The ANC’s Iran Myth: Tehran Was No Friend of the Liberation Movement

Occasionally the South African government’s fraternal relationship with an anti-Western regime becomes a political liability. In such circumstances, the argument will invariably be trotted out that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is just being loyal to a friend who stood by it during its hard apartheid-era times. This is a play on Western guilt, for not unconditionally supporting the ANC at the time, and public ignorance, as these relations were seldom as the ANC claims.

The United States (US)-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic, and the decapitation of its leadership, has meant that the current regime in Iran – with whom the ANC has long aligned South Africa – may not be long for this world. Going forward, this past relationship may bring with it no further rewards, but many liabilities. In order to defend this relationship, the old “historic loyalty” excuse has made a reappearance.

In a recent article in the Daily Maverick Peter Fabricius made the claim that “Iran has been a friend to the African National Congress since the revolution of 1979, when it supported sanctions against apartheid.” In a post on X the ANC Secretary General, Fikile Mbalula, noted that prior to the Iranian revolution the Pahlavi regime was the main oil supplier to apartheid-era South Africa. However, this changed after the new Islamic Republic “cut ties with racist South Africa. Their stance was clear: Iran cannot have relations with a racist, oppressive regime.” Mbalula stated in conclusion: “We must not forget our friends.”

Misleading

As always, this is a misleading representation of a far more complex historical reality. At the time of the Iranian Revolution the ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) leaderships were wholly intertwined, and the liberation movement hewed closely to the line laid out by the Soviet Union, its dominant sponsor. The Soviet Union and its communist proxy in Iran, the Tudeh Party, supported the overthrow of the Shah, and were initially giddy at the success of the revolution. In an article published in the SACP journal The African Communist in 1980, Ali Khavari, a member of Tudeh Party’s Central Committee, declared that “the revolution has dealt imperialism powerful blows. Until very recently Iran was a trusted ally closely cooperating with Israel and racist South Africa; it supplied them with enormous quantities of oil to help their reactionary regimes survive, and suppressed the liberation movement in our region. New, revolutionary Iran is an ally of the liberation forces of the world.”

Despite this promising start the relationship between the Islamic Republic and the Tudeh Party, and its Soviet sponsors, soon soured. In February 1983 the Islamic Republic launched a major clampdown on Soviet networks in Iran. Numerous Tudeh members were arrested and tortured by Revolutionary Guards, and 200 suspected Soviet agents and collaborators executed. In May 1983 the party itself was dissolved, and numerous Soviet diplomats were expelled. The New York Times reported on 5 May 1983 that this “followed televised confessions in recent days by seven high-ranking party members, several of whom said they had passed military and political information to Moscow for decades. The party members were among 70 people arrested in February and charged with treasonable activities.” A few years later The Washington Post revealed that the Khomeini regime had been acting on intelligence provided by the American Central Intelligence Agency, which had provided it with lists of names acquired from a defector from the Soviet security service, the KGB.

The SACP’s Central Committee issued a statement on 7 May 1983 condemning in the “strongest possible terms” the banning of the Tudeh Party “and the arrest of its leading members, including First Secretary Noureddin Kianouri, on trumped-up charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Their alleged ‘confessions’ can only have been obtained by the use of inhuman and diabolical methods of torture. This suppression of the party of the working people of Iran and the persecution of its members represent a grave threat, not only to their lives, but also to the future of the Iranian revolution.” Tudeh Party members told the African Communist that following their imprisonment the Tudeh’s Party leadership were “subjected to vicious tortures, worse than even in the time of the Shah”.

Frosty

Not surprisingly, then, the relations between Iran and the ANC/SACP went into the deep freeze for the next several years. This was in contrast to the mutually beneficial relationship that clandestinely flourished between the Islamic Republic and the white regime in South Africa. While South Africa needed supplies of oil, Iran was locked in a vicious war with Iraq through the 1980s and desperately needed weapons. The deals between South Africa and Iran and Iraq, both of whom it supplied with arms, took various forms, including direct oil-for-arms bartering.

According to Hennie van Vuuren, in his book Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit: “For example, in 1985, the government of Iran agreed to purchase $750 million worth of South African weapons from Armscor in return for Iranian crude of equal value. The government of Iraq is said to have concluded a similar oil-for-arms deal in the same year to the value of $1 billion.” Kobus van Zyl, a senior official of the Strategic Fuel Fund at the time, told Van Vuuren that “South Africa lived off oil from Iran through the 1980s.” To facilitate such trade Iran maintained an interests section (a de facto embassy) in Johannesburg into the early 1990s.

Mr Mandela Goes to Tehran

In late July 1992 Nelson Mandela visited Iran to request financial support for the ANC. This was one of numerous such trips that the ANC leader made in the early 1990s for this purpose. This was a programme necessitated, in part, by the collapse of many of the ANC’s old Soviet bloc sponsors, the states that had actually supported the ANC at its time of greatest need. Mandela took an entirely mercenary approach to such matters, though, and would thank his host in public for their past support of the struggle (no matter how nominal) and then request a large donation for the ANC in private.

This was one visit that made senior ANC officials particularly queasy, given what the Islamic Republic had done to their Iranian comrades. Ahead of the visit, Aziz Pahad, of the ANC Department of International Affairs, contacted the ANC’s chief representative in London, Mendi Msimang, to find out about the current climate in Iran. In his reply Msimang related that just a few minutes before he had received a delegation from the Iranian community, protesting strongly against the proposed visit. Msimang wrote:

“Recently, the Iranian regime is accused of having publicly hanged four people in the city of Shiraz and a further four in Mashhad shortly after peace demonstrations which had been held in many of the major cities of Iran. The [exiled leftist Mojahedin movement] is feeling very strongly against the visit of Madiba. They argue that it would give respectability to a regime which is repressive and bloody. They object in Mr Mandela being drawn into a country that has experienced all forms of torture and atrocities committed since June 1981. In my opinion, and having listened to the strong feeling expressed by the Mojahedin delegation, I naturally would recommend that the Department advise the President to defer this visit to some date in the future.”

Such advice was disregarded and the trip went ahead. On 22 July 1992 Mandela visited Tehran where he was awarded an honorary doctorate. He also met with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and said that the Iranian revolution in 1979 had “brought much hope for the uprising of the people of South Africa against injustice”.

Most importantly, the visit was a success from a fundraising point of view, and it is this – not wholly imaginary apartheid-era allyship – is what laid the basis for the amicable relations between the ANC and the Islamic Republic going forward.