looting,” one Tan commander told an inquiry. Later, reprisals would become official policy.
For the British Empire, the widely publicised spectacle of homeless families outside burnt-out houses and shops was a reputational disaster.
As in South Africa, Britain clung to the view that there was no Irish war, only the terrorism and intimidation of a handful of criminals.
And, like the South Africans, it was prevented from fully unleashing its coercive powers by the glare of world scrutiny. It was especially sensitive to opinion in the United States, home to millions of Irish immigrants.
The security forces accused it of a “slap and stroke” policy. Martial law was never applied across the whole of Ireland and censorship, for example, was not invoked.
The British intelligence system also foundered at the start. Despite a £10?000 reward, Michael Collins, the Mandela-style Dublin Pimpernel, cycled around the city and plotted attacks in its pubs without being arrested. (Legend has it that he once hid in the Jewish quarter disguised as an Orthodox Jew and cursed a Black and Tan in Yiddish.)
Hopkinson remarks that the Irish war was driven by intelligence. Collins, the IRA’s intelligence director and a man of extraordinary memory and grasp of operational detail, identified British spies using every possible resource, including wastepaper bins, housemaids and contacts in the seat of government, Dublin Castle.
His coup was the ruthless crippling of the British intelligence network in November 1920 by his “Squad” — ironically dubbed “the Twelve Apostles” — who assassinated 15 people and wounded four in gracious south Dublin in a single morning.
This starkly refuted Lloyd George’s claim that “we have murder by the throat”. As the dead officers were driven in a solemn funeral train through London, public confidence in government policy on Ireland was deeply shaken. Fear aroused by the Squad’s activities also critically interrupted the general flow of intelligence to the authorities, much as the “necklace” did in South Africa.
A further blow was the razing of the Customs House, the heart of the Irish civil service, in May 1921. Despite IRA losses — five killed and 80 captured — the operation has been likened for its shock effect to North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet offensive.
The two sides had reached stalemate — or more correctly, a ragtag force of poorly armed guerrillas had fought the mighty British Empire to a standstill.
Security force deaths rose from 44 in the first half of 1920 to 171 in the second half and 321 in the six months following. By the time of the truce, more than 440 IRA soldiers had died and 4??500 were interned, against just 2??000 in active service. An armistice was signed in July 1921 and a full treaty in December that year.
The Irish war served as a model and inspiration for anti-colonial campaigners worldwide. But it left a bitter, enduring aftertaste.
The de facto head of state and its most seasoned diplomat, Éamon de Valera, controversially stood back and left the treaty talks to others, including Collins.
De Valera claimed this gave him a “strategic advantage”. But cunning and ambition may have been the real spur.
Foreseeing that Britain would not concede on two key issues — freedom from submission to the Crown and the inclusion of the northern counties in the new state — he may have stepped back to preserve himself politically and weaken his rivals, above all Collins.
In a startling display of opportunism, he denounced the treaty from the podium and warned that the Irish might have to “wade through blood” to win their republic.
(At the height of the Irish conflict he had spent 18 months in the safety of the US, campaigning vainly for American recognition of the Irish Republic.)
A savage civil war between anti-treaty “irregulars” and government forces under Collins then followed. When the latter was killed in an ambush, De Valera, as leader of
a new republican party, Fianna
Fáil, ultimately went on to take the reins.
The party would tower over 20th century Irish politics. Only since
De Valera’s death in 1975 has Ireland thrown off the stifling, decades-long burden of his Catholic conservatism.
True to Britain’s instinctive bias, Lloyd George legislated the partition of Ireland in favour of northern Protestants before settling with the republicans of the south.
That grave historical injustice — the fruit of 800 years of Anglo-Norman colonial meddling and oppression — remains unremedied.
This is the major parallel between the two revolutions. Many would argue that South Africa’s colonial overhang has also not been fully dealt with.
Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian. He is on holiday in Ireland.
EU, UK tax on imports will be a blow for African countries:
There is a global shift to lower greenhouse gas emissions as part of the drive to fight climate change. As part of this, the EU and the UK are in the process of implementing the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
In principle, CBAM looks to lower carbon emissions by addressing something known as carbon leakage or offshoring emissions. In essence, it involves the transferring to the EU or UK of products which will increase their emissions. It is a tax on products with high carbon coming into the EU or UK. The aim, according to these countries, is to create a level playing field, grow industry decarbonisation and apply a carbon price to imports.
The goal is to stop carbon leakage on moved goods and lessen emissions from one country to another. The EU implemented CBAM in October last year, as a trial phase, and hopes to fully implement it in 2026. The UK CBAM is under consultation with a view to launching it in about 2027.
Overall, CBAM aims to increase global climate action by encouraging countries that are subject to it to raise their emission targets and increase domestic carbon prices which lessen their liability and earn higher tax revenues, as noted in a publication by the South African Reserve Bank.
Faten Aggad, the executive director at the African Future Policies Hub, told the Mail & Guardian that “while the EU is attempting to present this as climate action, my argument is that it’s actually an industrial policy …
“So, the question really is whether CBAM is truly a climate measure or actually a measure to protect European industries from competition,” she said.
If the end goal of CBAM is to lower emissions and stop carbon leakage, why is there such a furore over it? To put it simply, CBAM affects South Africa and, more broadly the continent, massively. It stands to affect least-developed countries much more harshly than the EU and UK’s other trading partners.
CBAM imposes tariffs on African countries responsible for very little of global carbon emissions which will negatively affect their trading options. It is a major injustice.
The South African Institute of International Affairs reported it “may reduce continental gross domestic product by -0.91% and cause a slump in exports of various products to the EU”.
South Africa’s Department of Trade, Industry and Competition said, “These measures will disrupt exports, undermine investments and lead to job losses in a context where we are working hard to bring down the levels of youth (aged 18 to 34 years) unemployment which currently stands at 45.5%. Instead of supporting South Africa to build economic resilience and social cohesion, the CBAM measures will deepen socio-economic frictions.”
Concerningly for South Africa, about R52.4 billion of exports (at 2022 values) are at risk in the short term. This is about 10% of South African exports to the EU and approximately 2.2% of exports to the world, as noted by Seutame Maimele writing for Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies, an independent, non-profit economic research institution.
Last year, at the African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, countries signed a declaration that called for fair trade for countries on the continent and tariffs to be subject to discussion and agreement, not unilaterally applied, which is what CBAM in its current format is. It is still open to discussions, comments and opposition.
The main sectors on the CBAM list include iron, steel, cement, fertiliser, aluminium, electricity and hydrogen.
The EU accounts for 26% of Africa’s exports of fertiliser, 16% of iron and steel, 12% of aluminium and 12% of cement. CBAM could cause a fall in exports of aluminium from Africa to the EU by up to 13.9%, iron and steel by 8.2%, fertiliser by 3.9% and cement by 3.1%, according to a joint study by the African Climate Foundation and the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.
Aggad noted that Mozambique is one of the countries that will be hit the hardest. “In fact, Mozambique is the most affected country. The reason is their aluminium manufacturing plant, which depends heavily on exports to the European Union.”
The EU and the UK must acknowledge the imbalance CBAM brings to African trade and countries. It needs to hear these concerns and include these trading partners in discussions on making such a mechanism workable. In its current form, it stands to negatively affect countries already hit by the global trade imbalance.
It will exacerbate the inequalities on the continent and further highlights the need for finance to enable African countries to transition to emitting fewer greenhouse gases in creating products. Failure to do so will see the EU and UK moving to other countries, such as China and India for goods, which will impoverish more African countries.
Aggad believes another way to fight it would be to go to the World Trade Organisation but this might not yield the required result. She believes Africa should consider its own CBAM-style tax, with the collection of the money on the African side, instead of in the EU or UK. This would keep the revenue on the continent.
The EU and UK are trying to lower greenhouse gas emissions but the question must be asked if this is the way to go about it. To do it in a way that is harmful to least-developed countries and regions that are already impoverished will only enhance inequality.
“I do not have a sense that they’re seriously listening or having discussions in good faith,” Aggad said.
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