Chapter 9 - Namibia, Sanctions, and Apartheid’s Death Grip

Summary

Introduction

For Americans the late 1980s represented a period of jubilation, with disappointment peppered throughout. For many southern Africans, they remained full of tragedy and challenge. Some of these challenges, such as the trials of the Cassinga detainees, represented longer-term efforts to utilize law to change individual dissidents’ lives, if not society at large. The success of these efforts did occur in court, though just as often these victories represented changing the changing geopolitics that ultimately played an outsized role in making apartheid untenable.

Founding the Legal Resources Centre

As these tensions came to the fore, the Project also increased its involvement in Namibia. David Smuts—a Stellenbosch- and United States-educated relation of Jan Smuts—founded the Legal Resources Centre (Windhoek) and Human Rights Centre (Ongwediva) in 1988. The LRC paired an attorney and advocate in each office, with paralegals managing most of the work. Smuts had worked in private practice and realized the scale and volume of assassinations, detentions and torture occurring in the country. He increased his staff quickly, hiring black paralegals whom he trained in anticipation of a day when they could practise law in an independent Namibia. As the Project had worked with Smuts through his firm of Lorentz and Bone, it agreed to act as an intermediary between the new LRC and the J. Roderick McArthur Foundation, which provided major funding.

The organization focused on educating (especially northern) Namibians about their legal rights and providing representation for civilians who alleged acts of atrocity and violence by the occupying South African troops. This became particularly important as violence against Namibian nationalists increased. The country had, as we have seen, been at the centre of myriad international court cases and UN Resolutions. McDougall remained intent upon bringing pressure to heighten awareness and spur action among the international community where, as Susanne Riveles points out, there was a “discrepancy between the existing legal provisions for Namibia and the absence and inability or the disinterest of the international communities to enforce these legal provisions”.

The Legal Resources Centre soon became the only full-time legal clinic operating among Northern Namibia's approximately 600,000 residents, and it opened satellite legal advice offices in Tsumeb, Rundu and Walvis Bay. Within its first year, the LRC handled more than 450 cases.