In the 1980's, the United States supported some pretty nasty organizations in the name of beating COMMUNISM.
One organization that the United States government did not ever support or give legitimacy to was RENAMO.
From an article on May 19, 1987 by Anthony Lewis in the New York Times.
Last Sunday a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army blew up a community hall in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.
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Imagine that a day or two later the United States had urged the British Government and its Northern Ireland officials to sit down and negotiate with the terrorists who planned the bombing.
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a significant lobby in Washington is pressing the Reagan Administration to follow exactly that course with another country: Mozambique. The lobby wants the Administration to urge the Government of Mozambique to sit down with Renamo, a rebel force whose atrocities make the I.R.A. look like pikers.
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Jesse Helms and other senators on the radical right have pressed President Reagan for political gestures toward Renamo.
One of the other Senators pushing for political gestures toward Renamo-John McCain.
John McCain was one of the "radical right" Senators who voted for an am
amendment (S. Amdt. 868) sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms to a State Department appropriations bill (there is no available link to the vote online; I found it in the 1987 edition of Congressional Quarterly's yearly release)
This amendment's purpose:
Directing the Secretary of State to consult with all parties to the civil war or insurrection in Mozambique and report to the Congress on whether there exists the possibility of a negotiated settlement that affords all Mozambicans
Another article from that same day, also by Anthony Lewis in the NYT:
They capture peasants and cut off their ears. They burn clinics.
They attack medical teams going to inoculate children.
Those are some of the tactics used by the Mozambican guerrilla group Renamo. Set up originally by white Rhodesia, then supported by South Africa, Renamo was designed to destabilize Mozambique. Its strategy is simple terror.
The viciousness of Renamo has aroused widespread support for the Marxist Government of Mozambique, regardless of ideology. Margaret Thatcher has just agreed to double British aid to $25 million a year; Britain trains Mozambican Army officers and is about to enlarge that program. Even the conservative Government of neighboring Malawi now has soldiers helping the fight against Renamo.
President Reagan supports the Mozambican Government, too.
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But 28 United States senators are trying to turn American policy toward support of Renamo. Among them is the Senate Republican leader, Bob Dole, who wants to succeed Mr. Reagan.
It is an extraordinary idea, hard to believe: that 28 senators, including a candidate for President, should try to line this country up with a group as murderous as Renamo. But it is a fact, one that shows the continuing power of the radical right in the United States.
One of those 28 Senators was, in fact, Senator John McCain.
Even more on Renamo (Kevin Lowther & C. Payne Lucas in the Washington Post, April 27, 1988), as I just want to be sure that their awfulness is made clear:
The boy smiled hesitantly and shook hands. "He's beginning to come out of himself," the American nurse said, explaining that the young Mozambican had little to smile about. Renamo guerrillas had slit his parents' throats while he watched, and when he found his way to safety in neighboring Malawi he became one of 450,000 Mozambicans to flee there during the past 19 months.
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To achieve this end, South Africa transformed Renamo -- an incubus summoned to life by Rhodesian intelligence in 1976 -- into one of the world's most active terrorist organizations.
How else to describe a group that last July slaughtered more than 400 men, women and children in the town of Homoine? Which has committed countless other atrocities throughout this country twice the size of California? Which makes 10-year-old boys into killers? Which has destroyed hundreds of rural clinics and schools and paralyzed economic activity in the country?
UNICEF reported last year that the destruction of health posts and the interruption of Mozambique's successful vaccination campaign had condemned tens of thousands of children to die of measles and other preventable diseases. Mozambique's children die every day so that apartheid may live.
Although there have been frequent press and other reports detailing Renamo's terror, many Western observers have responded with disbelief. A State Department report released last week leaves little comfort for the skeptics, and even less for those who have actively promoted Renamo as a "democratic" alternative to the socialist government in Maputo. The report, based on interviews with 196 Mozambican refugees in several countries, estimates conservatively that Renamo has murdered as many as 100,000 civilians.
And yet John McCain wanted us to force the Mozambican government to negotiate with this group.
Of course, Paul Begala told us yesterday of McCain's involvement in an organization that embraced anti-Semitism and racism to end communism.
But John McCain sat on the board of a very right-wing organization, it was the U.S. Council for World Freedom, it was chaired by a guy named John Singlaub, who wound up involved in the Iran contra scandal. It was an ultra conservative, right-wing group. The Anti-Defamation League, in 1981 when McCain was on the board, said this about this organization. It was affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League – the parent organization – which ADL said "has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-Semites."
I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
John McCain. Terrorist Supporter.