MINOR: j!", MINOR: j!", 'A4 x 14, ................... LP lit, fn Al, Northwestern University Library Evanston, Illinois 60201 Ott1 L SOUTH AFRICA AT WAR SOUTH AFRICA AT WAR White Power and the Crisis in Southern Africa RICHARD LEONARD LAWRENCE HILL & COMPANY WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT 06880 To the memory of my father Copyright © 1983 by Richard Leonard All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by Lawrence Hill & Company, Publishers, Inc. 520 Riverside Avenue Westport, Connecticut 06880 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Leonard, Richard. South Africa at war. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. South Africa-Race relations. 2. South AfricaPolitics and government-1961- 1978. 3. South AfricaPolitics and government-1978- . 4. South AfricaForeign relations-1961- . 5. Guerrillas-South Africa. 6. Guerrillas-Africa, Southern. 7. Africa, Southern-Politics and government-1975I. Title. DT763.L46 1983 305.8'00968 82-23405 ISBN 0-88208-108-X ISBN 0-88208-109-8 (pbk.) 123456789 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments x 1 From Police Repression to Military Power 3 2 The Black Struggle for Freedom 21 3 The War in Namibia and Regional Aggression 59 4 Military, Police, and Security Forces 98 5 Arms for Apartheid 131 6 The Propaganda War 161 7 The Total Strategy 198 8 The Crisis in American Policy 222 Appendix A The Freedom Charter 242 Appendix B Secret Propaganda Projects 245 Appendix C The Crocker Documents 248 Notes 261 Index 275 Preface For decades there have been warnings that South Africa is a tinderbox, ready to explode in a racial conflagration. These warnings have multiplied in the years since South African police killed hundreds of young protesters in Soweto and other black areas in 1976. A recent report, South Africa: Time Running Out, prepared by a Study Commission on U.S. Policy Toward Southern Africa and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, conduded that violence in South Africa will "intensify and spread" unless real progress toward meeting black grievances is not made soon. Robert McNamara, former U.S. secretary of defense and president of the World Bank, echoed this theme in October 1982 when he told an audience in Johannesburg that South Africa could be "as great a threat to the peace of the world in 1990s as the Middle East is today" unless there were fundamental changes in its racial policies. In fact, South Africa is already a country at war. Since the mid-seventis militarization and military conflict have become a central part of South African life. The conflict over South Africa's illegal occupation of neighboring Namibia has grown into a significant guerrilla war. Pretoria has . - become engged in a pattern of aggressive intervention and attacks fi gamst other countries in an effort to enforce its hegemony throughout southern Africa. At the same. time, South Africa's white minori -ovJA ernment has been-facing growing resistance-by black South Africans kc, against apartheid, both m pedceful prutsan a errillacl . Thus L ,the future of South Africa and the strategic alignment of southern Africa N. C,> in the decades ahead are being shaped by the conflicts that are underway now. To insist that South African militarization and military conflict must be viewed as a central aspect of the current situation in southern Africa is not to say that it is the only important element. The military conflicts have grown out of and are intertwined with underlying political and economic factors. Nor does the focus on the military imply that what PREFACE / vii lies ahead will inevitably be a pattern of military escalation and all-out regional war. There was a settlement of the Rhodesian war in 1980 just when South Africa's military intervention was becoming more overt and extensive. A settlement (and independence) may yet be reached in South Africa's protracted war in Namibia. Nonetheless, military force, with South Africa as the dominant power, has come to play a main role in southern Africa. And final resolution of the region's confrontations can only come when there is an end to the fundamental conflict, which arises within South Africa. Several incidents at the end of 1982 and in 1983 heavily underscored the future implications of the military's "Total Strategy." The first of these was a pre-dawn raid on Lesotho's capital, Maseru, by South African military forces. Approximately one hundred commandos, carried by five helicopters, launched an attack in which thirty South Africans, members of the African National Congress (ANC)-the standard-bearer of black resistance to apartheid-and twelve Lesotho citizens were killed. This "warning" by the South African government to its neighbors against harboring its opponents provoked a rare, united vote of condemnation by the United Nations Security Council. It also brought retaliation by the ANC. One week after the Lesotho raid, at least four explosions ripped through South Africa's first nuclear power station, which is situated at Koeberg, only ten miles from Cape Town. In a statement issued in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the ANC claimed responsibility and declared that its military wing. Umkhnnfn 71, Sizwe, had carried out the sabotage for "all our fallen heroes and impisoned comrades; including those buried in Maseru." At first the South Africans claimed that little damage had been done at the Koeberg plant, which is being built at a cost of more than $200 million by a French consortium, Framatome. Later, it was admitted that construction had in fact been set back by at least six months. The conflict within South Africa reached a new stage of intensity on May 20, 1983, when a car bomb set by ANC guerrillas exploded on the street outside the headquarters of the South Africa Air Force and offices of South African Military Intelligence in Pretoria. Officials said 18 people were killed and 190 injured. Eight of those who died were said to be black, and almost half of the casualties worked in some capacity for the military. The South African military retaliated with an air raid on what were claimed to be ANC guerrilla targets outside Maputo, the capital of neighboring Mozambique. South Africa said that 61 people were killed, including 41 ANC members. However, reporters taken by Mozambican officials to the areas attacked said there was little evidence of current connections with the ANC. Mozambique said 6 people, including 2 children, were killed, and 26 were injured. At a news conference in Nairobi, Kenya, ANC President Oliver Tambo viii / PREFACE said that the guerrilla attack was an escalation of the ANC struggle brought on by the South African raid W' Maseru and by a series of assassinations of ANC officials. He said, I.Never again, never again, are our people going to do all the bleeding, never again." And he asked reporters, "Don't you think that we have offered the other cheek so many times that there is no cheek left to offer?' Past ANC guerrilla actions had concentrated on sabotage attacks on strategic or symbolic targets. But a statement by the ANC office in Lusaka, Zambia, indicated a shift in policy. Saying that the conflict was caused by the "intransigence \>and violence of the apartheid regime," it warned that future attacks would be aimed at "an increasing number of those who have chosen to serve in the enemy's forces of repression." The South African government claimed that the ANC bombing had been condemned by "all communities and every sector of political opinion" in the country. But correspondent Joseph Lelyveld reported in the New York Times (May 25, 1983) that among the black majority in urban areas, there was support for the ANC attack. A social worker said, "It is unfortunate that innocent civilians were involved, but the motive for the attack was very clear. The black fatalities are just a part of the larger sacrifices we as a nation have to face and accept." "The people are jubilant," said a black with many political contacts. --' "They long ago ve Rp any hope for peaceful change. What they are saying is that the African National Congress is finally hitting real targets. That is why you are having crowds of blacks drawn to the street where the bomb went off. They want to see the place where a white man died." A teacher said, "You don't want to call the death of innocent people a good thing, but maybe some people will begin to realize now how valuable all human life is and take steps to negotiation."The Botha government's Total Strategy is not, however, aimed at fostering negotiations but at mobilizing all possible resources to defeat the ANC and maintain white dominance. This study examines the South African crisis through a focus on the country's ongoing military conflicts and growing militarization, because this has become the dominant trend there and throughout the region.The first chapter describes how South African militarization, marked by the rise to power of former Defence Minister Pieter W. Botha, has taken root since the mid-seventies as a result of both internal and external crises facing the Nationalist government. The second chapter approaches the conflict in South Africa from the perspective of the go..o bla k resistance to apartheid, with the focus on the African National Congress. The aim of this chapter is to provide a basis for an understanding of guerrilla conflict in South Africa by placing it within the wider perspective of the history of African nationalism. This background stretches back through decades of peaceful protests after the formation of the .6 PREFACE / ix white-ruled Union of South Africa in 1910 to its roots in African resistance to European expansion and conquest since the seventeenth century.