A U.S. case against South Africa’s state- owned defence firm poses a difficult question to supporters of Nelson Mandela’s government: Should the crimes of the apartheid government have to be paid for by its democratic successor?

Pretoria wants Washington to drop its prosecution of the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor). It is also asking the U.S. administration to lift its ban on new deals with Armscor. The company’s misdeeds belong to the past and should no longer burden the post-apartheid government, it says.

Despite Pretoria’s lobbying, Washington insists that Armscor and a subsidiary must face trial over a 1991 indictment by a Philadelphia grand jury which accused the firm of conspiring to violate U.S. arms control laws.

In a statement issued by its embassy in Washington this week, Pretoria said it will not pay millions of dollars in fines or waive its sovereignty by allowing Armscor to face trial in the United States.

“The payment of fines would…be tantamount to offering an atonement for the sins and transgressions of those who formerly oppressed many members of the current government,” the statement said.

But as long as Armscor avoids a U.S. trial, it cannot sell its arms in the United States — and that ban has also cost the South African firm other clients.

“I think Armscor suffers from its past, apparently well- deserved, reputation under the apartheid regime,” says Natalie Goldring, deputy director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC).

Goldring notes that the South African National Defence Force remains Armscor’s main client, while many nations — not just the United Statets — still regard the firm warily. Some sources tell IPS that Armscor in recent years has lost contracts because of its apartheid stigma, including a failed bid to provide helicopters to Britain’s Royal Air Force.

The South African government refused to comment on Armscor sales, which, like most defense commerce, are kept secret.

Certainly, many opponents of apartheid agree that it is at best ironic that Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years by the apartheid government, must now answer for the crimes it committed in evading U.N. weapons bans designed precisely to weaken white rule.

Washington’s harsh stance on Armscor also strikes some analysts as curious.

“I find it ironic that the United States is being so insistent on enforcing its arms exports laws in this case,” Goldring says, noting U.S. arms sales to human rights violators in Indonesia and Turkey. “This is the pot calling the kettle black.”

But even members and supporters of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) believe that covert arms sales between U.S. firms and the South African government should be investigated, regardless of the consequences for the new government.

“Serious U.S. laws were violated in the United States,” says Richard Knight, a researcher for the New York-based Africa Fund, a longtime apartheid foe. “Real people died because of this stuff.”

“A government inherits everything that goes with a government,” Daniel Ngwete, spokesman for the South African Embassy in Washington, says. “The Government of National Unity has inherited all of South Africa’s problems, and (the Armscor) case goes with it.”

Despite Ngwete’s words, Mandela reportedly lobbied his U.S. counterpart, Bill Clinton, at their meeting at the United Nations last year to drop the Armscor case.

Clinton has insisted that he will not intervene in his Justice Department’s prosecution of Armscor — a case, sources tell IPS, is likely to result in millions of dollars in fines against the South African firm.

The Mandela government, however, insists Armscor, like South Africa itself, has changed its stripes and that it should not be fined because the previous National Party-led apartheid state tried to circumvent U.S. bans on arms sales to Pretoria.

Some U.S. firms and individuals chose to violate those bans, sending advanced weapons — from landmines to missile parts and designs — to South Africa, Knight says.

Some of those transactions, he adds, have landed U.S. businessmen in jail already. One company, International Signal and Control, defied the arms ban on South Africa and later made several fraudulent deals, which damaged a British defence contractor financially.

The bottom line, Knight says, is that there is a web of shady arms deals that must now be disentangled, and Armscor is in the middle of it.

That web may include deals that involve more recent horrors, according to some activists. Alison des Forges, a researcher for Human Rights Watch/Africa, says Armscor is linked to arms sales to the former Rwandan government, which is blamed for killing as many as one million of its citizens in 1995.

Other alleged recipients of Armscor weaponry include the former military junta under Gen. Raoul Cedras in Haiti, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s army just before the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq, and Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s government in Libya. Arms sales to all of these regimes were banned by the U.N. Security Council at the time that Armscor was supplying them.

Armscor now insists it has stopped selling arms to pariah states and is not violating international arms embargos. Knight adds there are signs Pretoria has indeed cleaned up its act — notably by setting up the Cameron Commission, which investigated some previous arms sales.

“I think they’re trying very hard to sanitise their relationship with Armscor,” Goldring says of the Mandela government. She contends many South African officials seem to share the U.S. Justice Department’s harsh view of Armscor.

But the Africa Fund, which pleaded repeatedly for Justice Department investigations into the covert arms sales during the waning years of apartheid, does not want those efforts to end just because the government has changed.

“It’s not a question of penalising the current government for past sins,” argues Knight, who says he is sympathetic with Mandela’s bind. “But let’s face it — the same guys run Armscor who ran it before.”

More to the point, Knight says, the United States intends to maintain bans on Armscor deals with U.S. firms until the current case is resolved. That matter, he contends, can only be solved through cooperation with the Justice Department, not through diplomatic pressure to drop the case.

Despite the frictions the case has caused, officials on both sides are confident that the current support Mandela’s government enjoys in Washington will continue.

“It doesn’t harm the overall relationship,” Ngwete, of the South African Embassy, says. “This is but one small part of the overall relations.”