Andre
Jaquet
Newshounds
once asked Foreign Minister Pik Botha what he considered his most significant
achievement. He answered “Avoiding sanctions being placed on South Africa for
our support of South West Africa.” Then, with a rueful chuckle, he added: “At
least when South Africa was hit with sanctions, we earned them in our own right”.
During my posting in Washington,
I had inadvertently become an honorary member of the Embassy’s ‘Washington Mafia’,
an assortment of colleagues who had worked with Pik Botha in his previous
incarnation as Ambassador to the United States. Herbert Beukes second in
command at the Embassy was a senior member of the Washington Mafia and knew me
from the work we had done in the United States and when I returned from posting,
he suggested to Botha that I join his office. I jumped at the opportunity to
become involved in what seemed like a good way of shucking off the drudgery of boring
bureaucracy at Head Office and a logical way to advance my career.
Members of the Mafia were
on the whole liberal, capable and supportive of Pik Botha’s drive to create a
brave, new South Africa. Some in this group were very bright and practical
while others specialized in rough methods to bring reluctant bureaucrats into
line. One of these specialists who rose to the top was summoned by Botha with
the phrase “Where is my Rottweiler?” These
gatekeepers had in effect become Botha’s think tank and were partly a response
to the inertia of some senior members of the Department, who had given up
trying to sell apartheid abroad.
There were other candidates
who envied the job I had been offered and used colleagues close to Pik Botha to
lobby for them. The Rottweiler apparently whispered in Pik Botha’s ear that “Jaquet’s
wife is a Communist”. Laughable and untrue as that was, the matter brooked no
further argument and instead I was shunted to head the Namibia/Angola desk
which was largely dormant at the time because all activity in this area was
handled by our Permanent Mission in New York and the Legal Division in
Pretoria.
Quite unexpectedly, the
major shift in East-West relations brought about by Glasnost affected my life fundamentally. The improved relationship
between the Soviet Union and the West meant that independence for South West
Africa was inevitable and the subsequent flurry of events placed me close to
the center of South African diplomatic efforts for the following six years.
Several academics and
former politicians have written extensively on these negotiations, and I don’t
intend to describe them blow by blow. However, I doubt that there will ever be
a time when there will be complete peace on this earth and it may be useful to future
negotiators to describe what helped these negotiations succeed. The best impartial
description I have come across was compiled by Dr Greg Mills who heads the
Brenthurst Foundation in Johannesburg.
Quite rightly, Mills avoids
the logistical and personal difficulties that such talks between nations at war
meant for the negotiators themselves. But none of those involved in these
negotiations could remain indifferent to some of the more tragic events of
those times. During negotiations we were acutely aware of the hundreds of
civilians and military men and women were dying while we talked and drank coffee.
I frequently thought of the ripple effect this war was having on loved ones
left behind.
In
the early stages of the negotiation process, where we were going to meet was
always disputed. We insisted on African destinations on the pretext that
African problems should be resolved on African soil. Actually we wanted to use
the negotiations to get into African states that would normally not have
us. When the others cottoned on, they resisted and for weeks the Americans couldn't
get the parties to agree to a venue. Finally Chet Crocker persuaded us that
Egypt was an African state and he sold Cairo to the others on the basis
that Egypt was in the Middle East.
That is also where we met
the Cuban bulldozer Risquet. He might
have been an icon of the Cuban revolution but let’s give him an E- minus
for diplomatic skills. At the Cairo meeting he nearly brought the
entire exercise to a halt with his confrontational and doctrinaire approach.
An important part
of my brief was to develop a good working relationship with the South
African Defence Force to try to keep them on board so that they didn't undo on
the ground what had been achieved at the negotiating table. We at Foreign
Affairs spent a good deal of energy and time injecting a dose of realism
into the internal debates before and during the talks because the
securocrat mindset in those bad old days was mostly ignorant and dismissive of
international realities.
By the late 80's some
military strategists realized that the 'total response to the total onslaught'
method of government advocated by was failing. But questioning the
doctrine meant crossing President PW Botha and that was a dangerous exercise.
Some chose to bury their heads in the sands of statistics, reckoning that
if you fed enough detail to the bosses, they would have to come up with a more
workable strategy.
Besides the head of Foreign
Affairs, Neil van Heerden, and Intelligence chief Neil Barnard, the head of the
Defence Force, Jannie Geldenhuys was a major force for realistic, honest
bargaining. He was an impressive thinker and must have had the full
backing of the late Defence Minister Magnus Malan, who was significantly more
realistic than his public persona would have suggested. I remember him saying in one of our first in
house meetings: “Die weermag het die tafel gedek; nou kan ons onderhandel”.
(The army has laid the table and now we can sit down and negotiate).
The downside was that at
the second management level, the Defence Force and to some extent the SA Police
were not all on board and most certainly did not see the big picture. Isolation
from world thinking does that to you. More than once we were confronted with a
fait accompli that subordinates in those Departments had created without
referral. Consequently we at Foreign Affairs were at pains to lead others
gently towards a broader view our place in the world. We did so in a number of
ways.
Early in the process we
participated in a simulation exercise which had us playing the roles of all the
actors in two or three scenarios that might lead towards an independent
Namibia. When the participants from DFA, who were playing the roles of the
UN or the State Department or the Politburo made their contributions, they were
frequently challenged by the military as not being realistic. "Ag nee;
hulle is darem nie so erg nie!" (No
way! They aren’t that bad) reverberated around the room a number of times.
At the micro level I took
my job very seriously and at times that meant sacrificing my liver for my
country. I recall a friend and I engaging two helicopter pilots in
Oshakati in a drinking duel which lasted until the early hours of the
morning and which ended with one of the aviators asleep in a flower bed and the
other sprawled on a concrete pathway leading to the barracks.
That was the kind of thing
that built respect for DFA or in military parlance 'die laventelbrigade' (the
lavender brigade). They had never heard von Bismarck's remark that diplomats
were superior to camels. "Camels", he said, "can only work for
about 40 days without drinking. Diplomats can drink for far longer than that
without working”. Mind you, I had to
admit to defeat at 5am one morning aboard an air force jet when a Brigadier
asked the flight attendant for a glass of brandy for the plaque on
his teeth.
At ground level, we
couldn’t understand why the State Security Council went into extraordinary
detail in situation reports that were discussed each morning by senior members
of the intelligence community. Incidents under such rubrics as
"stone-throwing", "stone throwing with fires", "stone
throwing by schoolchildren", "demonstrations with violence",
"without violence", "with shots being fired",
"with wounded", "without wounded" and so on.
These statistics would be
listed in the situation reports and also on the mother of all Lego boards in
the situation rooms in the President’s offices in Pretoria and in Cape Town.
Each had a Lego base spread over an entire wall and such incidents were
reflected by constructing many columns of different colours. But there was remarkably
little analysis of what it all meant, no description of the real grievances, no
suggestions for other approaches. Negotiating with the enemy was not on and in
fact negotiations themselves were the enemy, the strategy of cowards and
defeatists.
At around the same time,
the State Security Council even considered building a life-threatening fence
around Walvis Bay to assert South Africa's sovereignty in that enclave. To
get folks in that frame of mind into the same room as Cubans, Angolans and
Soviets was not a doddle. Neil Barnard of the National Intelligence Service was
an important player on our side. He provided the team with good intelligence that
was less self-serving than reports written by the military staff. More
importantly he was a good weathervane of which concessions President Botha
would accept.
Keeping tabs on what was
happening on the ground was important too. Although Savimbi’s minority party,
UNITA, was not at the negotiating table, it had the capacity - with a
little help from its South African military friends - to wreck the process by
actions on the ground. So it was important to keep him in the loop
and before every negotiating round he was informed of what we
intended doing and his input was considered. After each round he
would again be informed of what had been achieved. Initially that task was
entrusted to the military until we discovered that the agreed message was being
distorted with a military bias. Subsequently Savimbi was briefed by a
joint delegation that included Foreign Affairs and the Intelligence services.
To increase Foreign Affairs
influence on Savimbi and to keep an ear to the ground, we had an experienced
official, the late John Sunde, open an office in Northern Namibia at Rundu. Initially
Minister Pik Botha wanted him to be stationed at Jamba, Savimbi’s stronghold in
Angola itself. Thankfully wiser counsel prevailed.
The Administrator General
in Namibia, an appointee of the South African President, had to be dragged
along kicking and screaming. Early in 1988, when UN supervised elections
were just a few months away, I attended a meeting of the Administrator
General's Working group on the elections he strode into the room with a spring
in his step. "I have the winning recipe that will deny Swapo victory"
he announced. All it amounted to was a plan to gerrymander Namibia’s towns
and country areas into wards and constituencies that made no sense but would disadvantage
SWAPO. Just as bad was his final
farewell to President Nujoma: “Now don’t you mess up this beautiful country!”
or words to that effect.
The ruling National Party caucus
signed off on negotiations in Namibia on the understanding that it was an
off-shore exercise to see whether one could negotiate with “terrorists” without
the sky falling on one’s head. Many of
them believed that if the results were not to their liking, the process could
be reversed. They had very limited understanding of the dynamics that made
independence inevitable. Most of us knew by then that it was just a question of
how rough or smooth the transition would be.
A few months after Namibian
independence the first formal talks on SA soil between the ANC and the SA
governments were held in Somerset West. I was invited to the first meeting
on the government side to talk about the logistics of negotiations and never
again. I understand that someone advised FW de Klerk that DFA had “given
away South West Africa” and should not be allowed to do the same to South
Africa. I like to think that the SA Government would not have been so frequently
out-maneuvered at Codesa if they had used the technical expertise Foreign
Affairs had built up in the Namibia initiative.
