Namibia ...

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.