The Nazis of Africa

known cabinet minister. Because the ANC's chief ethics' commissioner and widely respected legal expert and human rights advocate articulates controversial opinions forthrightly, his account has to be taken seriously. The authors' powerful polemic seeks to remind South Africans of the atrocities committed by criminal regime; it records the well-known racial laws and exhorts apartheid's beneficiaries to take collective responsibility. It denies that defenders and resisters can be placed an equivalent legal footing. Asmal seems to side with those in the ANC who incited Tutu's ire because they argued that they fought a and, therefore, do not need to appear before his Truth Commission. The authors admit comparatively few or scattered human rights infringements on the part of the ANC. They are called mere lapses of an under-resourced organisation under stress, never condoned but actually forbidden. If that is the case, why the initial leading ANC members' reluctance to appear before the Commission? In their eagerness to establish that resisters and defenders of apartheid inhabit fundamentally incompatible, moral universes, the authors ignore the classical philosophical distinction between just and in war. No one doubts that the anti-apartheid movement fought cause. The complementary principle of in insists that, even in such cases, conventions of justice have to be followed and the party must be held accountable if it does not do so (for instance, killing prisoners of war or unnecessarily harming civilians) regardless of the moral evil of the opponent. The oppressed are also bound by the rules. Tutu, to his eternal

Nazism · Political science · Politics · The Holocaust · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa · South African History and Culture

• Assessing a Decade of Democracy in Southern Africa

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