Forty Years of the Kabwe Conference: Apartheid Crisis Deepens
(Portions of the Political Report of the National Executive Committee to the National Consultative Conference, which was presented by the President of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, 17 June 1985, Kabwe, Zambia)
The International Front
“As we have said, already by 1975 we had defeated Vorster’s ‘détente’ offensive. At the beginning of 1976 he was forced to withdraw his defeated army from the People’s Republic of Angola. His puppet forces in Mozambique and Angola were not making much headway. Despite such atrocities as the Kassinga Massacre of 1978, the struggle in Namibia continued to escalate, SWAPO’s position having been greatly strengthened by the birth of independent Angola. The offensive of the Patriotic Front also intensified, underpinned as it was by the popular victory in Mozambique.
“Further afield, the Vietnamese liberation movement had finally won victory in 1975 with the collapse of the Thieu regime and the humiliating flight of the Americans remaining in South Vietnam. The Shah of Iran, originally placed on his throne by the CIA and since armed and developed by United States imperialism as one of its counter-revolutionary strongmen in the Persian Gulf, was swept out of power by the popular masses in 1979. As an act of solidarity with our struggle, the new Government of Iran, which was visited by an ANC delegation led by our Secretary General, imposed an oil embar
