The African National Congress (ANC) speaker at next weekend's Sinn Féin ard fheis will have a new topic to discuss with journalists and delegates in the bar.
It is the revelation that in the late 1970s and the 1980s, Kader Asmal, the scholarly human-rights lawyer who founded the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM), helped arrange for South African insurgents to train at IRA camps.
Of course, the fraternal delegate will also be able to point to links between his country's former apartheid regime and all the main loyalist terror groups. Those links resulted in the importation of tonnes of weapons to Northern Ireland, some of which have never been recovered. Unlike the IRA/ANC alliance, which led to no known fatalities, that arms trade was responsible for bodies on Ulster streets.
Asmal denied links between the IRA and the ANC in his lifetime. "Tendentious," he spluttered at the suggestion in a BBC interview in 2002, ticking off the journalist for a "dangerous strategy".
As a member of the IAAM at the time the links were in operation, I occasionally met Asmal. He was full of gratitude for Irish support for the boycott campaign against South Africa's apartheid regime, from which he was an exile. He applauded the Dunnes Stores' workers who went on strike rather than handle South African goods, and he praised the rock group U2 for helping to fund Nelson Mandela's trip to London in 1990. There was never any mention of bombing an oil refinery, an incident now described in his posthumously published autobiography Politics in My Blood. Asmal clearly supported the nationalist cause in Ireland but, as he says in his book, he did not support IRA violence. He did, however, back Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC's military wing. He felt that the absence of a universal franchise and a democratic way of changing the South African government justified the use of force against it.
You would never have guessed this owlish professor had become personally involved. Yet he played his part efficiently enough. He tells how, in the 1970s, he was asked by the ANC to organise training in Ireland for Umkhonto militants. "It was a delicate task because it would of necessity involve the IRA," he explained in the book. The problem was that "none of us wished to place the ANC office in London in jeopardy or fuel the allegations of connivance between the ANC and IRA".
Although Sinn Féin was affiliated to the IAAM, he chose a circuitous route, asking Mick O'Riordan, then the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) and a trusted friend, to act as a go-between. A veteran of the Spanish civil war and a member of the IRA in the 1930s, O'Riordan had some experience of delicate negotiations.
Material released after the fall of the Soviet Union records that in the early 1970s he wrote to the Kremlin saying: "Dear comrades, I would like to outline in written form a request for assistance in acquiring the following types of arms: 2,000 assault rifles (7.62mm) and 500 rounds of ammunition for each; 150 hand-held machine-guns (9mm) and 1,000 rounds of ammunition for each" for use by the Official IRA. Such was his influence that the scheme, Operation Splash, was approved by the KGB, although it eventually fell through.
In the case of South Africa, Asmal records that O'Riordan approached Gerry Adams and that two Umkhonto militants received a fortnight's training courtesy of the IRA. Adams has always denied IRA membership and has not commented. However, a Sinn Féin spokesman told me: "Look, we have never denied our active support for the ANC."
Asmal reports that the Umkhonto members trained in Ireland passed on their expertise to the rest of the organisation at camps in Angola. Later, the organisation's high command approached Asmal to arrange for IRA members to travel to South Africa to carry out reconnaissance on the Sasolburg oil refinery in preparation for a bombing.
"Once again, I arranged the task with Adams of Sinn Féin, through the mediation of O'Riordan," Asmal wrote. The Sasol bombing on June 1, 1980 caused no deaths or injuries, but was seen as a dramatic escalation of the terrorist campaign and a propaganda coup. Asmal was at an academic conference in London when his wife Louise rang to tell him to come home quickly. "There on the television was the extraordinary spectacle of Sasol in flames, lighting up the sky for miles around," he wrote. "We cheered and felt we had made a major contribution to the struggle."
All of which helps to explain the strong support of South Africa's ANC government for Sinn Féin's role in the peace process and in bringing the IRA's campaign to an end.
They provided training in negotiations, supplied observers when IRA weapons were put into dumps, and their friendly interest was eventually accepted by unionists who attended a conference in South Africa alongside Sinn Féin at a time when the DUP was still refusing to talk to the republicans.
Loyalist sympathies were generally with the apartheid government. The links culminated in the 1988 importation of 200 AK-47 assault rifles, 90 Browning pistols, 500 fragmentation grenades, 30,000 rounds of ammunition and 12 RPG-7 rocket launchers in a shipment from Lebanon arranged by South African agents. The arms were divided between the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance, a protest movement with which the DUP severed its links when news of the illegal arms importation emerged.
The UDA's share of the weapons was seized as members drove past Portadown police station. Jimmy Craig, a UDA brigadier who was passing information to both the IRA and the police, is thought to have been responsible for the members' capture.
In the end, the arms importation was financed by a £300,000 (€340,000) bank robbery in Portadown.
Brian Nelson, the UDA's head of intelligence and a British agent, wrote in his diary that his handler told him the shipment had been let though to preserve his cover.
That wasn't the only intelligence link. Nelson is thought to have travelled to South Africa in 1985 to inspect weapons at the invitation of a Northern Ireland man who worked for the government. Armscor, the South African arms-manufacturing company, offered loyalists £250,000 in cash or weapons if they could steal plans or parts for the Starstreak and Blowpipe missiles being manufactured in Belfast. That fell through; security at the factory was too tight to get enough information out.
Relations between Northern Ireland paramilitaries and South Africa, and perhaps other regions such as Cuba and the Middle East, may contain more murky secrets than have yet been revealed. It is a pity that we have to wait for the selective revelations of the dead to hear them, and to learn the lessons of our history.
The case for a systematic truth-recovery process, like the ones in South Africa or Germany and some European countries after the fall of communism, is compelling. However, with no clear victory in the Northern Ireland conflict, and the ongoing prospect of prosecution for Troubles offences, there is no incentive for those with stories to tell to do other than take their secrets to the grave.
