Jeugkrag (meaning "Youth Power"), also known asYouth for South Africa, was a short-lived South African youth group in the late 1980s. It was surreptitiously funded by theapartheid government's Department of Military Intelligence in an operation known as Project Essay. Led byMarthinus van Schalkwyk (later a member of theAfrican National Congress) it operated exclusively on Afrikaans university campuses and sought to influence the political views of Afrikaans-speaking students.[1][2][3]
Van Schalkwyk was the national chairman. He was supported between 1987 and July 1988 by Cedric de Coning, who was both director of fund raising and publicity secretary.[citation needed]
Putatively aimed at bringing together youth from different ethnic and ideological backgrounds,[4] Jeugkrag was a transparent effort to supplant the process of youth dialogue originally started by theInstitute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), anNGO founded at the end of 1986 by the liberal ex-parliamentariansFrederik van Zyl Slabbert andAlex Boraine[5] with funding from donors such as theOpen Society Foundation[6] and theSwiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).[7] Slabbert and Boraine, who had decamped in frustration from thetricameral parliament,[8] were part of the white group that held groundbreaking discussions with ANC delegates at the historicDakar meeting in 1987.[9]
The group was vilified byPW Botha, who called them "political terrorists".[10]Peter Mokaba, anANC leader that Jeugkrag had engaged, would later comment: "At the time although we knew that Jeugkrag was not an independent organization, but part of the heart and soul of theNational Party, it was our policy to discuss matters with both progressive and reactionary organizations."[11]
In 1990 en route to a meeting inBotswana, a 12-person Jeugkrag delegation was detained by police at the Monomotapa Hotel inHarare,Zimbabwe. They were questioned about a meeting that they had attended with members of theZimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), a marginal political group opposed toRobert Mugabe's government.[12] The delegation consisted exclusively of representatives from Afrikaans-language universities including theRand Afrikaans University,Stellenbosch University, and theUniversity of Pretoria.
TheUniversity of Pretoria office was headed by Louis du Plooy until the organisation was disbanded in 1991.[citation needed] The liaison officer was Cleoné Bakker.[citation needed]
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