Publication	Sunday Independent
Date	2011-09-19
Reporter	Ivor Powell
Web Link	www.iol.co.za

Terry Crawford-Browne is a lot more formidable than he looks, as President Jacob Zuma recently discovered.

This week, faced with Crawford-Browne’s application to the Constitutional Court for a full judicial review of the legal probity of South Africa’s notorious arms procurement programme of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Zuma effectively backed down.

Instead of opposing the application to force him to institute a judicial commission of inquiry – thereby keeping the lid on the scandal – the affidavit Zuma submitted offered to pay Crawford-Browne’s legal costs, and announced to the world at large that the president would indeed be establishing such a commission.

Or at least some kind of commission.

While upbeat, Crawford-Browne remains vigilant.

“We are waiting to see the terms of reference,” he says, “to judge whether this is an exercise in damage control or a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of things. At the very least we require that the commission is public and has powers to subpoena witnesses. Only then would I consider withdrawing the Constitutional Court application. If not, the fight will go on.”

It is a fight for Christian justice that began more than 30 years ago when he was a dedicated and active member of the community of St George’s Cathedral in the Gardens, and a member of the Church’s Peace and Justice Committee. Crawford-Browne was instrumental behind the scenes in establishing and administering the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) together with activists from Cosatu, the UDF and Black Sash.

Now 25 years after its disbanding, the ECC is acknowledged as having played a greater role than any other organisation in demoralising and in the end debilitating the once-unstoppable apartheid-era South African military machine. Some years later, under the spiritual guidance of then-Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and acting in concert with other spiritual leaders, notably the late Beyers Naude and then-Calvinist firebrand Allan Boesak, Crawford-Browne went on to play a key role in promoting and designing a regime of economic sanctions that ultimately brought the Pretoria regime to its collective knees in the early 1990s.

In this role, acting on Tutu’s mandate, Crawford-Browne briefed the UN and the Commonwealth heads of government in lobbying for the adoption of morally driven sanctions against the South African government.

It was a role for which Crawford-Browne was singularly well suited. Born Irish in Libya where his father served as trade commissioner administering British interests in the aftermath of World War II, and educated in Malta, he was at this time a US citizen and a seasoned international banker. Working for Nedbank since the mid-1970s, he knew the terrain from both sides, having been party to several questionable Reserve Bank transactions as the apartheid regime covertly moved money to sanctions-busters and other dubious clients.

Now on the side of the angels, Crawford-Browne addressed the US Congress lobbying for the adoption of the comprehensive sanctions package that was later enshrined in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, passed through Congress in 1986 to compel economic disengagement by US companies from South African markets and a progressive isolation of the Pretoria regime from the Western power bloc. Remarkably the legislation was passed in the face of a presidential veto by then-president Ronald Reagan.

It was only in the early 1990s, however, that Crawford-Browne turned his attentions to the arms trade. Mandated again by the ever-benignly inscrutable Tutu to represent the Anglican church’s position before the Cameron Commission into the murky world of weapons trafficking, Crawford-Browne argued a moral position on weapons dealing in the face of the barely regulated sale in 1993 of AK 47s by Armscor to Middle East end-users palpably engaged in regional conflict.

The end result of the commission was the establishing of the National Conventional Arms Control Committee, finally set up in 2002 to regulate the arms trade and prevent the sale of South African weapons into war zones and other situations where they could fuel conflicts or be used against civilians.

By the mid-1990s, when Crawford-Browne – still acting on behalf of the Anglican church, but by this time at the behest of Tutu’s successor, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane – made an input into the same Defence Review that ultimately resulted in the still-controversial arms procurement programme, his position on the issue was already fully articulated.

The priority in the new South Africa, Crawford-Browne told the review, was poverty alleviation, and a new democracy at peace with itself and the world could ill afford to be diverting resources to the business of war.

The argument – widely dismissed as quixotic at the time and in the interim, and legally challenged by the government on several occasions, most recently by former Finance minister Trevor Manuel in securing a 2010 interdict preventing Crawford-Browne from accusing him of corruption – continues to underpin Crawford-Browne’s peace activism.

It also lies at the heart of his application to the Constitutional Court. In essence the argument developed by Crawford-Browne together with legal counsel Paul Hoffman, and supported by disaffected former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein and researcher Paul Holden *1, is to the effect that the deal was entered into in violation of the constitutional responsibilities of government.

To highlight the facts, Crawford-Browne demanded a full and public TRC-style judicial review overseen by five judges, and equipped with powers of subpoena, to review the evidence and finally decide whether South Africa had been ripped off.

The goal was to secure a repudiation of the arms deal as essentially corrupt, and a formal cancellation of the whole deal.

As Crawford-Browne explains, the application is not as fanciful as it might appear. South Africa continues to be bound – until at least 2021 – by punishing debt schedules to pay off the weaponry.

The key thing, though, is that the mechanisms are built in to cancel the deal to the benefit of the South African fiscus.

“There are clauses written into the contracts that if bribery can be proved, not only can the deal be legally cancelled, but also penalties extracted,” he notes.

“The longer it drags out the more evidence accumulates that the whole process was greased with kickbacks and corruption.

“It is no longer very difficult to demonstrate this with the recent admissions from SAAB in Sweden and Ferrostaal in Germany, and add to this the boxes and boxes of documentation the UK’s Serious Fraud Office passed on to the Scorpions. We just need to get it out in the open.”

Not even Zuma appears any longer to doubt Crawford-Browne’s commitment and capacity to do just that.

With acknowledgements to Ivor Powell and Sunday Independent.

*1       This is called keeping under the radar, intentionally or otherwise.