Johannesburg — IF, DURING the mid-80s, the apartheid government called you as much of an enemy to the state as the African National Congress (ANC), it was a sign you were doing something right. And so it was with the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), which encouraged thousands of young white South Africans to reject their call-up to fight in Angola and South African townships.

The campaign that grew out of the individual Conscientious Objectors Support Groups was in fact so successful that it was restricted by the apartheid government in 1986, after only two years of operation. It was banned in 1988. But it continued to operate as an underground movement and -- according to some -- was even more successful as a result.

"The reason they banned us was the people just stopped pitching up for call-ups. They were seeing the effect of numbers not pitching up, from a small rate in the early '80s. (Adriaan) Vlok and (Magnus) Malan called us 'Public enemy number two after the ANC'," recalls Crispian Olver, a key ECC figure in Cape Town, now an environmental consultant.

The tale of the ECC, which next month celebrates its 25th anniversary, is of another part of the wider anti-apartheid struggle. Tens of thousands avoided the call-up by objecting and going to jail, leaving the country or evading the military police. But how the campaign started, how it defined its message and how it kept going after official restriction, hold clear lessons for any would-be campaign organiser.

The first objectors to conscription were individuals who did so on religious or pacifist grounds. Michael Evans, an early ECC leader, says the first two objectors to take an overtly political stance were Billy Paddock and Pete Hathorn in the early 1980s. Both were jailed. In 1982, Evans helped organise a campaign for another objector, Brett Myrdal. Myrdal toured the country, speaking at university campuses. That same year, the Black Sash, an activist women's movement, passed a resolution calling for the end to military service. This gave a crucial endorsement to anticonscription efforts.

"It was an illegal act to persuade someone not to do military service. It was not illegal to call for an end to conscription. We realised (the resolution) had massive strategic value. Our campaign was not saying 'Don't go to the army' -- it was simply that people were given a choice," Evans says.

In the second half of 1983 the maximum penalty for avoiding military service increased from two to six years. But the seeds of the ECC were sown.

The campaign had its first meeting in Cape Town in October 1983. As an organisation of organisations, it copied the United Democratic Front (UDF), begun two months earlier. By the end of 1983, there were ECC structures in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban . The first big public event was a year later. The ECC was an eclectic grouping .

"It was the only organisation in which the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) Youth and the UDF sat on the same platform," Olver says.

While some ECC members were in the ANC -- the party had encouraged the formation of an anti-conscription campaign -- it was vital to keep the two separate. The government, for a start, was always keen to connect the two and any direct link with the ANC would have crushed the ECC.

Gavin Evans, Michael's younger brother, was a member of both, having joined the ANC in 1980. He sent the party reports of the ECC, but says the two had to be kept separate. The ANC did not have widespread support among whites at the time.

"The ECC was a broad church. It included people like the Black Sash, pacifists, liberals in the PFP. They didn't need to feel like they were useful idiots, but that they were as much a part of decision-making as anyone else. The ANC played a role at the beginning, but once the ECC was set up, it played virtually no role at all," Gavin Evans says.

By 1985, when the ECC hosted an international peace conference in Johannesburg, there were additional branches in Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown and Pietermaritzburg. Later that year branches opened in Stellenbosch, Pretoria and on several university campuses.

Harassment of ECC leaders was widespread. People were arrested, houses were fire- bombed, signs were put up "outing" gay ECC members .

"Checking tyres before driving was always an absolute must," recalls Paula Hathorn, who joined the ECC after her brother Peter was jailed. Security police regularly overinflated car tyres and cut brake cables to cause accidents.

Former ECC activists are quick to point out that the harassment they suffered was less than that faced by black members of the struggle. But in divided apartheid SA, the two were separate. The ECC was the campaign being fought in middle-class suburbs and its members were taking on the security apparatus and their own communities.

The ECC meanwhile grew, refining its message as it went along. It experimented with different campaigns. Some worked, some didn't.

Olver describes one "absolutely disastrous" campaign titled "War is not compulsory, let's choose a just peace", with the awkward anagram WINCLCAJP. Olver says it was so broad it was meaningless.

"We always believed in things like justice and peace. But that was not our message. That was not going to appeal to our conscript base. It was namby-pamby, 'Let's make the world a better place', which frankly, most conscripts weren't interested in."

The experience forced ECC leaders to think about who their target was and how to reach it.

"We said 'Our base is the conscript. Get in there and mobilise the people who are conscripted. Stop doing this anything-and-everyone approach.'"

By keeping the focus tight, the ECC worked.

"It was a very limited, single- issue campaign, with an approach that was fun. People were having a lot of fun being in ECC," Gavin Evans says.

This was crucial. Even though the backbone of the ECC was politically minded types, a serious political message was never going to appeal to a wider base of white conscripts with no such awareness. Olver, a member of the ECC's culture committee, describes how they shaped the organisation.

"I was part of the gang that had our feet in alternative white culture. We were jollers, we followed The Clash and Voelvry and listened to Bright Blue. There was some incredibly creative stuff. We organised artists and musicians. Our posters were offbeat and appealed to a broad constituency," he says. It was not only fun, but crucial to take this approach, he says.

"The lefties would never have pulled it off without us counterculture types. We were able to talk to the base in a way they never could. White conscripts would never have responded to a serious, principled, left-wing message."

Olver says this tactic paid off during the state of emergency that came into full force in 1986, when SADF troops started deploying into the townships.

"A lot of conscripts had no political conscience but they were not happy. Some of them were feeling a general moral dilemma, but it was just this unease of the army being deployed at home fighting South Africans. It was no longer a war fighting foreign enemies, it was the knowledge that this was a civil war. The ECC managed to tap that nerve. They latched on to that message," he says.

The numbers of people refusing to sign up grew and in 1986 the ECC was restricted, curbing its ability to function publicly. It was banned two years later. The restrictions, however, made the ECC far more effective, Olver says.

"We hit on a tactic which proved to be electric. That was to then go back to the old idea of (conscientious objectors), of individuals taking stands, but to do that with a mass base."

Using ECC networks and relationships, they organised large numbers of people to stand up and announce on the six-monthly call-up dates their refusal to serve. In August 1987, 23 conscripts did so.

"We organised it in a very clandestine, underground way. The next call-up, we accelerated this," Olver says.

The second time, there were 143. Two years later, the number that refused to go was 771. Then it grew to 1021. "By the fourth call-up, they were not prosecuting people if they didn't pitch. This thing just snowballed," Olver says.

The ECC's changed tactic coincided with the greater changes taking place in the country at the time, Gavin Evans says. "It was that period of ungovernability and the state was floundering. There was also a sense that they knew they were into a different period . While they were doing all sorts of dirty tricks, at the same time they were in secret talks with the ANC."

And how much effect did the ECC have on the bigger picture? Michael Evans, now a lawyer, is careful not to overstate it.

"Conscription ended because apartheid ended. There was the unbanning (of the ANC and South African Communist Party). As soon as that started happening, the whole conscription structure started collapsing. Conscription only formally ended later, but more or less by the end of 1990, they announced a moratorium on more call-ups."

The importance of sticking to the core

STICKING to the core message was always crucial for the End Conscription Campaign (ECC).

In early 1986, ECC activist Gavin Evans went to the US, sponsored by the United Nations (UN) Special Committee Against Apartheid. He spoke at the UN and then went on a speaking tour around the US. "In some ways it was quite difficult," Evans recalls. "I spoke at a lot of anti-apartheid meetings where the agenda was one of disinvestment and that wasn't part of the ECC programme.

"We couldn't go outside the country supporting disinvestment when to do so would have lost support at home from liberals who didn't support disinvestment ... you had to stick to the ECC agenda rather than going beyond it." Michael Bleby