[I like this. The old commies getting together for some parly! I am curious to see what happens. Take a good look at this news story directly from the “mouth of the ANC”… and keep in mind what many of us whites told people about being “under communist attack”. Now you see many hidden facts being acknowledged in the open! Note we said they were trained by the Russians, they went to Russia, even to China.

There is outright rubbish in this article about Mandela being cool to the Russians. I’ll bet the CIA was twisting Mandela’s arm. Right after the 1994 elections, they announced various forms of military co-operation between the S.African military establishment and Russia. Among the news announcements I heard over radio and TV:-
o Russian jet engines would be put in S.African Airforce aircraft
o We would cooperate with the Russians on tank technology.

Am I the only one who remembers that? And… some time in the 1990’s, the Russian airforce came to S.Africa and did manoevres here with our airforce. It was on TV. Am I the only one who remembers these things?

But I suspect that Britain and America did not like it… and they put the heat on Mandela quietly. About 3 years ago, that was confirmed to me by some Zimbabweans who made friends with someone in President Mbeki’s office – that Mandela wanted to go all out Communist – but the Western world quietly turned the screws on him and kicked him into line.

But the blacks will one day try again… That socialist dream is not over… Jan]

Putin heads to South Africa on long overdue trip

September 03, 2006, 12:30

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives in South Africa this week on a visit many veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle believe is long overdue. Putin will be the first Kremlin leader to visit South Africa when he arrives in Cape Town on Tuesday, despite Moscow’s active support of the country’s long battle to end white rule.

Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, one of South Africa’s best known white radicals and communists, recalls with nostalgia his own guerrilla training in Odessa in 1964, when he was 26. “One must hand it to the former Soviet Union,” Kasrils said. “They were really the main staple support for the ANC (African National Congress) and South African liberation. They were really fantastic in terms of military training and in terms of weapons, in terms of food and the like.”

Kasrils was among the first group of 200 guerrillas the then-banned ANC sent to Russia for military training. Many senior members of South Africa’s current government, including President Thabo Mbeki, were to follow.

Due mainly to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, relations between Pretoria and Moscow took a long time to warm after Nelson Mandela led the ANC to electoral victory in 1994, marking the end of apartheid. Mandela in particular was rather cool to the Russians and did not visit Moscow until just before he retired in 1999.

“The ANC government initially saw the new Russian government as a reactionary one,” said Nel Marais, analyst at Pretoria-based think-tank Executive Research Associates.

The Russians on their part appeared more preoccupied with building relations with Europe and China.

But since the end of apartheid and the fall of communism, the two states have evolved along parallel lines as democracies struggling with social problems but blessed with mineral wealth that helped them get back on their feet.

Putin comes to the new South Africa for talks about trade between two of the world’s biggest emerging market economies.

Revolutionary years
Kasrils said few in his group in Odessa imagined then that white rule would end as peacefully as it did. “We really pictured ourselves marching on Pretoria from Johannesburg with AK-47s on our backs and Che Guevara berets,” said Kasrils, nicknamed “Red Ronnie” and described by apartheid authorities as “armed and dangerous”.

A visit by a Kremlin leader would have been unthinkable in the apartheid days when white rulers in South Africa as well as Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, used the fear of communism to great effect both at home and abroad.

It was easy for them to tap into the sentiment of governments in Britain and the United States in particular as the Soviet Union bankrolled liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola, the latter with Cuban support.

Kasrils said the communist bogey was clearly exaggerated, but the apartheid rulers came to believe their own propaganda, to some extent. “They had built in Pretoria at Air Force headquarters a vast underground bunker that goes over 100 metres, because they genuinely believed Russian MiGs would come and attack Pretoria,” he said. Like so many other relics of apartheid politics, the bunker remains buried below the surface. “The generals were to hide in this bunker. It’s still there

Source: SABC News
URL: http://www.sabcnews.com/world/europe/0,2172,1…/p>