ABOOBAKER ISMAIL
Mr Chairperson, the ANC never sought to conduct a campaign of terror.  The inference at that time was also made that we basically were striking at whites.  I would like to put it to this Committee that in fact, if you looked at the first Security Force casualties, they were in fact black policemen.   If you looked at the attacks in the Soweto area, at the Protea, Morocco police stations,  they were black policemen.   And any inference that these were aimed at whites, is rejected because through the struggle, all those that were part of the apartheid system, be they black or white, were targeted.  This was never a target, an attack against whites.  We never fought a racist war.  We fought to undo racism.  We sought to fight as best we could because we believed we fought a just war, we believed in justice, we tried to limit casualties and if we wanted to go on an indiscriminate campaign of terror, we would not have gone through so much pain in going for targets, trying to get inside of the targets, it is very easy.  It takes a few, it takes a pistol or two to kill so many.  We never did that.  We weren't Barend Strydoms that simply stood there and went pah-pah-pah at so many people.   That would have been dead easy.  We never sought to do that.  We actually thought about the targets at the end of the day, we knew that we had to get to a point, we had to bring the white racist regime to their senses and I believe it is because of the mature policies of the ANC that we have the kind of system in the country today, that we have.  You cannot simply make a switch from what people would like to portray the ANC as, and then to have a kind of government, a leadership in this country today, which upholds human rights to the extent that it does.  The racist regime would never have been able to make that transformation.  At all times they sought to hold onto the power and privilege and I think this kind of suggestion that we were just out on a campaign of terror, is rejected with contempt.  South Africa today is still able to continue and to grow, it is beginning to pull together as a united country, because of the maturity, because of the vision and insight of the ANC leadership.  President Mandela previously had said you know, we stretch out the hand of friendship to all but he said he had a problem, that very few whites, actually took that outstretched hand.  We talk of reconciliation, would a people that were bent on a campaign of terror, stretch out their hand so shortly after what the majority population had suffered for centuries, would they do that?  I would say no.