The End of Apartheid (3 page)

This (the threat to continue sanctions) was regarded by Smith as an example of British perfidy. But it had the intended effect. The Muzorewa delegation accepted the proposed constitution, overruling Ian Smith. Nkomo and Mugabe still were holding out, though. To get their attention, we announced that, to organise the elections, we would be sending a British Governor to Rhodesia with full powers, dissolving the Rhodesian government and parliament. As Nkomo and
Mugabe's henchmen said to me, they now realised that, this time, we were serious, which they had never believed we were before.

With extreme reluctance, Muzorewa agreed to stand aside as Prime Minister; a more power-hungry politician would have refused to do so. Nkomo and especially Mugabe, however, still were bent on stringing out the conference while they pushed more of their troops across the border. In the course of many discussions with me at Lancaster House, Mugabe kept telling me that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun' and that he had a PhD in terrorism. The Rhodesians were responding by launching ferocious cross-border raids into Zambia and Mozambique. As Mugabe demanded that we must ensure the release of all political prisoners, I told him that this would have to include his own dissidents, held in a detention camp in Mozambique.

Carrington and I were summoned to see the Prime Minister in her room in the House of Commons. We had presented her with a bill providing for Britain to assume direct control of Rhodesia through a Governor with full legislative and executive powers. Reminding us that she was a lawyer, she insisted on going through every line of it.

Next, in the Foreign Office, I spent the mornings with our military representatives negotiating with Ken Flower and Peter Walls and the afternoons with Tongogara and Nkomo's commander, Dumiso Dabengwa, brokering a ceasefire. This required the guerrilla commanders to concentrate their forces in the rural areas in designated assembly places, under the protection of a Commonwealth monitoring force, which, Margaret Thatcher now accepted, would have to be
led by the British military. We found an unexpected, invaluable ally in Tongogara, who proved to be far more interested in a peaceful outcome than his political leader, Mugabe. At my suggestion, Christopher Soames, Winston Churchill's son-in-law and Leader of the House of Lords, was persuaded by Carrington to serve as Governor.

Following a series of secret meetings with him in a hotel under the motorway on the Edgware Road, in which he received us clad, bizarrely, in a raincoat, Nkomo told us that he wanted to agree. Mugabe, however, was not going to agree to anything until cornered into doing so.

We warned the Prime Minister that the conference would be dragged out indefinitely unless we took decisive action to bring it to a conclusion. With her approval, we now took the risky step of despatching Christopher Soames to Rhodesia – despite his own misgivings – and lifting sanctions before a ceasefire was agreed.

The conference ended with Mugabe still holding out. Through the Mozambican special representative, Fernando Honwana, we were able to persuade President Samora Machel, whose country was suffering desperately from the war, to tell Mugabe that, unless he signed the agreement, there would be no further support from Mozambique. Agreement was announced in time for it to be greeted with applause at the state banquet President Carter was holding for Margaret Thatcher at the White House.

Before our departure from Lancaster House, Tongogara told me that he was taking serious risks in committing to the agreement.
Shortly before the ceasefire was due to be implemented, Mugabe told the British ambassador in Maputo that Tongogara had been killed in a road accident on 26 December as he drove from Maputo to give orders to his forces. His death at this crucial moment gave rise to all sorts of suspicions, the more so as he was known to have had a private meeting with Nkomo before leaving London. His injuries were declared to be consistent with death in a car crash, but, as ‘car crashes' have turned out to be a favourite method for the Mugabe regime to maintain itself in power, the jury still is out on what really happened to Tongogara.

On day one of the ceasefire in Rhodesia, those of us who had negotiated the agreement at Lancaster House passed through some of the worst hours of our lives. The monitoring force teams were deployed in remote, guerrilla-infested areas, with the Rhodesians speculating as to how many of them would return. Having put up their flags, they waited for the guerrillas to emerge from the bush. They did so at first in a trickle, which then became a flood, with fifteen thousand men moving into the camps without a single major clash. Mugabe, however, had delivered thousands of lightly armed young
mujibas
(scouts) to the assembly places, while keeping large sections of his forces outside them. As General Walls protested to me, ‘Any self-respecting terrorist has an
AK
-47!'

There followed two months of extreme tension in Rhodesia, with an ever-present risk of a breakdown in the ceasefire, as Mugabe used his forces outside the assembly areas to intimidate the villagers and the Rhodesian special forces contributed their own atrocities, including an
attempt to assassinate Mugabe. Ian Smith engineered a meeting with Muzorewa and the military commanders to demand that they should renege on the agreement and go back to the war. This was rejected by General Walls and Ken Flower. We had got round this corner with screaming tyres.

As the elections approached, we received a deluge of international observers, with a great deal of advice and concerns about the turbulent nature of the process. This caused Christopher Soames untactfully to observe: ‘This is not Little Puddington in the Marsh. These people think nothing of sticking tent poles up one another's whatnots!'

The CIO chief, Ken Flower, was a legendary figure in Salisbury. Whenever I had dinner with him at Meikles Hotel, the band would play ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' I was reassured by him of my own impartiality as he informed me that I was on two death lists, that of some rogue elements of the Selous Scouts, who felt that I was a bad influence on General Walls, and that of Mugabe and his associates, should they lose the election.

We challenged the observer teams to predict the result, which none of them proved able to do. The Rhodesians to the end were overconfident of Muzorewa's support. Nkomo, who knew that his support was confined to Matabeleland, kept urging us to ban Mugabe! Our assessment was that Mugabe would win the largest number of votes, but we did not know how many.

We had asked all the observer missions to declare whether the elections were free and fair
before
the results were declared. Most were
reluctant, but the UN representative, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, showing political courage, declared the election to have been fairly conducted before the outcome was known. He found reassuring, he told us, the sight of shirtsleeved British policemen in their helmets at every polling booth. Even Julius Nyerere acknowledged that ‘The British do not know how to rig an election!'

As the election results came in, but had not yet been announced, and it became clear that Mugabe was going to win, Soames's deputy, Sir Antony Duff, and I set off to Combined Operations Headquarters for what we knew was likely to be a decisive confrontation with the Rhodesian military commanders, with Walls in great distress saying that ‘The enemy is about to become our government'. They demanded that we invalidate the elections, with Walls appealing directly to Margaret Thatcher to do so, an approach that was summarily rejected by her. They regretted, they said, ever having gone to Lancaster House.

I reminded them that they had done so only because they were losing the war. Walls, turning to his colleagues, said: ‘You know that is true.' He blocked plans by elements of the Rhodesian military to try to stage a coup. Mugabe in turn was persuaded to form a coalition government including Nkomo and Ian Smith's deputy, David Smith, and the British military set about integrating the Patriotic Front and Rhodesian forces. Ken Flower, less surprised at the outcome than his fellow commanders, got himself appointed as Mugabe's head of intelligence. I was presented by Nkomo with an
AK
-47, which was promptly confiscated by the British military.

Margaret Thatcher found it sad that Zimbabwe ended up with a Mugabe government, but political and military realities were on the side of the guerrilla leaders. She shed some tears as she watched on TV the British flag being lowered over Salisbury. I shared her sentiments about Mugabe. But she recognised that the Muzorewa government could not have brought peace to the country and had insufficient support to survive.

She was proud of the role we had played. She had not, initially, wanted to negotiate with Nkomo and Mugabe, but ‘unpleasant realities had to be faced'. Britain, she declared, had demonstrated its ability, through ‘forceful diplomacy', to settle a particularly intractable international dispute
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– a success that would not have been possible without her willingness to face all the risks associated with assuming direct control in Rhodesia, which none of her predecessors had been prepared to do.

When, seven years later, I arrived in South Africa as British ambassador, Pik Botha greeted me with the words: ‘That was a terrible thing you did at Lancaster House!' Mugabe's victory, he claimed, had set back the cause of reform in South Africa by a generation. I reminded him of his own statement to us at the time that Rhodesia was on its beam ends. The longer negotiations were delayed, the more radical the outcome was likely to be – a principle that did not apply only to Rhodesia.

CHAPTER I

‘This time we have locked up all the right people!'

Despatched by Margaret Thatcher to be the British ambassador to South Africa, I found the country in the grip of severe repression under the regime of President PW Botha. Nelson Mandela and his senior colleagues were in prison with no prospect of release. The other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) were in exile. The ANC and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned. Two and a half thousand people had been detained without trial. The press were censored and a state of emergency was in force.

It had to be said that, in the short term, these tactics were working, in the sense that the crackdown was effective and ‘order' had been restored. When I asked General Johann van der Merwe, head of the security police, why, at this point, the country was quiet, he replied cheerfully: ‘This time we have locked up all the right people!'

Intensely frustrated by the obstructionist attitude of PW Botha, in
sending me to South Africa Margaret Thatcher wanted to see us playing a more activist role than the embassy hitherto had done, having been encouraged by the Foreign Office to engage in her least favourite activity – damage limitation. As we had a large number of British citizens in South Africa, by far the largest investments and close links with the English-speaking business community, she found it frustrating that Britain apparently had so little influence on the regime.

She had been subject to attack, in a series of Commonwealth conferences, for her resistance to more extensive sanctions against South Africa. We had, in fact, imposed military, nuclear, oil and sports sanctions, but she was adamantly opposed to blanket sanctions which, in her opinion, would further reinforce the siege mentality of the Afrikaners as well as destroy the livelihoods of large numbers of black South Africans. She regarded many of the leaders calling on her to take these steps as a bunch of hypocrites, given, as she put it, their own imperfect records on human rights and dependence on trade with South Africa.

As for her own views on apartheid, she had alarmed the South Africans by writing in 1983 to the Conservative MP Ian Lloyd that the exclusion of blacks from the political process was ‘a powerful factor in compelling black politicians to seek by violence what is denied to them by the laws under which they live'.
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Three years earlier, President Botha had travelled to Europe for the fortieth anniversary of the 1944 Normandy landings – ironically, as he had opposed South Africa's participation on the side of the Allies in the Second World War. Being a believer in engagement rather than
ostracism, Margaret Thatcher invited him to meet her at Chequers, the Prime Minister's official country residence. The veteran anti-apartheid campaigner, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, met her to urge her not to see Botha. She replied that she wanted to tell Botha face to face that South Africa must change, which is what she proceeded to do.

In her briefing notes, heavily underlined by her, she was forewarned that PW Botha was hard, dour, belligerent and intolerant of criticism. In their private meeting, he complained that he never received any credit for the improvements he had made in the conditions of black South Africans. In return he got a forthright lecture about the continuance of forced removals of black South Africans from areas reserved for the whites. She pressed him on the continued detention of Nelson Mandela, subsequently confirming in parliament that she had done so.

PW Botha demanded that the ANC office in London should be closed. Mrs Thatcher said that we could not do this under our law. There was no evidence that the office personnel were guilty of illegal activities.
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In fact, the UK authorities were more worried about the actions of South African embassy personnel, two of whom had just been expelled for organising break-ins at the offices of the ANC and the South West Africa People's Organisation (Swapo). In March 1982, there had been a bomb explosion at the ANC office, which subsequently turned out to have been the work of Craig Williamson, a senior figure in the security police.

Pik Botha's summary of what the South Africans took away from the meeting was that, ‘while her manner remained sympathetic, Mrs Thatcher went on to say very firmly that the key issues were still pressing: apartheid had to be dismantled, Mandela and other prisoners
released and the front-line states should be spared further attacks by the South African armed forces. The forcible removal of urban blacks had to stop.' But they did get the impression, correctly, that Mrs Thatcher was sympathetic to the linkage between South African withdrawal from Namibia and the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola.
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Her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, observed that the Bothas probably were surprised to be pressed by her on all the key issues: ‘Apartheid must go. Mandela (and others) be set free and the front-line states no longer exposed to attack from South Africa.' Forced removals also must come to an end.
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Having heard Margaret Thatcher's remarks on television immediately after the meeting, Trevor Huddleston sent her a handwritten note, thanking her in fulsome terms and saying that her public statement had given him encouragement and hope: ‘It was truly all I could have wished for.' She replied that she had expressed her concern at the continued detention of Nelson Mandela and the need for early progress on this.
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Margaret Thatcher had, for a while, entertained the hope that PW Botha was serious about reform, for he had stated in 1979 that South Africa must ‘adapt or die'. The pass laws, intended to keep the black population from establishing permanent residence in the urban areas, at last were abolished, as they had proved simply unenforceable. The prohibition of mixed marriages was lifted as well. But Botha's objective was to modernise apartheid, not to get rid if it. His much-heralded constitutional reform involved the creation of new separate chambers in parliament for the Indian and coloured communities. The exclusion of the black community from the so-called tricameral parliament
triggered a wave of unrest within the townships which had led to the imposition of a state of emergency. Opposition to the proposed constitutional reforms led to the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) to organise black resistance within the country.

PW Botha was due to make a speech in Durban on 15 August that was advertised in advance by Pik Botha as representing the ‘crossing of the Rubicon'. Rejecting the reformist language in the text presented to him, PW Botha delivered instead a characteristically finger-wagging performance. ‘Don't push us too far,' he declared. He was not, he said, prepared to lead white South Africans ‘on a road to abdication and suicide'.

Immediately following the ‘Rubicon' speech, a consortium of US banks, led by Chase Manhattan, announced the decision, already taken in principle, to refuse to roll over the country's debts or to make any further loans to the government. A host of other international banks followed suit. FW de Klerk observed subsequently that the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Gerhard de Kock, regarded the speech as having cost South Africa one million rand for every word.
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This was a massive underestimate. For these market sanctions were to prove far more effective than any other measures against South Africa, apart from the arms embargo.

The Commonwealth heads of government, meeting in the Bahamas, had decided to send a group of ‘eminent persons', led by General Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and the former Prime Minister of
Australia, Malcolm Fraser, to South Africa to explore ways of trying to get negotiations under way with representatives of the black majority. On 31 October, Margaret Thatcher wrote to PW Botha urging him to accept the Commonwealth mission and stating that the release of Mandela would have more effect than any other action he could take. The seven-member Eminent Persons Group received some encouragement from Pik Botha and met Mandela in prison. But PW Botha had been persuaded to allow them to visit only under pressure from Thatcher. Adamantly opposed to outside interference, he decided to ‘get rid of these people'. On 19 May 1986, he did so by ordering the South African Defence Force (SADF) to launch air attacks on Gaborone, Harare and Lusaka, ostensibly against ANC targets, bringing an abrupt end to the Commonwealth's negotiating efforts.

Margaret Thatcher had tried to persuade Geoffrey Howe to join the Commonwealth mission, untactfully suggesting that she could do his job as well as hers while he was away. He had resisted successfully but, extremely reluctantly, he was pushed by the Prime Minister to try again, this time on behalf of the European Community (EC). His reluctance, as she acknowledged, proved justified, as he was berated on television by Kenneth Kaunda and received boorishly by PW Botha, who was beside himself, denouncing ‘damned interfering foreigners'.
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