By Roland de Vries
When Harry S Truman almost accidentally became President of the United States in 1944, a lot of people were concerned. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t famous, he didn’t have much tertiary education, or a great public presence like his predecessor; he had been middling-sized businessman, and now he was stepping into the famous Franklin D Roosevelt’s large shoes.
But he turned out to be an exceptionally good president. He had lots of good, solid middle-class common sense, knew how to pick top-class subordinates, and take tough decisions. As an artillery officer in the ghastly trench warfare in France during World War I, he had learnt the art of leadership.
But his most valuable characteristic was expressed in just four words on a little wooden plaque on his desk in the White House: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. In other words, no excuses, no passing of the blame to other people or other circumstances. I decide what must be done, and then do it, no matter what it takes, and accept the responsibility for what happens, good or bad.
And in the spirit of Harry Truman in 1944, I post the question: Are we, the law-abiding and peace-loving people of South Africa, locked into a war of attrition?
Some people might not quite understand what a “war of attrition” is. The answer is that it is a usually low-level conflict, sometimes quite a long one, in which one side is slowly ground down by an endless and apparently unstoppable series of attacks. It ends when that side has suffered both physically and spiritually to the point where it simply gives up.
So, my question to my fellow citizens is simply to ask them to consider the current situation in South Africa and then answer truthfully: Are we locked down, not by government regulations but by another reality, a war of attrition?
As we speak, violent crime is escalating both vertically and horizontally, geographically and in intensity in all our provinces. Corruption is widespread at all levels, from the lowest to the highest. It seems almost as if the tide of evil has no boundaries when one witnesses the impulsiveness and recklessness of civil disobedience which has taken root in our streets. It is literally a matter of life and death not just for individual citizens but for the entire country.
Take note: Chronic corruption in South Africa is leading to human suffering and death. It is time for the many good people in our country to stand up and say, “enough is enough.” But in the meantime, 60 million people are held to ransom by a small number of unscrupulous officials and the ineptness of our government.
South Africans have so many worries these days that terrorism doesn’t have much priority in their thinking. What they don’t seem to realise is that in fact terrorism stalks their daily lives. Because criminals, especially violent ones, are actually terrorists – actually more than just terrorists. An ordinary terrorist does what he does because he has a cause, whether it is a good or bad one. The criminal terrorist is different. He has declared war on society as a whole; the only cause he has is to accumulate money or possessions – anybody’s but his own.
I am sure many people will not agree with this definition. They will say: “Oh, but he had an impoverished childhood”, or “Oh, it’s all the fault of apartheid”, or some other handy excuse. And so, the buck passes on and vanishes into a fog of words. None of them ask why millions of South Africans who were also victims of apartheid and impoverished childhoods manage to do honest work and raise a good family. It is because they accepted that the buck stopped with them. If they liked it or not, they made the best of a bad situation without declaring war on their fellow-citizens. They are the real heroes in our war of attrition.
But the criminal terrorist can’t be bothered with stuff like that. He is a predator for whom everyone else is a potential victim, from the homeowner with a big fridge to an aged grandmother collecting the small but desperately necessary social grant to feed herself for the next month. His motto is: “If someone can’t protect his life and his property, I’ll take it from them.”
Appealing to his better nature won’t work because he has none. What works for him is a bloody nose – a “snotklap”, to use an apt Afrikaans word.
So, I ask another question: Does the ANC government have any resolve, or the ability, to restore law and order in South Africa as soon as possible, and thereby protect the lives and livelihood of all our good people? Before answering it, ask yourself – truthfully – if you believe that the situation of criminal violence and political turmoil and uncertainties that now prevail will get worse before it gets better.
There is no sign of that happening. So, if your answer to the question is “yes”, forget about the political aspects and concentrate on the most pressing problem, one about which you, the citizen, can do something. And that “yes” also means that the country’s peaceful communities will have to do the work themselves to safeguard their families, loved ones and friends.
The writing is on the wall: Some time ago we crossed the boundary behind which the maintenance of ordinary safety and security was enough, and are now locked into what amounts to a struggle for survival. So, we have to ask ourselves what we, the citizenry of all races, ages, and income, can do to assist the statutory forces of law and order to win that war of attrition.
It is an old military axiom that you can’t win a defensive battle unless it is only to gain a breathing-space for you to prepare a counterattack. If not, your defeat is almost inevitable because the enemy has gained the initiative! In that case you might as well give up.
So those are our only choices: be pro-active, act decisively or be defeated.
If we want to be pro-active, we will have to accept the fact that since we have crossed the threshold of survival, the days of relying on reactive neighbourhood watches and farm watches are gone. The watches, expensive burglar-proofing and alarms are not enough, important though they all are. We also need to take the fight to the criminal – purposefully, legally, lawfully, and professionally – instead of waiting to be hit.
Criminals are not supermen. Mostly they prey on soft targets – weak or defenceless people, or unguarded infrastructure like ATMs or (a recent example – schools closed during the lockdown) although now and again they strike in force, such as during transit robberies, but this last is not our priority. Our priority is protecting ourselves and our property, and there is an old saying that if you want to fight an alley-cat you can’t use a dog. A dog can’t climb a tree. So, you need a bigger, fiercer alley-cat!
This means changing our tactics. Let the criminals and crooked dealers become alert and afraid for a change. Let the night become our friend as well and not only the criminal’s. The night has a thousand eyes: Know their routes, the time they usually strike, the tactics they use, the bases from which they operate, their intrinsic weaknesses (e.g. their need to work fast and get away), Unravel the criminal networks purposefully. We can achieve the latter, even as volunteers, if we set our minds to it. And remember that actually we no longer have an alternative!
I quote an example of the Israeli’s war of attrition of the distant past, when as a people they stood strong and turned stark fear and desperation into hope.
Let us take a lesson from Major General Orde Charles Wingate, who as an exponent of unconventional warfare taught the Israelis how to fight during darkness. Wingate was a British Army officer who is best remembered creating World War II’s Chindits in Burma, who were deep-penetration troops trained to fight far behind Japanese lines. But long before he founded the Chindits he was organising guerrilla groups in Palestine, Abyssinia, and the Sudan.
In 1936 Wingate – a highly religious Christian – was transferred to Palestine, then a British-administered League of Nations mandate, at the start of the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939, when Palestinian Arab guerrillas had begun a campaign of attacks against both British mandate officials and Jewish communities. Wingate saw it as his religious and moral duty to help the Jewish community there to form a Jewish state in terms of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, and he set about training members of the Hagenah, a Jewish paramilitary organisation, which in 1948 was absorbed into the Israeli Defence Forces.
Wingate formulated a scheme of raising small assault units to combat the guerrillas. He explained the concept as follows: “There is only one way to deal with the situation, to persuade the enemy’s gangs that, in their predatory raids, there is every chance of their running into our own gangs, which are determined to destroy them. The units would carry the offensive to the enemy, take away his initiative and keep him off-balance, and produce in their minds the belief that our own units will move at night and can and will surprise them either in villages or across country. Night operations would give our own units the advantages of shock and surprise.”
Almost a lifetime after his death in a 1944 air crash, Wingate’s memory is revered by the Israelis and hated by the Arabs. That is irrelevant in our context. Love him or hate him Wingate worked out a winning formula! There is no reason for us to re-invent this particular wheel. All we have to do is modify it to fit the local circumstances.
For more background, try to find and read General Frank Kitson’s book on counterinsurgency during Kenya’s Mau-Mau era: Gangs and Counter-Gangs (Barry and Rockliff Books, London, 1960). Once again, whether you love him or hate him, Kitson has useful things to say.
The reason why I quote these two examples is because neither Wingate nor Kitson depended on masses of troops or heavy weaponry – that scale of force rightfully belongs to the army and police. Their weapon was the citizenry, and the citizenry’s task was not just fighting but maintaining a round-the-clock vigil on their local areas.
Intelligence-gathering is of vital importance; as the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu said: “Know your enemy.” It is not an easy task. Rumour can sometimes be understood to be reality, and very often what you see is not what you think it is. But at the end of the day, accurately collected and processed intelligence can emerge, and never forget that knowledge is power.
So, although things look pretty dark right now and might very well look darker in the future, let us never give up hope, and let the voices of the many virtuous people in our country and the world out there beyond our borders be heard. And always remember what General Jannie Geldenhuys (former Chief of the South African Defence Force) once said: “Defeat is not an option.”
The bottom line is that we need to think outside the box and be surprisingly different. As honest people of faith, who respect and care for others, we need to take our lives, streets, and farmlands back!
So that’s where our buck stops – in our hearts, in our minds and the work we do in Faith to safeguard ourselves!
Peoplesmind