Apartheid

6
sanctioned South African commodities started to bring in profits again after 1994, and most of
the profits ended up in the pockets of business owners and executives, who were mostly
white. There is much that Israelis and Palestinians can learn from the South African
experience, perhaps especially if they are able to achieve an end to legalized and political
apartheid like South Africa did.
Another reason why apartheid still eludes easy classification is that, like most armed
conflicts today, it does not readily fall under the classification of war, since the relationship
cannot be defined as a formal state of war between two states, except under unusual
circumstances. War is never formally declared, except under these relatively rare conditions.
Today, in most conflicts, the two main warring groups usually lay claim to the same territory
as their homeland, and apartheid is just one example of this kind of conflict. The apartheid
wars in which the traditional sense of war does apply are mainly colonial invasions, in which
invader civilian settlements may be planned, but are not yet an established fact. They also
include wars with neighboring countries, such as Israel’s wars of 1948-9, 1956, 1967, and
1973. The Israeli invasions of southern Lebanon from 1982 through 2006 or the continuing
invasions of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, however, are not wars in the traditional
sense since Israel (in contradiction to international law) neither declared (or even admitted
waging) war nor recognized the sovereignty or rights to self-determination of the states or
nations that they invaded. Moreover, the Palestinians in Palestine and Israel, just like the
South African Blacks in South Africa, including the Homelands, were both disarmed and
surrounded, during most of these wars of the apartheid states against their neighbors. Lacking
states as well as military hardware, it was thus next to impossible for the main victims of
apartheid to wage war anyway.
But then, apartheid is not just oppression either. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, in the southern African apartheid conflict
millions. Apartheid is something between war and oppression, and, at the same time, both war
and oppression.
Similarly, apartheid is something between crime and law, and lawful and criminal at
the same time. It is a crime under international law, but its application and realization is of
course often required domestically by the apartheid regime’s laws. Frequently, it is a crime or
an offence to be against apartheid under an apartheid rule. More or less covert crimes under
those same laws are also sometimes or even often encouraged by apartheid regimes,
especially human rights violations carried out by invading semi-civilian settlers and so-called
‘state security forces’.
Apparently, apartheid needs to be understood with a conceptual apparatus that partly
transcends that of international law and traditional political science, in which ‘war’ is
understood as international, and ‘oppression’ as domestic. I believe this can be done with an
umbrella concept of ‘gross human rights violations’, encompassing both war and oppression.
Thus, apartheid, along with genocide and colonialism (and other serious crimes, such as racist
slavery, or aggressive warfare in general), can be understood as ‘a system of gross human
rights violations’, and as a crime against humanity.
In this investigation human rights are understood in terms of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted on December 10, 1948 by the General
Assembly of the United Nations. This concept of human rights is far from unproblematic. It
contains a subtle bias of a pro-western nature as well as several potential contradictions. Civil
and political rights are emphasized whereas social and economic rights are downplayed. Many
people in developing countries resent this, knowing for instance that there is more than
enough food for every human being in the world whilst the destitute, especially in these
countries, are starving. Yet there is no universal human right to be fed, nor are there any to be
sheltered or clothed. Furthermore, there is no system of rights, only a list. And conflicts
between rights, e.g. between the rights to privacy and freedom of expression, are left
unsolved.