NICOLE FRITZ: A shining instance of public officials acting ethically

A long time ago, in what now seems a different country, news came of a Chinese ship sailing for Durban. On board it had cargo for construction purposes. But it was also packed with a deadly arms shipment: reportedly, 3-million rounds of small arms ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and 2,500 mortar rounds.

That arms cargo was to be transported across SA territory and delivered to the Zimbabwe ministry of defence — in the immediate aftermath of Zimbabwe’s deeply contested 2008 presidential elections. It would be more than a month before those elections results were announced, giving Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) candidate Morgan Tsvangirai a majority of the votes but not so large a majority that he could avoid a run-off with the incumbent, Robert Mugabe.

Tsvangirai ultimately withdrew from the run-off, saying his supporters risked being killed if they voted for him. Indeed, more than 150 MDC supporters were reported killed in the period March to June 2008, and Human Rights Watch documented the establishment of torture camps set up to systematically target, beat and torture people suspected of having voted for the MDC.

In this context it wasn’t hard to imagine what the arms shipment on board the An Yeu Jiang was intended for. News of that cargo leaked and it galvanised SA society. Dock workers in Durban, backed by the Transport & Allied Workers Union, said they would refuse to offload the cargo.

Churches rallied support of their members at the port, and legal action was brought by the Anglican Archbishop of KwaZulu-Natal, Rubin Phillip, and Gerald Patrick Kearney, head of inter-church agency Diakonia and the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (of which I was then director). That action secured an interim interdict prohibiting the offloading of the arms in Durban’s port.

But before the order could be served on the captain of the An Yeu Jiang, he pulled up anchor and made for Maputo. The ship was turned back there too, and when it retraced to SA territorial waters, seemingly now en route for Walvis Bay, Namibian civil society organised and protested any offload there.

Ultimately, the ship docked in Angola, allegedly only offloading the construction cargo always intended for Luanda but retaining the arms cargo. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that the actions in SA prevented the use of SA territory to ship those weapons.

It was at that time an extraordinary moment of solidarity — shown not only by South Africans for people facing political persecution in Zimbabwe, but by many in the wider region. Recognising that the circumstances of the An Yeu Jiang matter are highly specific, and that our country now is in many ways a different place, still it is hard not feel poignancy comparing that exemplary solidarity and the crude xenophobia that now manifests ever more widely in our body politic.

Until now I had always believed that the An Yeu Jiang case study was a demonstration of solidarity but that it was unlikely to have done much to prevent the transfer of arms to Zimbabwe in that period. I have assumed that the news leaked because somehow the ship’s cargo manifest inadvertently came to the attention of a conscience-struck customs official or port authority, and that they made the disclosure. I have assumed that there were any number of other arms shipments that never came to such attention and so were discreetly dispatched across our shores.

What I now understand is that the disclosure of the arms shipment came about because those officially charged with overseeing the entry of goods into this country made the shipment known. Unable to act formally, they did so informally. This is information that dramatically recasts this incident in my mind: an evocation, certainly, of the importance of civil society, but more so a demonstration of the fundamental importance of ethical, conscientious public officials.

• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is director of the Helen Suzman Foundation.