This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.
30 Sep 2004: Motlanthe, Kgalema
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POM. What I was trying to do was to try to look at the passage of your life from 1994 to today and for you to look at the passage of your life to see to what degree it reflects changes that have taken place in South Africa. Now in 1994 when I interviewed you then, I think you were at that point with the National Mineworkers and then I interviewed you while you were Secretary General. But say on a personal level and on a family level how have things changed for you since the advent of the new dispensation, democracy, the new South Africa.
KM. Well I see my children and family less than I used to do. That's how things have changed.
POM. What ages are they now?
KM. There's more work now than one carried before. My lastborn was born in July of 1991, on the 9th to be precise.
POM. Is he still at school?
KM. He's at school now, yes, doing great.
POM. You're living where now?
KM. I live in the Midrand.
POM. Where did you live have you moved since where were you living in the early nineties?
KM. I was living in Dobsonville in Soweto.
POM. Is the community in Midrand a mixed community?
KM. Oh yes, it's a mixed community. It's mainly blacks and Indians, of course with whites as well.
POM. Do you find that either patterns of segregation still, well they exist, but that even since then new ones have arisen, that black middle class people tend to live in middle class areas but that there is still that degree of segregation between the two communities?
KM. Well most areas are quite mixed, precisely because the blacks are in the majority in this country and that is why they move into all areas as it were. They are in the majority, as I said. So there will be no area there will be very few areas that are still absolutely white.
POM. That's because of pure demographics more than anything else.
KM. That's right, but of course there are many settled communities that have been there for a very long time. And of course there are also new areas, new developments in the form of townhouses or places where people buy stands and build, there are many, many of those new ones that were not there before.
POM. Does your son, when you talk about the old days to your 13 year old, does he know what you're talking about or does he say, "Ah Dad!"
KM. No he does, he actually does, he actually knows yes. He's actually surprisingly quite aware of that recent past.
POM. Do you have other sons and daughters?
KM. I've got an older son and a daughter, yes.
POM. What is he doing?
KM. He's working.
POM. What is your sense of personal freedom as distinct to what it was?
KM. Well my sense of personal freedom is that freedom simply means revealing what else is more necessary. That's what it means. It just opens up so many more new challenges, just so many more new challenges, yes, and challenges that are not so new. Because I deal with people that has always been my area of work and with people I can be patient and take a long term view, but not everybody does that. Many of our people believe, and they are led to believe, that ten years is a hell of a long time, that within ten years of the new dispensation there shouldn't be any informal settlements, there shouldn't be people without jobs, there shouldn't be any poverty. The reality is that it takes quite a while to address these fundamental issues.
POM. I've worked it out: in Ireland in the Republic it was fifty years and we had homogeneous, educated people but beside a powerful colonial neighbour it took fifty years to make that leap from staggering around into high level economic growth. When I look back I see similarities here. We had a thing in the fifties when I was growing up, in Gaelic called and what it meant was 'hardly Irish'. It's the same kind of thing, buy Irish, buy Irish products. I see that happening here, many similar things happening until kind of a national self-confidence is established.
KM. That's right.
POM. So if you looked at, say, the five most significant achievements that have been achieved in the last ten years on the one hand and the five, not in any order, the five greatest challenges that have yet to be met?
KM. Well the first major achievement really was attainment of liberation and therefore the restoration of the dignity of the majority of our people who in the past were treated as sub-humans, that's the greatest achievement. The second one is the building of a non-racial, non-sexist democracy. That in itself is a major achievement and there still is lots and lots of work to be done. The constitution, the legislative framework is there, is in place for the attainment of a non-racial society, yet racial attitudes still remain because they are also a function of material conditions, value systems and it will take a while for us to expunge them completely from our society. There are still inequalities even though the commitment on the part of the government is the creation of a better life for all. To that end, through many rural communities who in the past had no access to basic, basic, basic services and amenities, they today have access to running water, they have access to electricity, but of course challenges of affordability emerge. That is why our biggest challenge in this country is the fight against poverty which is linked very integrally to growing the economic cake. The third point actually was stabilising the economy. The economy is stabilised, the structural weaknesses have been corrected, the growth levels are still very low at 2 3%, but of course the education and skills training regime has not kept pace, has still left many people, adults, outside of this growing economy, hence this heavy unemployment.
POM. Hold it there for a second and we'll go a bit backwards. Non-racialism. I'm now living about eight months of the year here and will hope to spend eventually the rest of my life as a resident in the country. I will not go back to the United States for the next four years at least because it looks like George W is going to hop home. But I am struck by the way debate in this country, public debate or discourse is marked by race, charges of racism all the time, that seems to me stops debate in its track.
KM. That's not my sense. My sense is that the world outlook of many people in SA, the ideas, were shaped by a racially divided past and therefore in that kind of atmosphere people still come at issues with the eyes of those who are shaped by that past. You see that's why I spoke about the attitudes, because that's what we're talking about, the physical climate, the constitution, the legislative framework, nothing allows for it, it makes it impermissible for anybody to practice racism and therefore it serves as a constraint. In other words the environment is changing for the better, but of course ideas are a reflection of the material conditions as well in terms of ownership patterns, control of resources, distribution of incomes, all of those things impact on people's outlook and for as long as we still have this huge divide in terms of access to skills training, poverty as I said there are many people who still have no access to what others take for granted. During the election campaign we went to a school here in Johannesburg, well-equipped school, the children assemble in a hall in the morning and so on, and then we went to a school in the township, same area, and the school was made up of containers. So I am saying with those disparities against that, of course the intakes in the schools are now no longer informed by skin colour so black children can go to some of these privileged schools, but there are many, many more who still remain in the deprived areas.
POM. In deprived areas you'll have black children in run-down black schools.
KM. And it would be black children going there. They will have no swimming pool, they will have nobody training them in any sporting code, and therefore they logically stand very little chance in the future of being selected to represent this country at the Olympics or World Cup or whatever. So I am saying those disparities are still there.
POM. I want to go back to your thing on attitudes. Let's look at the Democratic Alliance. Do you think that the DA as a party comes at issues from still what would be even a subliminally racist attitude?
KM. Yes because they have said to themselves that anything that is bad for SA is good for them, it's good for them. Anything that is bad for SA as a country is good for the political fortunes of their party. That's how they see it. That is why to them it is important that this country is seen to be failing so that gives them the platform for presenting themselves as potentially better placed and qualified to do a better job with the country, for the country. Now they also, you see, language in itself, just language is not a sign of intelligence actually or capability. If English is your mother tongue, that's your mother tongue, you can speak it, you can read it if you like. If it is not your mother tongue it means you must learn it and you can very well find that that an intelligent, very talented brain, is not articulate in English at all. But they would regard command of the English language as a sign of intelligence and capability: well you qualify to be very close to where we are but we are quite superior. So it borders on the old problem of white supremacy.
POM. Where would you place, say, Helen Suzman?
KM. You know Helen Suzman of old opposed apartheid but was for qualified franchise for blacks.
POM. When you 'qualified', you had to be educated or you had to be not for - ? When you say qualified, she wasn't ?
KM. No, no one person, one vote democracy.
POM. She wasn't?
KM. She wasn't. No she wasn't. She opposed apartheid, yes, but she was not prepared to go the full hog so for her at that time precisely because she would oppose apartheid she came across as a radical liberal, so to speak. But the DP at the best of times was actually in terms of if you were to use British politics they were actually Tories. It's just that they were in a setting with such a right wing.
POM. In comparison.
KM. Yes, in comparison to the National Party. They actually qualified to be not only really radical liberals but they stood for the correct positions. But of course they were not prepared to go the full hog, the full distance. That's why even now they would adopt a position that says whatever is bad for SA is good for us as a party.
POM. But they would say, no, we are for a basic income grant for everybody, we are for better education, we are for getting rid of the skills differential. We go into the townships and we try to do the best we can establishing contact. They would say you're misreading us.
KM. No, no. Many black people who have gone into the DA and all of them, without exception, say they are racists, when they leave there. Throughout. You must speak to Professor Themba Sono.
POM. Oh yes, he was with the Institute of Race Relations. I know that.
KM. Yes, you must speak to him. He was there in the DA, a senior person. He is one of those I'm speaking of and he had to leave and he can tell you horror stories.
POM. I'll make a point of that. So you would see them as still being for the maintenance of white privilege?
KM. They are worse. I was saying at the best of times the DP, which preceded the DA, DA remember was an amalgam of the DP and NNP, at their very best when they say this was now the liberal grouping in SA, they were in fact in terms of outlook and value systems the closest thing to the Tories in England. Now as the DA they are now home to the conservatives who left the NNP, the National Party, so in fact now they are even more.
POM. So you would see them still calling for the maintenance of the status quo, for the maintenance of the residualities of white privilege?
KM. Well it's not possible now. It is not possible and they know it. They would love to be in a controlling position.
POM. But they know that's not possible.
KM. They think it is possible with the majority taking their cue from them and taking leadership from them.
POM. Do you really believe they want SA to fail, for joblessness to grow, for economic growth to come to a halt, for foreign investment to dry up?
KM. Oh yes.
POM. You do?
KM. I do. I do. Because to them that would offer them a possibility of they could then present themselves as an alternative. You see they're looking at it from the point of view of supplanting the ANC, that if the ANC is seen to have failed or if this country is visited by major setbacks under the stewardship of the ANC government, to them that would be of great benefit, an opportunity to position themselves as people who can save the country and lead it better. But you must speak to people in the Western Cape when the DA was in charge there because it's not as if they never had an opportunity to be in charge. They were in charge in the Western Cape, go and chat there. Carol Paton in the Sunday Times at that time wrote a very interesting piece in the Sunday Times.
POM. Sorry, who's that now?
KM. Carol Paton, on assessing the performance of that DA led government of the Western Cape.
POM. I'm trying to position things here. In Britain at the moment the Tories are hoping that everything goes wrong in Iraq for Blair, that it gets screwed up, they're hoping that the economy will start they're hoping the other party will fail to govern well so that they can say, "We'll govern better." What's the difference between - ?
KM. At the political level it's logical that an opposition, it's not unpatriotic in fact for an opposition to wish for the ruling party to commit major blunders that would benefit them. But that's different from saying what is bad for SA is good for us.
POM. Now who says that?
KM. The DA.
POM. They wouldn't put up a statement saying what's bad for SA is good for us.
KM. You go and check, you must check that, that's what they did.
POM. I'm going to ask you a funny question: if you were the DA, what would you be doing to try to be a credible, non-racist small party but one that's capable of growth, saying we've got to look to the long term, it's not going to happen overnight, we know that? How would you behave in terms of positioning yourself as an opposition party to the ANC?
KM. Firstly we would have to be a non-racial party and a democratic party, a party with internal democracy. So that's a starting point. Anything pretentious doesn't work because people here, the black people here, were brought up on participatory democracy and that's what sometimes people do not understand that in the ANC people love the ANC because in the ANC they have a right and the space to debate and speak and talk in a language of their command and nobody can lord it over anybody else. That internal democracy is critical in the first instance because otherwise if that doesn't exist you will attract Professor Themba Sono and other people and once they are in there and they realise that there is no internal democracy they leave. You'd never be able to grow into a meaningful force unless you do that. You see we have been promoting the vision of non-racialism from 1955. Next year on 26th June it will be the 50th anniversary of Kliptown. So you have a whole generation brought up on that political diet of non-racialism. So therefore anybody who says, well we are going to be exclusive, can't win in this country so you have to be non-racial. But I am saying there are no half measures in that regard. You really internally have to be non-racial. I think that's a weakness of a party like the DA because you see there's a yearning for dominance still. They are very sensitive when they put blacks forward, it is really to satisfy a requirement so they can say, "Look here", and so on, but in the manner in which they operate, the internal democracy, they are exclusive still. Participatory people want to belong and know that they've a right to speak and debate.
POM. Is there a difference between the African concept of a participatory democracy and, say, the western model which would be more the top down party organisation? Are they conceptually different?
MG. They're different. We know here, I mean the NP then, and people have said to us, "No, look, you people debate everything. We come from a culture where what the leader says is what we go with." So there's a difference even here in SA. That's why I'm talking about that if any party, if a predominantly white party truly wants to become a meaningful force they have to open up for internal participatory democracy. Without that they can never be a serious party at all, they cannot be.
POM. This has been said to me too that
KM. Because also, you see, the levels of education, the training and all of that, some of these white parties, I mean people come at meetings as though they are in a board meeting of a corporate company you know in a corporate company, going to sit in a board room. The documentation would have been prepared, you would have received it two weeks earlier, you would have gone through it and the options for every decision sought would have been clearly enumerated there. So the chairperson says, "Take the document as read?" Yes, yes. "Well, item 1, which option? There are three options here. Option 2? Option 2. So adopted. Item 2." So the meeting takes virtually 40 minutes and they go their ways and they've taken major decisions of course. That kind of approach would never work. I mean if we had to work like that in the ANC, the ANC would die in no time.
POM. So the NEC, or the National Working Committee, what form does that take in terms of is there an agenda prepared, papers prepared?
KM. That's right. Same form.
POM. Well what's the difference between them?
KM. But they are discussed you see, they are discussed. You have to discuss.
POM. So the options on the - ?
KM. If you say to people, "Here's this issue, here's a recommendation." They say, "Where's the background information? How are we expected to engage with this issue and take a decision on this matter?" And it stands down. You can never do that in the ANC, you can never do that. Even at conference, I mean at conference with 3000 delegates they debate and the debate doesn't even begin at conference, the debate starts a year earlier through the structures. By the time they get to conference where they also debate draft resolutions they would have debated that very issue over and over and over.
POM. Might not that be, since participatory democracy is something indigenous to African culture and something that is not part of 'white' culture or 'western' culture for that matter, really an opposition that is non participatory based is not really a viable opposition in SA?
KM. That's true.
POM. And the logical conclusion of that would be that the DA, which is predominantly still made up of whites, can never be an opposition because whites can never know, culturally know, because it's not in their 'genes' so to speak, how to
KM. No, it's not genetic.
POM. I'm only using that word, put that word in quotes, OK?
KM. No, no, I understand. That's why I am saying if they were to open up for this internal debate and not because they are in charge, so when new members come in who engage I mean Professor Themba Sono would be in a position to engage them with logical arguments and so on, if he himself still feels so deeply that they are racists, it means that they've not quite opened up, they're not open-minded on issues. They come with fixed views and very strong views and positions. That in itself, I think, would make it very, very difficult for them to make inroads among black people because the culture, the political culture of this country is that it is participatory and people know that none is more equal than others. Certainly there are things that you would never ever do with an ANC branch or members of the ANC, or in the labour movement, the trade union movement. There are things that you would never ever be able to do. Leadership, I mean you are elected but the members know that you are accountable to them. There is no confusion about that issue whereas in some of these parties the leader is the leader. I mean in the ANC there's respect for leadership but, of course, once matters are debated they debate. They don't for ever confuse leadership for monopoly of wisdom. Never.
POM. Let me extend that into what comes up all the time Zimbabwe, and I assume Sebastian asked you about this and I have the look or the look of not having heard what you said or what he asked you. But here you would have the DA saying there is this abuse of freedom of speech, you have political repression, you have human rights abuses. Leaving aside the land issue altogether what you have is they would call Mugabe a tyrant, a political tyrant. That's the way they classify and that's the way the west classifies him. You have this anomalous relationship between the ANC, the people who fought against political repression seemingly keeping their mouths shut. I've talked to Morgan Tsvangarai, at one time the Mail & Guardian I think published an abbreviated version of an interview I did with him, and Smuts replied to something that he had said when he talked about President Mbeki.
KM. Well he has since learned, Morgan Tsvangarai, he has since learned.
POM. He hasn't learned?
KM. He has learned since that time. You see they went into an election and their election is constituency based and he lost. That's why he's not an MP. Their other members who won seats in their constituencies, mainly in the urban areas and they are in parliament, they are parliamentarians. Now, of course, then the presidential elections came around and proceeding from the confidence that Mugabe would have so thoroughly discredited himself in the eyes of the electorate, that he would win the elections. OK? That, therefore, victory is a foregone conclusion. Now he did not win. Having failed to win
POM. But, there's a but there, that observers other than the South African observers, said it was a badly flawed election.
KM. And SADC.
POM. And SADC said that.
KM. SADC said the elections were fair.
POM. The European Union and others said they weren't.
KM. That's right.
POM. The Commonwealth. OK. So let's park that for a minute, I want to get to the militancy Mugabe has, the intimidation that's going on, the breaking up of the opposition parties, the jailing of people, the dismissal of members of the judiciary, the closing down of newspapers. I mean all of these are inimical what the ANC would stand for.
KM. That's right.
POM. And yet the ANC is not out there saying, "You've got to cut this stuff out."
KM. That's right. We say so.
POM. I don't hear it.
KM. Well, what we don't say, what we don't do is to climb on the rooftops and say that, but we say it to those who matter.
POM. OK.
KM. The MDC knows our views, ZANU PF know our views, that's why they would accept us as mediators in the process, otherwise they wouldn't, they wouldn't have accepted us at all. But they accept us precisely because they know our views and also, you see, the point I was getting at about Tsvangarai and the MDC, is that in essence the MDC was not a political party, it was a protest vote in essence in our own analysis. Now I know that the easiest thing to do is not to analyse the concrete reality, is to label and then proceed on the basis of that label. That's why the Americans and the British could commit a fundamental error like they have done in Iraq, precisely because they never analysed that concrete reality there, they never informed themselves. They just thought that, well, we've got these puppets here, we'll install them we'll get the oil and what we need is just justification for that. It's a simple straightforward agenda. (Tape goes blank here.)
KM. So you have a nuclear organisation, you build yourself into an organisation over policies, around policies. And I gave them an example that we have the PAC here in SA, the PAC has been around since 1959 but precisely because it existed for less than a year, almost, before it was banned with the ANC it never ever got to the point where it buckled down to policy. All you hear are general sentimental statements and I say precisely because of that every little difference that visits them divides them because people subscribe to policy positions. That's what drew, was keeping mass organisations together, there was clarity on issues.
. I said precisely because the British, the EU people, the Americans, thought they could through external pressure remove a Mugabe who was elected in an election from office and probably remove ZANU PF, such that they actually in their seriousness lost sight of the fact that the MDC was the main opposition in parliament. They controlled, since local government elections, all the urban municipalities without exception, and I say to them it's not the same thing as saying you are dealing with an opposition that is illegal and is not having the political space to put its case across and mobilise the people behind itself. It's not the same thing.
. You are coming at the Zimbabwe issue as though there is absolutely no political space for them. I speak to them, not to others, I said to them, I mean Welshman, their secretary, I spoke to him at length from an organisational point of view and said to him, "This is what you should do to build organisation. This is how you must engage to create space because you already have a platform as a parliamentary party and you control the municipalities in the urban areas." And I said to him this notion that external pressure can remove a democratically elected government like that one, because you see you made challenges, they challenged by the way, because it's a constituency based system, the law allows for them to challenge outcomes of the results but it's constituency, constituency, by constituency. They did that after the general election in 38 constituencies and those had to be processed through the courts, each constituency, all the documentation and everything else, and some they won, others they lost. And now by challenging even the presidential result they would still have to go and get all discrepancies that would have happened in all the constituencies so that having done that they should be where they are declared winners, they are declared winners in terms of those votes and so on. Where they would have lost they would have lost. But it's a thoroughgoing process.
. But of course the EU and the British had no interest in those kinds of facts. Their interest was to exert pressure so that they can see a regime change and the MDC's expectation was that that was going to work because it was powerful people. And I said to Welshman, "It will not work." I said to him, "It's a wrong demand, it's an absolutely wrong demand. It's not winnable. What you should be demanding", I said to him, "is to do a constitution which is democratic because the constitution gives more powers to the President and the ruling party to be able to generate pieces of legislation that whittle down the political space. So you need a democratic constitution. You can co-sponsor that with ZANU PF and the whole country adopts that constitution. You will then", I said to him, this is three years ago already, I said to him, "If you succeed in this regard the constitution will provide for the establishment of an Independent Electoral Commission to do a voters' roll, roll out its infrastructure and if you have that and government can't determine the number of voting stations, it is done by the Independent Electoral Commission which would make sure that they run they elections and they supervise the elections properly and you would be there, your party representatives would be there to verify every voting station and so on and so forth." Now I said, "That in itself will bring goodwill to you and the country", and I said, "If you had to do that you must also then align the term of office of the President to the general elections so that your general elections must happen at the same time as the presidential elections." I said, "If you were to do that by the time" meaning 2005, I said, "That would set three years instead of six years. He would step down at that point." It didn't happen. It did not happen.
POM. Just a couple of further questions on this.
KM. But I'm saying that if you have a legitimate government and state and you have external powers seeking to dislodge that legitimate government, what you are saying to us, the ANC, is that you would do the same tomorrow to us. The point I'm making is that we can see an injustice even if it's wrapped up in the veneer of justice here. We can see that, yes.
POM. The MDC hurt themselves by their 'backers' being the former colonial powers in Africa.
KM. Not just that, not just that, but the demand itself. Remember, you see part of the problem with the powers that be is that (a) they have tried these tricks elsewhere. In Mozambique the first democratic elections happened and the second one, the second democratic election, they were there saying so they tried it in Mozambique at the second democratic elections and they actually were canvassing and campaigning for Renamo and the Renamo leader, before the election, in the run-up, at the height of the campaign, said that if we do not win this election then we will know that Frelimo rigged the votes. That was echoed by the representatives of the German government, the USA, their ambassadors.
. Therefore, when they do that in Zimbabwe we had long analysed the Mozambican experience and we could see that here is an attempt to dislodge a legitimate government, but of course because they are our neighbours and we are also concerned about the economic situation and the political situation we were prepared to engage with them but meaningfully, and we tell them plainly, otherwise we wouldn't participate in futile exercises. But we are aware that democracy can only be strengthened through the participation of the people where it can never be imported, it can never be imposed because you come from without that's why we don't say we have all the answers there. We say our role is to support the efforts of the Zimbabweans to find a solution to their problems because if we were to pretend that we have the solution to their problems it would never work. It must be home grown. They must accept it themselves and say this is what we are going to do ourselves as the government. Our role is to support that.
. Now the role of the EU and the British and the Americans was to say, "We know this is a tyrant, he must be out, he will be out, and we are going to exert pressure." What kind of pressure? Short of an invasion, of course they say don't travel to our countries and that's about it. Some have even made comparisons between the SA struggle and the Zimbabwean situation and I say the two are incomparable, completely incomparable. In SA the people here had been struggling, at least in the name of the ANC, from 1912. It took 82 years, yes 82 years, and the rest of the world knew that they were supporting the efforts of the people of SA for freedom and not the other way around.
POM. The rest of the world were supporting?
KM. They knew that they were supporting the efforts of the people of SA for freedom, but that the people of SA were themselves fighting for that freedom. We could go to any country, any organisation, with our freedom charter and say this is what we are fighting for and they knew what they were committed to in giving support to us. We said this is what obtained, it's an evil system: this is what we want to replace it with. And, therefore, there was clarity, and that we were ourselves in the forefront of that struggle.
. Now in Zimbabwe it's like the Iraqi situation that you will have a grouping and then anoint them as the government in waiting and then exert pressure to remove the democratically elected government. It's not sustainable, it can never work. We would never be party to any such thing because if it can be done in Zimbabwe it will be done to us tomorrow, the same thing will be done to us. That is why we would rather the Zimbabwean people in their organised form, MDC included, should commit to finding a solution of a democratic nature to deepen their democracy. I mean we condemn, we condemn the fact that sometimes where MDC is treated as an illegal organisation when in fact it is a properly registered constituted party.
POM. Do you think, just to finish this up and you have somebody waiting I'll have to come back to see you again on another issue too, the first one is do you think that the MDC is hurting itself by, for example, fundraising in Britain?
KM. No, not quite. I would say, Padraig, we were shunned by governments when we were a liberation movement. Remember we were a 'terrorist' organisation in the eyes of the British government and the US and at a particular time government such as Sweden accepted us and so on, and yet representations to the British government go back to 1919. So even we had 48 years of peaceful struggle before we took up arms. So in a way I am saying if the MDC was not just a protest vote but a political party, political organisation, they would first formulate policies and on the basis of those policies go out and not just present themselves as beneficiaries of the Labour Party government in Britain, but speak and mobilise the people in Britain, the people in SA on a basis of the programme and policies, that our country Zimbabwe will go down because this is what is happening, this is what obtains and this is what we stand for.
. You know, President Mugabe said to me once that if the MDC were to be a truly home grown opposition which says, I mean I am trying to quote him verbally, "If they were to say well you fellows fought for the land, we understand that, but you are ignoring these industrial challenges and therefore we are opposing you because we want to take this country forward", he said he would sleep content that indeed this is a legitimate opposition wanting to take the country forward. He says, "Now you see they are just presenting themselves as an extension of Tony Blair and so on", well he's very crude in that regard. So I am saying that even if amongst the external support they were getting would come from the British government it wouldn't matter, but it would not be from government only. Now, boom, their thing was it's other governments that are supporting terror and therefore the first question, you don't have to be a political scientist to be able to see through this, the first question you ask is what kind of democracy is this that would be imposed by others like that? If these people do not have policies obviously they are installed tomorrow. Those who installed them would determine the policies and there's no such democracy.
POM. So it would be a new form of colonialism by a different name.
KM. Yes absolutely. It's neo-colonialism.
POM. You have another appointment obviously. I will come back to you again.
KM. OK.
POM. In the meantime I will send you a list of things that I want. There's a certain thing I want to talk to you about and that is in 1997 -