Azanian People's Liberation Army

The Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), formerly known as Poqo,[1][2][3] was the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, an African nationalist movement in South Africa.

After attacks on and the murder of several white families the APLA was subsequently classified as a terrorist organisation by the South African National government and the United States, and banned.

[5] In 1968 the "Azanian People's Liberation Army" (or APLA) replaced the defunct name "Poqo", which means pure in Xhosa, a local South African language, as the armed wing of the PAC.

[1] Potlako Leballo, the chairman of the PAC at the time of the formation of its military wing in the 1960s, modelled APLA on the Chinese People's Liberation Army, with Templeton Ntantala as his deputy.

[10] Leballo had planned a massive revolt for 8 April 1963, but Basotholand police managed to track down and raid the PAC's headquarters, seizing a complete list of Poqo members.

PAC leaders, who had been vehemently anti-communist, nevertheless accepted the aid by attempting to rationalize it as being because the Chinese were "non-white" and that their value system had not been "tainted by European thought" as they deemed the South African Communist Party to have been.

[5] In 1991 APLA launched Operation Great Storm,[15] a violent paramilitary campaign aimed at displacing white farmers to reclaim land for black Africans and obtaining arms and funding.

[24] The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the PAC-sanctioned action directed towards white South Africans were "gross violations of human rights for which the PAC and APLA leadership are held to be morally and politically responsible and accountable".

Attempts by MR officers to regroup in Vietnam, North Korea, and China were unsuccessful, although links were maintained with the Tamil Tigers and Maoist groups in Nepal and India.