by Christopher McMichael, Thought Leader
Last week, a fully armed contingent of South African National Defence
Force (SANDF) soldiers were enrolled to perform guard duties at the new
Khayelitsha district hospital. The reason for the deployment of
combat-ready troops in a civilian environment? To patrol a silent
protest by 50 members of the Khayelitsha Development Forum. As
constitutional law expert Pierre De Vos has pointed out,
such an action may violate constitutional restrictions which reserve
the internal usage of the SANDF for exceptional circumstances.
Not only does the deployment of the SANDF to quell internal protest
bear disturbing continuities with the apartheid government’s practices
but it is also paralleled by efforts to re-militarise the SAPS. In a
country in which only twenty years ago the police were the internal
extension of the then South African Defence Force using unrestricted
counter-insurgency operations and the notorious death squads associated
with the CCB and Vlakplaas throughout cities and townships, maintaining a
clear and strict demarcation between the police service and the
military force is essential to the protection of democracy.
However, the Khayelitsha incident is by no means unique. Joint
operations between the police and military are becoming increasingly
more commonplace. Prior to his suspension, Bheki Cele insisted that the
need to ensure mutual respect between members of the South African
Police Service and the South African National Defence Force, who are on a
regular basis involved in joint operations, was one of the reasons
behind the reintroduction of military ranks within the SAPS. In turn,
the SANDF lists such ‘interoperable’ dual operations with the SAPS and
other government departments as one of its key areas of focus.
While there is growing evidence that ‘interoperable’ missions are
being used to quash increasingly heated community protests, the primary
site of joint operations are the intensive security measures which
accompany major sporting and political events. At the recent COP17
conference in Durban, the military joined the police in creating a ring
of steel around the International Convention Centre, while the World Cup
was marked by the largest internal deployment of the SANDF since 1994.
Preparations for that event included joint training missions between
SAPS elite units, SANDF special forces and SOCOM, the US special
command, which among its other ‘sensitive’ missions co-ordinated last
year’s execution of Osama Bin Laden. In turn, the SAPS’s much publicised
World Cup procurement drive included several items that have been
developed and tested in contemporary war zones. These included
Israeli-made water cannons, designed for ‘crowd control’ in Gaza, and
bomb disposal suits used in Iraq. Fortunately for civilian airspace,
complaints from the Civil Aviation Authority prevented efforts to buy
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) similar to the drones causing
substantive civilian casualties in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
While SAPS management claimed that such equipment is a necessary
augmentation of the ‘war on crime’, the origins of much of this
technology raise an unsettling question: how far they are willing to
pursue this logic of combat?
The public discussion about signs of re-militarisation in South
Africa has understandably focused on its disturbing resonances with the
dark corners of our recent past. However, this has been accompanied by
the importation of international practices and security systems which
blur the distinction between civilian policing and urban warfare. For
example, SAPS units such as “The Special Task Force” and the new
“Tactical Response Team” echo the elite forces used by law enforcement
departments throughout the world. These units receive paramilitary
training and access to much heavier caliber weaponry and firepower than
ordinary police officers. Such elite units can serve legitimate
purposes, such as confronting heavily armed criminals who can and
sometimes do endanger members of the general public. But the experience
of many foreign countries demonstrates that police elites like these can quickly become forces of internal repression. As evidenced in
last year’s clampdowns on the Occupy movement and current
‘pacifications’ in Rio de Janeiro slums, paramilitary police can rapidly
be targeted against the public. Indeed, the Gauteng Tactical Response
Team has already been implicated in several instances of torture and
brutality.
Since the killing of Andries Tatane in Ficksburg last year, the SAPS
has promised to modernise its crowd control techniques. This seems an
impressive development but much of its new policy is based on training
missions conducted with the French police which has in recent years been
associated with serious allegations of brutality, excessive use of
force and the systemic harassment of North African minorities. Hardly a
progressive model to emulate.
There is a further irony in the adoption of Israeli manufactured
crowd dispersal equipment due to the obvious parallels between the
present occupation of Palestine and apartheid. Through Israel’s booming
homeland security industry, equipment tested in Gaza’s open-air
bantustans is being imported into domestic policing throughout the
world. At the same time, the SANDF appears committed to an increasing
presence within the country. Along with taking over border security from
the police it is also currently building a urban warfare training
ground outside Johannesburg.
These are only a few examples of the increasingly blurred lines
between the military and police. The internal use of the military,
whether for big events or to intimidate protesters, is accompanied by
the militarisation of the police and the increased usage of combat-ready
security technology. This is not an exclusively domestic process, but
is sustained through transnational policing connection and the wares on
sale throughout global security and arms markets. Indeed, Minister of
Police Nathi Mthethwa proudly highlighted this influence during the
announcement of changes to the ranking system: “Police forces around the
world are referred to as the Force and their ranks are accordingly
linked to such designations.”
This focus on ‘force’ is part of an international move towards
increasingly militarised policing through the perpetration of
functionally endless ‘wars’ against crime, drugs or terrorism. The local
media and academia often present policy brutality and state violence as
a brute hangover from the recent past. The offered solution is often
that this can be cured through the application of vaguely defined ‘world
class’ practices, which may actually legitimate the state’s fascination
with finding security and military solutions to social problems and
political dissent. Rolling back militarisation requires a change of the
institutional culture of the SAPS and reductions of the SANDF’s domestic
entanglements rather than a quick resort to dubious ‘international
benchmarks’.
