Southern Africa working group
The Southern Africa Working Group (ASA) was a Swiss anti-communist organization that wanted to support the apartheid regime in South Africa by influencing reporting in the Swiss media.
The ASA was founded in 1982 by Christoph Blocher , then the National Councilor of the SVP. She saw South Africa as an economically and geopolitically important outpost of the West (see Cold War ). Members also included National Councilor Ulrich Schlüer and Brigadier Carl Weidenmann , who had previously been in charge of intelligence cooperation with South Africa on the Swiss side. On the one hand, it was about arms deals, which undermined both Swiss legislation and UN sanctions, and on the other, aliens' police measures against apartheid critics in Switzerland, as a National Fund study in 2005 showed.
According to documents from the South African military intelligence service, contact with groups such as the ASA, the Swiss East Institute around Peter Sager or the Zurich “subversive hunter” Ernst Cincera was given great importance by the apartheid government. This was in connection with the Comops project of the government at the Cape, which had the aim of improving the image and spying on opponents of apartheid. The ASA organized South Africa seminars to which industrialists, the military, scientists, politicians and other speakers were invited. The seat was Zurich .
The ASA published a bulletin that appeared in 182 issues between 1982 and 2001. This included understanding of the Immorality Act , which criminalizes sexual relations between blacks and whites, and the Bantu Education Act , which ordered the separate teaching of blacks and whites. Furthermore, the decolonization of Africa after the Second World War was criticized and a “European re-colonization to save dying Africa” was called for. The follow-up magazine is the Fehlmann Letters , which have been published about six times a year since 2002.
President
- 1982–1990: Christoph Blocher
- since 1993: Jacques-Simon Eggly
literature
- Roger Pfister: Switzerland and South Africa during apartheid. Controversy and “agenda setting” after 1998. ETH Zurich, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-905648-30-X , DOI: 10.3929 / ethz-a-004046723 , pp. 6-8.
Individual evidence
- ^ Jean-Michel Berthoud: Close Swiss ties to the apartheid regime , Swissinfo , March 21, 2005.
- ^ Jean-Michel Berthoud: Light in dark Swiss politics in South Africa , Swissinfo, October 27, 2005. Accessed on August 26, 2018.
- ^ Research group Switzerland - Africa: collaboration with the apartheid regime. In: contradiction . 49, 2005, p. 160. Retrieved August 26, 2018.
- ^ Title recording , catalog of IDS Basel Bern, accessed on August 26, 2018.
- ^ Maria Roselli: Blocher and Merz: Two old friends of South Africa ( Memento from December 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), Work , November 10, 2005.
- ↑ Title recording , Helveticat , accessed on August 25, 2019.