LETTER: RDM should be closed down immediately

I gasp in disbelief that Bernard Benson bemoans SA’s failure to pour petrol onto the Ukrainian fire ("ANC spurns chance to sell Denel’s howitzers to Ukraine”, June 8). He is evidently unashamed by SA’s disgraceful complicity in Saudi Arabian/United Arab Emirates war crimes in Yemen because of exports by Rheinmetall Denel Munition (RDM) of 155mm shells used in G5 and G6 artillery, and other munitions. Or that former president Jacob Zuma, with Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2016 jointly opened a $240m RDM-designed and installed munitions factory in Saudi Arabia. He is likewise obviously ignorant of the stipulations of the National Conventional Arms Control Act that SA will not export arms a) to countries that abuse human rights and b) to regions in conflict.

Benson is also wrong in blaming Russia for the prospective starvation of up to 350-million people in Africa and Asia.  It is actually Ukraine that is responsible for the sea mines that prevent Ukrainian exports of wheat from Odesa. Russia proposes clearance of these Ukrainian mines so that wheat can be exported, but Ukraine rejects Turkey’s initiative to mediate the issue. The madness of this war in Ukraine is highlighted by  Volodymyr Zelensky’s gullibility that supplies of US and British missiles and other weapons will somehow defeat the Russians. 

Even the previously-notorious American warmonger Henry Kissinger has rationally called for an immediate cessation of the conflict before it becomes the third world war — Ukraine must acknowledge the territorial losses of Crimea and the Donbas.  The US and EU were repeatedly warned since the 1990s that Nato’s eastward expansion was seen as an existential threat to Russia. Undeterred, but with deliberate intentions to humiliate Russia, the US and Nato recklessly provoked the invasion as a proxy war, and as was predictable the consequences include the devastation of Ukraine.

To evade German arms export regulations Rheinmetall deliberately locates much of its production in countries such as SA, where the rule of law is weak. Almost four years have now lapsed since the explosion at RDM’s plant in Macassar, Somerset West, killed eight workers, when public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan promised a thorough investigation. The families of those workers and the Macassar community still await finding out whether last year’s department of employment and labour investigation will recommend legal prosecution of RDM for criminal negligence.

Testimonies at last year’s hearings decisively discredited RDM’s disgraceful attempt to blame the workers, and in particular supervisor Nico Samuels, for their own deaths. Samuels had been overruled by management when he informed them that a newly-installed valve in a blending machine was not fitting properly. That machine was blending chemicals for 155mm shells for export to Germany when it exploded with the equivalence of 750 kgs of TNT, thus about half of the 1,500 kgs TNT equivalence of the Beirut explosion of 2020.

It is clearly untenable to locate an ammunitions factory in a residential area such as Macassar. RDM should be closed down immediately. Its four factories and properties in Somerset West, Wellington, Potchefstroom and Boksburg should then be decontaminated at Rheinmetall’s expense, and repurposed to create more and better jobs than killing civilians in Yemen or Ukraine. 

The late Oliver Tambo rightly commented during the 1980s that “Armscor is a Frankenstein monster that cannot be reformed and must be destroyed”.  Similarly, the 1994/95 Cameron commission of inquiry found Armscor to be managerially incompetent and irredeemably corrupt. Tambo’s apt perception equally applies to Denel (as the bastard offspring of Armscor), but into which the ANC since 1994 has irresponsibly poured tens of billions of rand in the grotesque notion that killing foreigners for profit is a lucrative business. 

Terry Crawford-Browne

World Beyond War SA

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