A South African WhatsApp group working with BDS has sparked a movement to block a ship carrying military explosives bound for Israel.
Madison Bannon, Waging Nonviolence, October 28, 2024
For a few hours between Oct. 17-18, a cargo ship called the MV Kathrin had “gone rogue” just outside of Malta’s territorial waters. To “go rogue,” in shipping terms, is to be without a flag — and in the case of the MV Kathrin, its flag had been revoked by the Portuguese government after it sat, “at anchor,” in the Mediterranean for 10 days, rejected from its destination port of Malta.
Why such drama on the high seas? To understand, you have to go back to the beginning of the MV Kathrin’s journey — back to July, when the ship embarked on its beleaguered journey out of Hai Phong, Vietnam. It was there that sympathetic members of a Vietnamese labor union alerted the international organizing committee of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, that a ship carrying weapons bound for Israel was about to loop around the African continent.
As an American activist living in Johannesburg, South Africa, I have had a front row seat to the organizing that’s led to the Kathrin being rejected from nearly every port on its destination list. Even now, with a new German flag, the Kathrin’s status remains clouded in mystery, having unexpectedly docked in Albania sometime around Oct. 24.
When the tip came in from Vietnam, the BDS committee quickly put out a call to organizers and activists in South Africa: Does anyone know how to track the movement of a ship?
Lifelong climate and anti-apartheid activist Sunny Morgan answered the call. He uses an app called Marine Traffic in his business as a solar installer and supplier. He began to track the Kathrin. On Aug. 20, a BDS comrade (in South Africa, all activists call each other comrade) alerted a WhatsApp group chat titled “SA Energy Embargo” that a vessel potentially carrying ammunition to Israel was scheduled to dock in either Cape Town or Walvis Bay, Namibia on Aug. 22 or 25.
I am a member of that group chat, and I watched as the feed became a flurry of action — comrades reaching out to friends in the harbors, downloading other ship trackers like Marine Traffic, sending screenshots of the Kathrin’s movements, drafting letters to government officials and to port authorities, and then — crucially — someone suggested we get in touch with the Namibian justice minister. A handful of activists had just met her at the Global Anti-Apartheid Conference on Palestine, which was convened by the South African Anti-Apartheid Steering Committee and held in Johannesburg in May.
We had it on good authority that the Kathrin would pass Cape Town for Namibia, so BDS began a social media campaign calling on the Namibian Port Authority to reject MV Kathrin on the grounds that providing the ship with safe harbor is akin to complicity in genocide and not aligned with international law.
There is an African proverb: If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito. This little group chat — and a handful of hyper-active activists in it — tracked the Kathrin day in and day out, exchanging information and calling everyone they knew who might have the power to stop it as the ship passed Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, setting its destination officially to Walvis Bay.
Then, just in the nick of time, on Aug. 25, as it traveled at 20 knots towards its destination, we got word from our Namibian comrades: “Permission for vessel Kathrin to enter Namibian water was revoked. Our justice minister also wrote a letter to her colleagues and called on Namport [the Namibian Port Authority] not to allow the vessel to enter any Namibian port. This is a small but significant victory.”
We then saw, via her own statement, that Namibian Justice Minister Yvonne Dausab had indeed requested the relevant authorities not allow the ship to dock at Walvis Bay port, reminding them of Namibia’s international obligations, “not only under the Genocide Convention but also as articulated in the recent advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice.”
Minister Dausab’s stance aligns with Namibia’s public stance on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and reflects the country’s support for Palestine. But this bold, decisive and symbolic first public move against the Kathrin was the result of direct nonviolent organizing taken by the small and determined activists of BDS and the SA Energy Embargo WhatsApp group.
Energy embargo and BDS
The SA Energy Embargo WhatsApp group isn’t a group of cartographers or ocean logistics experts, it’s an online space for pro-Palestinian activists to gather and plan actions that push the South African government towards an energy embargo against Israel.
South Africa is rich in coal. Until recently, we oscillated back and forth with Russia as Israel’s second and third largest coal supplier. That changed in June, when Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a ban on his country’s coal exports to Israel. South Africa then became Israel’s number one supplier, powering daily life in that country — a daily life that includes weapons manufacturing, military bases, spyware and Israeli settlers illegally expanding settlements in occupied Palestine. In short, South African coal powers an apartheid state.
In joining the organizing of SA Energy Embargo, I was able to unite my climate activism with Palestinian solidarity. “Keeping the coal in the hole,” as we say, is an environmental win, as well as a local energy win for South Africans. Cutting Israel’s supply of coal would significantly hinder its ability to expand settlements, organize its military actions and further its apartheid and genocide.
The SA Energy Embargo initiative was born of a call from South Africa’s BDS chapter to further a divestment, boycott and sanctions strategy that isolates Israel economically. The South African BDS movement is grounded in a rich legacy of organizing and a deeply personal understanding of the power of sanctions and boycotts — one that dates back to South Africa’s own journey in the 1960s.
In 1962, two years after the African National Congress was banned, exiled Chief Albert Luthuli gave a speech addressing the United Nations, saying “We appeal to the United Nations to support us to impose sanctions on the apartheid state and to put an end to this unjust system. … It is only when international pressure for the abandonment of apartheid becomes irresistible that the people of South Africa will have peace, security and equal rights.”
From there, an international movement of boycotting and sanctions on apartheid South Africa was born — with the goal of isolating the apartheid government economically and politically. The movement grew over the next 20 years.
In 1985, a small group of business leaders involved in mining and banking initiated a secret meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, with the exiled ANC to negotiate a peace deal. South African companies were having a hard time finding international markets and the economic situation had become untenable. Those business leaders were swayed, not because they came to recognize apartheid’s moral corruption, but because the economy was collapsing. They felt that a peaceful transition of power would stabilize the economy and reintegrate South Africa into the global marketplace. It was a pragmatic response to a boycott and sanctions movement that built a bridge between the white government and the ANC.
For me, learning this history was a turning point in my understanding of BDS. As an American, BDS was introduced to me as a radical antisemitic movement aimed at hurting Jews and Jewish businesses. The more I learned about the plight of the Palestinian people, the more sympathetic I became. At the same time, the more I learned about activist strategy and theory, the more my mind opened to BDS. Still, as someone with many Jewish friends, I felt that BDS was someone else’s call-to-action, not mine.
In the wake of the genocide in a post-Oct. 7 world — and becoming a South African “comrade” with that rich legacy of activist history — I’ve shifted my view entirely. I now understand the power the boycott and sanctions movement had to end South African apartheid. I also understand the corporate targets of the BDS movement: coal, weapons, insurance companies that back the coal and the weapons, and major corporate backers of Israel’s military. As a result, I am committed to the power and necessity of a movement like BDS, whose work entails campaigns like #BlockTheBoat, in which the MV Kathrin is just one of many ships.
While the Kathrin lingered off the Namibian coast, authorities investigated the ship and found that it carries eight tons of an explosive material called RDX, which had been sold by Vietnam to Israeli Military Industries Ltd. The anti-personnel mines made with RDX explode and send a spray of metal ball bearings that act like bullets, shredding everyone and everything around them. Put simply: It’s a weapon of indiscriminate and maximum harm for use in the furtherance of a genocide.
However, eight tons of explosives — listed as “general cargo” on the MV Kathrin — is only a drop in the blood-filled bucket for a war that has seen 75,000 tons of bombardment, directly killing more than 43,000 men, women and children. A further 144,000 — conservatively estimated by the Lancet — have been killed through disease, starvation and a decimated health infrastructure. Those eight tons on the Kathrin are also only a small amount of the ship’s cargo, which is carrying 7,138 tons of all manner of products from Vietnam and Singapore to states all over Europe and the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, the charge of this small group of committed activists has sparked a #BlockTheBoat movement that has connected activists across Southern Africa, the Mediterranean, Asia and Europe. The Kathrin has been denied harbor in Namibia, Angola, Montenegro, Croatia and Malta. Its Portuguese flag was revoked. Its journey has been delayed by weeks costing an unfathomable amount of money to all parties involved in its logistics, whether relating to the materials, the insurance or the ocean liner management. Even with a German flag, the Kathrin continued to languish outside of Malta for days before docking unexpectedly in Albania last week (in what is still a developing story).
If a handful of activists under a strategic BDS banner can ignite a global movement to block this boat, what is the potential of organized activism the world over? Could we hold the entire shipping industry to account? Could we change the way we do maritime logistics to stop arms transfers? Being able to ask those questions in a year of unfathomable loss, is a win.
Legal implications
The port of discharge for the eight containers of explosive material on the Kathrin was supposed to be Koper, Slovenia, where the German company Lubeca Marine was hired to transport the material on to Israel. Germany is one of Israel’s most vocal backers — so much so that Nicaragua took Germany to the top U.N. court in April for “aiding genocide” through arms and equipment sales.
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That case contributes to a mounting body of Palestinian support at the U.N., which was kicked off in December 2023, when South Africa convened its case against Israel at the ICJ. After two days of public hearings in January, the court concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza could amount to plausible genocide and issued provisional measures to ensure aid was flowing into Gaza and civilian lives were protected. Israel has ignored them, along with all subsequent ICJ rulings and U.N. resolutions — instead choosing only to escalate its war.
On June 20, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner issued a callfor an arms embargo stating: “These companies, by sending weapons, parts, components and ammunition to Israeli forces, risk being complicit in serious violations of international human rights and international humanitarian laws.”
To provide safe harbor and passage for a ship well documented to be carrying explosives that intentionally create maximum damage and death to a government plausibly committing genocide is in contravention to the Genocide Convention to which 153 states are party (including Germany and Vietnam) and 41 are signatories (including Israel and the United States).
Germany alleged in its ICJ case that 98 percent of its arms exports “were general equipment like vests, helmets and binoculars. And of four cases where war weapons exports were approved, three concerned arms unsuitable for use in combat and meant for training.”
The body of evidence now published widely about MV Kathrin, her contents, her destination and her supporters contradicts Germany’s attempt to distance itself from the genocide. Specifically, the German company Lubeca Marine is known to be the company providing logistics for the arms transfer — and the German government is known to put its flag on the Kathrin despite knowledge of its contents and new reputation as a geopolitical pariah.
Call to action
South African allies to Palestinians feel that there is little impact we are able to have from so far away. The ICJ provisions have been ignored, as has the U.N. General Assembly vote for an arms embargo. The war continues. Aid is blocked. The weapons are still coming. We regularly stand outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, shouting and waving our Palestinian flags, and chanting our redresses of Biden, Blinken and Netenyahu. But ultimately we are powerless to stop the slaughter.
The seasoned comrades who fought South African apartheid will tell you that those years — just before the fascist government crumbled — were the darkest and most violent. There is hope in those words.
Our work of nonviolent direct action — in mobilizing rejections for this boat from Namibia to Angola to Montenegro and Malta — is a symbolic win, but it is a win. We have delayed, blocked and inconvenienced this ship for weeks. The Kathrin wasn’t able to dock for the entire coast of Africa. It has been named and shamed by every government sympathetic to Palestine. Records of its contents, its journey and its trials will be entered into a body of evidence of crimes against humanity. Simply, MV Kathrin cannot be ignored.
Ultimately, we activists are not calling on a country’s morality — countries rarely have those. Rejecting this boat is a legal obligation, as signatories of the Geneva Convention, the Genocide Convention and the recent ICJ and ICC rulings. This is international law.
We call on the maritime authorities of Albania to seize the explosives on the Kathrin in order to prevent them from reaching the Israeli military. We call on Germany to drop its flag from the ship. So long as the explosives are among her cargo, we call on all of the relevant port authorities to not accept it. We call on the organized labor of Albania and Slovenia to not unload the weapons — and the further logistics companies to not transport them to Israel.
We call on all nations to not offer safe harbor or passage to the Kathrin or any other ship known or suspected to be carrying weapons to Israel in furtherance of the genocide. We call on governments, states and the international legal community to ensure that these explosives and the next shipment inevitably coming never reach their intended destination to be used for their intended purpose, which is to indiscriminately kill.
As the international pressure against Israel mounts, the governments and companies that Israel can call on for support shrink, and the weapons and energy pipelines narrow. This gives us, as regular folks — who want to see an end to the genocide — an opportunity to focus and intensify our efforts. By supporting our local BDS movement we can, within our spheres of influence, support the #BlockTheBoat campaign, encourage arms and energy embargoes and make this genocide and the larger occupation untenable. We can use our power — no matter how small we feel we are — to make a difference. If my group chat can do it, so can you.
Madison Bannon
Madison Bannon is an activist, writer, podcaster and mom living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her show, The Delve tackles America’s hidden socio-political stories with the experts who know most about them. She’s committed to making the world a better place, one day at a time through her work in communications, non-profits, climate activism and youth development.
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