History cannot be ignored

Reporting on the kidnapping of South African ambassador Eddie Dunn in El Salvador by leftist guerrillas in 1979, I came across claims that the emergence of faxed demands from the African National Congress for his release involved an international terrorist network financed and coordinated from Libya, writes Piet Coetzer

My sources at the time told me that the core of those demands was the publishing of ANC messages in South African newspapers. Copy for those messages was supplied and some of it was in fact in Afrikaans.

Much speculation about the why and the how of the Dunn-kidnapping were around at the time. One of the less fanciful was that he was the wrong guy in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and that the actual target was the American ambassador, whose office was on the same route that Eddie Dunn was travelling to the South African embassy that particular morning.

After spending some three weeks in El Salvador I had to return to Washington where I was based as correspondent of a South African newspaper at the time. Barely another three weeks later I was on my way to Windhoek to take up a seconded position as media spokesperson for the then administrator-general to Namibia, the late Dr. Gerrit Viljoen and I lost contact with the Eddie Dunn story.

Details of what exactly happened with and around Eddie Dunn have, to the best of my knowledge, never emerged in public. What is sure however, is that the South African government of the time refused to meet those demands. Eddie Dunn eventually died in captivity.

I, for one, was disappointed that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up after the 1994-settlement in South Africa, had come and gone without the case of Eddie Dunn ever having been considered and cleared up. For me and others there will always be a gap in our country’s publicly documented history without the full truth surrounding that tragedy coming out.

Probable weight was lent to  claims of an ANC-Libyan connection way back in 1979 in a report by Scott Stewart published last week on the Stratfor-website

Stewart writes, among others, that during “the 1970s and 1980s, Libya served as the arsenal of terrorism. While this role may have received the most publicity when large shipments of weapon that Libya was trying to send to the Provisional Irish Republican Army were intercepted , Libyan involvement in arming terrorist groups was far more widespread.”

Understanding today

There is an Afrikaans saying baie water het sedertdien in die see geloop (much water has since run to the sea), but to ignore this history, would be to miss an important perspective on how the ANC, even today, reacts to events in Libya.

The extremely negative reaction from many quarters to any hint that the government is soft on what is happening in Libya and especially its dictator leader, should serve to illustrate how important it is for the ANC to fill in some gaps in the public record of elements of our history.

As Stewart points out in his report, there are serious dangers for the international community, going forward, stemming from that historical role of the Libyan leader. The responsibilities of the ANC as government of the day have also changed dramatically as the water passed to the sea.

Maybe, because of its own historical relationship with Libya, it now needs to be just that little bit extra careful about how its positioning to events in that country could be perceived in the global community.

(For the full Stratfor-report, click here)