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29 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (1998)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc29 and id is 1 raw text is: LA Crime, Law & Social Change 29: 1-29, 1998. 1 O © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Crimes of the state: Victimisation of South African political exiles in the United Kingdom MARK ISRAEL Flinders University, SA 5001, Australia (e-mail: mark.israel@flinders.edu.au) Abstract. Victimology and criminology have been spectacularly unsuccessful in confronting the way that governments victimise their opponents. This paper is concerned with state vio- lence against opponents who are based ouside the national territory, political exiles. Through- out their time in exile in the United Kingdom, South Africans connected to the African National Congress were subject to physical and symbolic violence from the South African government through a series of ideological, administrative and paramilitary measures. In this paper, I use the example of counter-exile activity in London to argue that researchers must contemplate research agendas that challenge state policy when the causes of violence have been the direct result of state policy even if that policy has been fundamental to the continuing existence of the regime. Introduction By the late sixties, the South African state had succeeded in almost wiping out both the mass-political struggle and the internal underground movements. Large numbers of activists were forced to move into exile - many in Africa, some to Europe. Outside Africa, the largest concentration of South African political exiles was found in the United Kingdom. During their time in the United Kingdom, from the 1960s to the 1990s, these exiles were subject to physical and symbolic violence from the South African government. Com- pared to life in South Africa, this was only a small part of the pressure that the opposition faced. Compared to the position of most other political activists in Britain, the effects of psychological and violent threats were acute. Analysis of the causes and effects of violence are key elements in the academic inter- disciplinary areas of victimology and criminology, and yet neither field has shown much interest in state violence. This paper is concerned with challenging that failing. It considers why victimologists and criminologists have eschewed victimisation by the state, and uses a case study of the violence perpetrated by one state, South Africa, against opponents who were based outside its national territory to show how criminologists and victimologists could and should contribute to work in the area. Using this example of the victimisation of political exiles, this paper

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