Illegal Exporting of Military Equipment to South Africa

Illegal Exporting of Military Equipment to South Africa

On 2 April 1984, four South Africans and three British nationals were arrested in the United Kingdom and charged with illegally exporting high-pressure gas cylinders and magnetrons to South Africa. Magnetrons were vital components of modern radar systems, while the gas cylinders had utility in a potential nuclear industry.

The four South Africans, which came to be known as the “Coventry Four”, were all employees of Armscor. These four men were Hendrik Botha, Stephanus de Jager, Jacobus Le Grange and William Meterlerkamp. They were all senior officials and consultants for Armscor, and its guided weapons subsidiary, Kentron, and had been arrested following a Customs raid on a London hotel at the end of March 1984. They had been taken to Coventry, where they had been charged and remanded in custody. The Pretoria regime reacted angrily by recalling the then Ambassador the United Kingdom, Marais Steyn, for consultations.

After spending ten days in custody, they were released under stringent bail conditions and guarantees from the South African Embassy, after being granted bail of £400,000. The three Englishmen who were arrested with the South Africans, who were Michael Swann, Derek Salt and Michael Henry Gardiner, were also released on bail as they were due to appear in court on 22 May 1984.

On 22 May 1984, a few days before the apartheid President of South Africa, P.W. Botha, was to visit the United Kingdom as a guest of British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, a High Court judge relaxed the bail conditions by allowing the “Coventry Four” to leave the jurisdiction of the British courts before the trial. The judge was presented with affidavits from the First Secretary of the South African Embassy, Andre Pelser, in which the apartheid regime undertook to return the four men to the United Kingdom to stand trial if they did not do so voluntarily. The four did return for a brief hearing on 25 June 1984, but when the time came for the committal proceedings on 22 October 1984, they were not there.

On 22 October 1984, the press and public benches of the Coventry Magistrates Court were packed solid with local, national and international press. Outside the court, television crews waited as the first case to be heard was the committal proceedings against eight men on charges of arms smuggling to South Africa. However, the “Coventry Four” were not in court, but a battery of lawyers and legal experts, including the First Secretary from the South African Embassy, as apartheid government of South Africa had recalled its ambassador to the United Kingdom to consult on the case.

The court proceedings began with the Customs seeking, not only warrants for the arrest of the “Coventry Four”, but also on the serious charges of conspiring to smuggle spare parts for guided weapon systems to South Africa. The four British men, who were arrested with the South Africans, did appear in court, also facing conspiracy charges. Taken together, the case clearly represented one of the most serious alleged breaches of the 1977 United Nations mandatory arms embargo that had come to court. In 1977, the voluntary UN arms embargo became mandatory with the passing of United Nations Security Council Resolution 418.

The lawyer representing the “Coventry Four”, the First Secretary, Pelser, as well as apartheid South African regime, sought to justify the non-appearance of the men by linking the matter with the presence in the British Consulate in Durban of the three leaders of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Natal Indian Congress (NIC). The lawyer argued that the sanctuary provided to the UDF and NIC leaders was an abuse of the Consulate facilities and a breach of international law. According to the lawyer’s argument, the British were preventing South African ‘justice’ from taking its course, and so the apartheid regime had the ‘right’ to retaliate by preventing the “Coventry Four” from returning to stand trial.

The decision that they should not return, it was explained, had been taken at the highest level in South Africa and ratified by the Cabinet. The magistrates, however, ignored these arguments, granted the warrants and decided that all £400,000 would be forfeited. These developments placed the British government in a dilemma. Four senior officials of a South African state agency had allegedly conspired to smuggle parts of guided weapons systems to South Africa – even the British government could not deny the gravity of these charges. The South African Cabinet had been directly implicated in a conspiracy to frustrate the course of “British justice”. The apartheid regime had broken a solemn undertaking to the British courts that it would ensure that the men returned to stand trial.

All this illuminated total contempt for the British government to such an extent that Malcolm Leslie Rifkind, Member of British Parliament, explained the following day, on 23 October 1984, in the British Parliament that “I called in the South African Ambassador this morning and conveyed to him the Government’s strong condemnation of this breach of faith. I also told him that, following the issue of the warrants for the arrest of the four defendants, we now expected his Government not to impede their appearance in court” (Sechaba).

On 27 October 1984, as if to taunt the British government even further, which took no effective action against the apartheid regime, Armscor called a press conference at which the “Coventry Four” were received as heroes and proudly boasted of their activities in seeking to sabotage the UN arms embargo. According to Gavin Cawthra, South Africa’s “extensive trade links with the UK have provided the arms dealers with plenty of opportunities to exploit loopholes, obtain military equipment for supposed civilian use, apply for manufacturing licences, or, failing all else, to use bribery and false information to circumvent the controls.”

Cawthra continued that “International arms deals are set up by South African government agents and middlemen, some of whom have made fortunes from the secret funds set aside by the government to ‘bust sanctions’ and build up its arms industry. Every year more than half the South African defence budget is allocated to the Special Defence Account. This fund, worth over R5 billion annually (over US$1.7 billion), is not publicly audited and is earmarked for secret projects, mostly the acquisition of arms. …Building on its fledgling arms industry and with the connivance of dealers, Pretoria was able to ride out the embargo. But the cost has been immense, and the results uneven.”

Sources:
South African History Online (SAHO).
Raymond Paretzky, “The United States Arms Embargo Against South Africa: An Analysis of the Laws, Regulations, and Loopholes”, Yale Journal of International Law, Vol. 12, No. 133, 1987.
Gavin Cawthra, “Arms for Apartheid: The Secret World of Sanctions Busting”, Index on Censorship, No. 10, 1991.
Mike Terry, “Pretoria Involved in Arms Smuggling”, Sechaba, January 1985.

Castro Khwela
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