Author does SA great service by writing this

The book – how apartheid was made to work, reads like a spy novel but it’s recommended reading for all who wish to understand the origins of our young democracy’s crisis, writes

HENNIE van Vuuren’s mythbusting new book, Apartheid, Guns and Money, is explosive. It is a meticulously researched, and a very readable, account of how the apartheid state developed a global criminal network to evade sanctions.

Van Vuuren undertook a vast amount of research for this book. He was supported by a team of experts from Open Secrets, the Right to Know Campaign, Lawyers for Human Rights, the South African History Archive and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.

Together the author and his researchers went through more than two million documents and conducted numerous interviews as they worked on this book.

In a world where opinion, substantiated or not, is rapidly replacing evidence, a book as thoroughly researched as this is something of a Molotov cocktail.

The vast amount of empirical evidence presented in this book simply cannot be dismissed as mere opinion.

As former Constitutional Court Judge Kate O’regan has written: “This is an exposé of that machinery created in defence of apartheid and the people who made this possible: heads of state, arms dealers, aristocrats, plutocrats, senators, bankers, spies, journalists and members of secret lobby groups.”

Van Vuuren’s book provides a brilliant exposé of how an international criminal conspiracy was set up to enable the apartheid state to buy guns and other weapons, including flamethrowers.

This network included bankers, politicians, spies and shady businessmen around the world. This network was vast.

The book shows that Armscor (the state arms company that later became Denel) had 844 bank accounts in 196 banks in at least 27 countries – the majority of them in Europe.

The myth that the apartheid state was isolated during the sanctions era was first bust by Sasha Polakow Suransky’s important 2010 book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa.

Suransky’s book showed that the apartheid state and Israel collaborated closely on military matters.

It is also well known that the apartheid state had links to Taiwan and Chile, under the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

But Van Vuuren’s book shows that bankers, right-wing politicians and spies across Europe, and especially in Switzerland and Belgium, were deeply implicated in working to support the apartheid state.

Reading this story is a bit like reading a spy novel. And among the many villains that emerge is André Vlérick, a Flemish banker and professor based in Belgium.

He set up a network of rightwing politicians to support apartheid and, as head of Kredietbank, ran a huge moneylaundering system for apartheid.

The business school at the University of Ghent is today named the Vlérick Business School. Van Vuuren argues in his book: staff and students at the University of Ghent have a moral obligation that the name of this odious, racist and deeply corrupt man is removed from their university.

Some of the actors in this pro-apartheid network are wellknown organisations in South Africa today. The role of the banks in propping up apartheid is particularly nauseating.

The old Volkskas Bank, now part of Absa, also played a central role. Absa has blood on its hands and must be forced to pay reparations. Lonmin, the infamous British mining company implicated in the Marikana massacre, was also part of this network under the name of Lonrho.

Well-known individuals are also part of the story. Christo