The Third World War - The Untold Story (57 page)

Thus, as the United States and the Soviet Union moved towards war during the latter part of 1984 and the early months of 1985, the greatest danger of this war's being waged by proxy in Africa was not in the Arab countries of the north-east, nor in the Sahara, nor west Africa, not even in the relatively stable centre and east. It was in the Horn of Africa and in the south. In the event, as we saw in chapter 17, the Horn of Africa was partly neutralized by the astonishing speed and force with which the United States and its allies strengthened their position in Egypt, the Red Sea and the Gulf. South Yemen was contained by naval action, and by powerful deterrence from North Yemen and Oman. In a similar way Ethiopia was contained by United States military reinforcement of Somalia and Sudan. The fighting in southern Africa, however, was prolonged and savage. It has been described in some detail in a previous book* and it is not intended to reiterate here either an account of the military operations or of the gradual withdrawal of black African forces and ANC guerrillas from South Africa. Nor need we concern ourselves with the immense United Nations activities which dealt with the problems of relief, reconstruction and repatriation, although it should be noted that the Cubans, the East Germans and what remained of the Soviet advisers were repatriated, in many cases after lengthy hospitality from South African 'camps' which made the treatment they were subjected to by their own countrymen, when they did return, less disagreeable than it might otherwise have been. What does command our attention now is the effect that war in southern Africa had on the central problem itself- the future of the Republic of South Africa.

* ibid., pp. 266-76.

One result of the brief but cataclysmic war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO was that it prolonged, with results whose severity and disruption have yet fully to be seen, the unjust and oppressive regime based on white supremacy in South Africa. It seemed that during the early days of recovery from this last world war, South Africa's leaders - faced with all the pressures for and against reform, some internal, some external - chose to risk the mounting black discontent and violence for the sake of white control. When war came, the activities of the front-line states' armies, together with ANC guerrillas, did little to endear the Afrikaners to their northern neighbours, except in so far that the South African Defence Force's eventual successes in holding on and beating back all invaders strengthened conviction in their own supremacy. Indeed the poor showing of the ANC guerrillas when it came to actual battle reinforced the views of hard-line Afrikaner leaders that they would be able to perpetuate their own political dominance. White control was something they understood and thought they knew how to deal with. The consequences of a programme of reform and reconstruction were not understood and were as a result feared and shunned. There had been ample grounds for misgiving even before the war began. In Namibia constitutional government had been overthrown in 1985
-
and SWAPO dictatorship established. In Zimbabwe gradual decline from democratic practices had been more or less completed in the same year; Botswana's greatly enhanced support for both foreign and ANC revolutionary militants had simply ensured the misery of its own people; and Mozambique had seemed helpless in trying to escape from the contradictory grips of communist mercenaries and national resistance movements.

There may have been one or two unexpected dividends in South Africa for those who advocated a policy of gradual reform and power-sharing. One was the revulsion felt by black and white South Africans alike at the indiscriminate bloodlust shown by some of the ANC guerrillas during the transitory and haphazard instances when unarmed civilians were at their mercy. Another was the stand taken by black homeland units, like the Transkeian Defence Force, the Bophuthatswana National Guard and, most notably, by the Inkhata Army, which so furiously and successfully resisted the Cuban and Mozambique attempts to invade the Zulu homelands. Yet examples like this of loyalty to the Republic did little or nothing to reconcile those who had previously questioned the principle of liberal reform to a new initiative for a
verligte
policy. On the contrary, there was an even greater swing to the
verkrampte
line advocating the exploitation of South Africa's economic hold in terms of food, transport, technology and goods, over its neighbouring black countries, so creating a kind of buffer between white supremacy and the ANC, and abandoning the reformist schemes that had raised so much hope in the early 1980s.

The policy of black homelands would continue. The so-called independent nation states would continue to be totally dependent on Pretoria financially, economically, administratively. The multi-racial President's Council which had formerly been used as machinery for introducing constitutional reforms, was dismantled. There would be no question of a single, racially-mixed parliament. Ethnic 'self-determination' would be maintained. There was to be no limited franchise system for regional councils and no question of any coloureds or Indians - let alone blacks - in a central legislative body. There was to be a clear division of power between the various racial groups. In short, apartheid was there to stay.
Also sprach
the Herstigte National Party.

Thus South Africa set itself on the path of blood, violence and revolution. Argument as to the future of that country has inevitably been taken up once more by all those who disagreed: the black front-line states as they begin to recover some degree of political, economic and military cohesion; the ANC in exile, together with all the other black revolutionary movements; the trade unions within South Africa itself; almost all the rest of black Africa with their support in arms, agents and money; the Third World in general. And unless, by the sort of diplomatic activity in the United Nations and elsewhere that made possible a peaceful Middle East solution, a way can be found to put such intolerable pressure on Pretoria that wiser counsels prevail, South Africa will find that the injustices of apartheid are corrected on a far bloodier battlefield than ever it saw during the short-lived Third World War.

The collapse of colonialism in South-East Asia, where three empires, British, French and Dutch, had sprawled untidily over the map, left the area without regional coherence in a clear need for it. The fall of Saigon in 1975, at the end of the second Indochinese war, marked the end of the brief period of American dominance and, apparently, of external intervention. The United States, scarred by the internal divisions caused by the costly and ultimately unsuccessful war in Vietnam, turned with huge relief away from the commitment of American troops on land in South-East Asia towards a purely maritime strategy for the region, based on the islands and island states of the Pacific.

There was a price to pay for this: it was no longer possible to exercise influence over events on land in the area. Governments were toppled or put in place by small, hard, wiry men crossing land frontiers, not by the actions of ships at sea or by unscrewing the nose cones of missiles. This had to be accepted. Domestic politics would stand nothing more. This was not to say that the United States was leaving Asia. Far from it; the US had every intention of remaining a power in the Pacific basin, the fastest growing economic area in the world. America's centre of gravity, however, would henceforward be in North-East Asia, built around the security link with Japan and, as it turned out later, a growing understanding with China. The naval and air bases in the Philippines would still be needed for US maritime strategy. Washington hastened to renew the leases for them. Manila was initially hesitant, not merely to drive a hard bargain but because the waning of American strength and influence was creating a climate of caution. But Vietnamese actions in Indochina soon put an end to regional hopes for stability and the other ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) states pressed the Philippines to sign, to enable the United States to keep a strong military presence in the area. South-East Asia was looking to Washington once more; the countries needed powerful friends again. In January 1979 the new agreements for American use of the Philippine bases were concluded.

It was the men in Hanoi that brought all this about. The North Vietnamese had emerged in heroic guise from the longest and bloodiest war of independence that South-East Asia had seen, unifying a country which now had military power far greater than its neighbours, allied to a fanatical determination to go on using it if need be, regardless of the opposition. In the aftermath of the war the ASEAN hope was that the Vietnamese energies would be channelled into uniting the hitherto divided nation and into rebuilding the war-torn economy. The fear was that communist or nationalist fervour would prevail instead, with Hanoi pursuing the aim of controlling the whole of Indochina, the long-held ambition of Ho Chi Minh. And then what? Further into South-East Asia?

The ASEAN leaders put out friendly feelers, making clear their desire for stability and their willingness to encourage and help with economic consolidation. Japan offered economic aid to Hanoi. This was perhaps the best way of drawing Vietnam towards peace and the West and away from the Soviet Union, now Hanoi's principal patron. The United States was unhappy at the idea of rewarding the intransigent in this way, at least so soon, but itself none the less conducted discreet negotiations with Hanoi to pave the way towards normal relations when the wounds had healed a little. Vietnam seemed willing to contemplate this, but all stopped when in November 1978 it concluded a treaty with the Soviet Union and shortly afterwards invaded Kampuchea (Cambodia), overthrowing the admittedly hateful and genocidal regime of Pol Pot and installing its own puppet, Heng Samrin.

Conflict in South-East Asia had thus broken out again, heavily supported, indeed only made possible, by the military assistance given to Vietnam by the Soviet Union. China, traditionally sensitive to Vietnamese ambitions, soon reacted in support of Pol Pot and in February 1979 briefly invaded Vietnam. While this attack certainly exposed China's military inadequacies, not least to Peking, it none the less imposed great costs on Hanoi, drawing a large part of Vietnamese military strength northwards to the frontier regions, where it was tied thereafter by the threat of renewed hostilities.

Thailand, faced with the insurgent activities of the ousted Pol Pot supporters spilling over the common border with Kampuchea, turned to the United States for aid and was promptly given military supplies. The ASEAN nations banded together against the Vietnamese and Soviet expansionism and turned to the world outside for support and in particular for help with the flood of refugees that had begun to pour out of Indochina. Most of all they looked to Washington, as the power in the area best able to counter the military strength of the Soviet Union. Thus the United States became once more politically involved in the region, only a few short years after leaving Vietnam. This time it was not for the containment of China, the original focus of US South-East Asian commitments. Rapprochement with Peking had removed the need for that. Now it was Soviet military activity and expansion that had to be checked. Soviet policies in South-East Asia were all of a piece with its activities elsewhere in the Third World -assertive, opportunist, anti-Western, anti-Chinese; in short, pro-Soviet and with a traditionally Russian flavour to boot.

ASEAN, the association which brought together Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, had for long been the most promising grouping yet seen in the region, though its purposes were primarily political and economic. Each of the members had its own security problems or preoccupations, some of them severe, but they were of a separate nature. Collectively they did not recognize any external threat to their security and since there was no consensus on security, nor apparently any particular urgency, there was no security structure in ASEAN.

The area ASEAN covered had some strategic significance, however, not only for the energy sources and raw materials it contained, but for its importance as a waterway. Among the hundred or so ships that were passing through the Malacca Strait daily in the early 1980s were those that carried the bulk of Japan's imports of oil and iron ore. For the United States and for the Soviet Union the waterway was important as the passage between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Access to trade with the region and the preservation of stability to enable this to continue seemed to offer a common interest to all the powers, and the Soviet Union in particular was at pains in the later 1970s to woo the ASEAN states - after initially being ill-disposed to recognize the organization - and to seek closer links. For a time Moscow touted a proposal for an Asian Collective Security Pact, but since this was transparently aimed at opposing China it found no takers in an area conscious that it had to find some way of getting along with that huge and unpredictable country. Yet the Soviet Union was also determined to support Vietnam and the two policies were not compatible.

ASEAN drew away from the Soviet Union, sharply so after the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, and some of its members began to forge closer links with China. The Soviet Union became isolated in Asia, its only allies being Vietnam and a North Korea that was careful to maintain links with China as well. Soviet forces did, however, reap the benefit of the support for Hanoi, in the form of air and naval bases in Vietnam. The Soviet navy began to make use of Cam Ranh Bay in particular, admirably placed halfway between the Far East Fleet and the Soviet naval force in the Indian Ocean, and affording surveillance over the activities of the US Seventh Fleet in the south Pacific.

It was almost inevitable that ASEAN would, under the new circumstances that were unfolding, pay more attention to security concerns. By 1980 the military expenditures of the member states had risen to $5.47 billion, 45 per cent more than the year before and a near doubling compared with 1975. Thailand, dangerously close to Vietnamese military activity in Kampuchea, was already devoting 20 per cent of its budget to military purposes. All were buying modern weapons, with Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand acquiring new tanks, indicating a readiness to resist any incursions by Vietnam. An interesting feature was the growing adoption of American weapons. All the countries operated one model or another of the F-5
Tiger
fighter and the A-4
Skyhawk
fighter-bomber. The US M-16 assault rifle was the standardized personal arm. American military advisers were in many countries, and ASEAN officers trained in hundreds in the United States. American military aid to ASEAN members went up by 250 per cent to some $7.5 million in the five years up to 1980 and was to more than double in the four years after that.