LETTER: Questionable semantics about incursions

Ashraf Kagee’s article on recent incursions into the territories of weaker nations to subjugate and enslave them at all costs made for most interesting reading (“The unequal regard for human life”, March 31).

Yet this phenomenon is as old as mankind itself and will unfortunately never stop. The Old Testament and scriptures of other faiths relate these ancient events.

The semantics of what to call these dominant incursions —  always the victor telling the story — will forever be questionable. The historical terms used are “raids” (the Jameson Raid of 1895), “occupation” (the first and second British occupations of the Cape, 1795 and 1806), “military operations” (as used by the apartheid regime when it invaded two weaker nations, Namibia and Angola) and nowadays “invasions” (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

The apartheid regime also conducted cross-border raids into our weaker “frontline states”, killing lots of people, even children. Its defence force later went into troubled townships to assist its police force, and euphemistically called them “operational areas”, again killing civilians.

It baffles me that the good professor chose to ignore these and two others. Isn’t Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara another invasion of a neighbour’s territory with the accompanying significant loss of life? And it continues to this day. Lastly, how will one classify Britain’s (or Argentina’s) occupation of the Falkland Islands, which led to a war in 1982? Argentina claimed to have occupied it first as it lies so close to the mainland, and it even has its own name for it, “Las Malvinas”.

Yes, in all these devastating killing sprees lives did not matter at all since the lives of the poor and marginalised have never mattered, and never will.

Koert Meyer
Welgelegen

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.