The first two Tumpo failures contributed to a major joint reassessment by the SADF generals with the battlefield commanders at colonel and commandant levels on how to proceed next. Tumpo One probably failed because, inexplicably, no follow-up night assault was ordered from brigade level when the Fapla infantry were clearly in a state of panic and on the run. Tumpo Two failed because military intelligence gave the SADF’s fighting men an over-estimate of the enemy tank strength and because of serious logistics problems as different major weapons, which had been at the battlefront for months, began to fail.
The national servicemen from 4 SAI and 61 Mech were in need of a rest from the physical and psychological punishments of the war zone. Toleration limits vary dramatically between men. But, denials notwithstanding at the highest levels of the SADF, the nervous breakdown of the Artillery Regiment captain with Major Tinus van Staden’s 32 Battalion infantrymen was just the tip of a very complex iceberg at the beginning of March 1988.
Dust, dirt, heat, disease, flies, mosquitoes, lack of fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, and the sheer strain, fatigue and tension of constant presence in one of the most remote and unpleasant war zones on earth were taking a toll of the fighting men. They were passing through the same kind of critical thresholds as their weapons and machines. To this day young men who fought opposite Cuito Cuanavale are being treated by psychiatrists for a severe nervous condition called post-traumatic stress syndrome.
To surmount the problem of excessive wear and tear on men and machines, the generals decided to replace the 4 SAI and 61 Mech men of 20 SA Brigade with fresh soldiers and equipment from 82 SA Brigade which Colonel Paul Fouché had been sent back to form in the Republic from among the bank clerks, car mechanics and farmers of the Citizen Force.
20 SA Brigade began its withdrawal on 4 March 1988 with the arrival of the first Citizen Force units of 82 SA Brigade – elements of a Ratel squadron from the Regiment Mooi Rivier and G-5 gunners from the Potchefstroom University Artillery Regiment.
On Tuesday 8 March, 20 SA Brigade’s Colonel Pat McLoughlin handed over to 82 SA Brigade’s Colonel Fouché. It marked the end of Operation Hooper and the beginning of a new phase in the War for Africa, Operation Packer. But, more far-reachingly, it served as a major landmark in southern African history, presaging changes of breathtaking scale and speed throughout the subcontinent.
★ ★ ★
Forces were now at work way beyond the control of the battlefield commanders and barely within the mastery of the Chief of the Defence Force, General Jannie Geldenhuys, and his senior generals. In much the same way as South Africa’s fighting men and war machines were passing beyond vital limits of potency, so many external forces were reaching critical junctures.
The deepest secrets of international imperatives underlying and suffusing the War for Africa at this crucial stage will only emerge once personalities like Chester Crocker and South Africa’s Director-General of Foreign Affairs, Neil van Heerden, write their memoirs and when Castroist conformist orthodoxy crumbles in Cuba to allow that side’s true story to be told. But enough evidence and clues already exist to show that diplomacy was beginning to shape the War for Africa rather more than the conflict was influencing the art of lying for one’s country.
★ ★ ★
The tentative Cuban knock on the door of South Africa’s New York UN Mission in late November 1987 to explore a possible negotiated end to the War for Africa opened the way to something more substantial. A major breakthrough came in late January 1988 when Angola and Cuba told the United States at a meeting in Luanda that they accepted the necessity for all 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola to be withdrawn.
Following the meeting between Chester Crocker, Angolan Foreign Minister Afonso Van Dunem Mbinda and Cuban Politburo member Jorge Risquet, US State Department spokesman Charles Redman told reporters on 1 February 1988 in Washington: ‘The Angolan delegation for the first time affirmed its acceptance of the necessity of the withdrawal of all Cuban troops from Angola in the context of a settlement. Cuban officials concurred in this decision.’
The Crocker-Van Dunem-Risquet act was an interesting one. Risquet, a smiling, bearded man, was one of Fidel Castro’s most senior lieutenants. He was in charge of foreign affairs in the Cuban Communist Party Politburo and was one of the small group of guerrillas who had fought with Castro and Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra in the 1950s against the Batista regime. Risquet, however, was not an unbending dogmatist. Within the narrow limits of permitted debate in Cuba, he had demonstrated a certain independence of mind. On one occasion, during a spell as Minister of Labour, Risquet had dared to voice the ‘bourgeois’ viewpoint that it was logical for a worker, even ‘of a complete revolutionary outlook,’ to be concerned about the family budget!
As the talks progressed over subsequent months, Risquet became known as Oom [Uncle] Kaspaas to the South African negotiators after a popular Afrikaans cartoon character.
Van Dunem was reputed to be a ‘moderate’ in the MPLA government, willing to consider talking to UNITA rather than pursuing endlessly an elusive ‘ultimate’ military solution. He demonstrated his subtlety by bringing to subsequent talks his Justice Minister, Mr Fernandes van Dunem, a former law professor in Belgium who surprised the South Africans with his knowledge of Afrikaans poetry.
Chester Crocker, in his sombre suits and behind horn-rimmed spectacles and conservative moustache, looked more like a dull and dowdy English country solicitor than a man who was perhaps the finest conceptual thinker ever to have served in a United States presidential administration. The Reagan Administration in which Crocker served had indicated right from the beginning, in January 1981, that Washington would never recognise the MPLA government as long as a single Cuban soldier remained on Angolan soil. But pressure on Angola to get rid of the Cubans would have to be part of a more complex game-plan for the whole southern African region.
The rough outline was that South Africa should be offered conciliatory and feasible terms for getting out of Namibia. That prospect would be used as a lever for a Cuban withdrawal from Angola to be followed by an MPLA/UNITA power-sharing arrangement. The co-operation of black Organisation of African Unity states with all of this was to be secured with a promise of open elections in Namibia, a talisman for OAU pride.
The Reagan Administration’s policy was christened ‘constructive engagement’ because it involved South Africa as a legitimate participant in a general process of change in southern and central Africa, rather than as the accused in the dock. The original author of ‘constructive engagement’ was the then Professor of African Studies at Georgetown University, Washington – Dr Chester Crocker, Reagan’s nominee as his government minister in charge of Africa.
Crocker was seen as intelligent but conservative by Jimmy Carter/ Edward Kennedy-inclined liberal Democrats. On the other hand, he was regarded as a dangerous liberal by the Republican right wing in Congress, who withheld confirmation of his nomination for several months.
Crocker was too cerebral by half for many of the right-wingers, but if they had read carefully his writings on southern Africa the more discerning ones should have been able to see that his proposals for the region were by no means conventionally liberal. In the particular case of Angola, they spelled problems for the MPLA and Cubans for years to come.
In one article on the Namibia-Angola problem Crocker noted that Namibia was top of the Western calendar for most liberal democrats while the Angolan war was hardly on it at all.1 Somehow, according to this mindset, the Cuban and Soviet presence in Angola was legitimate or justified until Namibia was settled and UNITA defeated. Crocker argued differently.
‘Angola is the logical focal point for policy,’ he said. ‘It is in Angola, after all, that anti-communist forces are effectively engaged in trying to liberate their country from the new imperialism of Moscow and its allies.
‘This process should be encouraged with the aim of getting the Cubans out so that a genuine political reconciliation can take place. As for Namibia, while a settlement is important there, it will not by itself end the Angolan strife, because Savimbi is by no means the tool of South Africa. He could continue to operate with the active support of other African states and governments elsewhere.
‘Accordingly, the West should back UNITA until such time as the MPLA is prepared to negotiate and expel the communist forces from Angola. Namibia, according to this argument, is a separate and less important issue.’
Unlike so many of his Western contemporaries at that time, Crocker was prepared to see and understand the rich complexities of central and southern Africa. ‘The region will be shaped by forces more substantial and concrete than journalistic conventions like “racist regimes” and “Marxist guerrillas”,’ he observed.
Crocker played his cards long and cogently. Many years later, when the situation had been transformed, Crocker said one of the considerations, or principles, which had imbued his strategy was realism. Namibia could not be treated in isolation from its regional context; it needed to be linked to the problem of neighbouring Angola.
After the January 1988 Luanda meeting, more responsibility fell on Crocker than anyone else to devise a level-headed, face-saving framework that would enable Cuban good intentions to be converted into sound practice.
There were plenty of obstacles. Angola’s MPLA government took the line that it would accept a timetable for the withdrawal of ‘all’ Cuban troops provided South Africa and the United States stopped giving aid to UNITA; South African troops were withdrawn from Namibia; Namibia was granted independence under the terms of United Nations Resolution 435; and international guarantees were given for the security of Angola.
The MPLA proposed no timetable for Cuban withdrawal, but Crocker asked that it prepare one as soon as possible. Crocker declined to give any undertaking on behalf of Washington on the suspension of US aid to UNITA. President Reagan and his supporters in Congress were unwilling to sacrifice UNITA as part of a Namibia deal linked to Cuban troop withdrawal.
The initial hostility of most South Africans towards the new MPLA position was tempered at key high levels of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by a message that the Soviet Union, for years the MPLA’s main patron and bankroller, was firmly behind the plan for the Cubans to leave Angola. The intermediary from the Soviets was the flamboyant rightwing West German politician Franz Josef Strauss, Prime Minister of Bavaria, who had managed remarkably over the years to maintain close relationships with both the Moscow and Pretoria governments.
Strauss, visiting southern Africa in late January 1988, immediately after meeting Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Bonn, told South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha at a secret meeting place in the Kalahari Desert that the Soviet Union wanted to find a political solution to the Angolan problem because it had concluded that a military one was not possible.
Botha’s ears pricked up particularly sharply when Strauss told him that Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who with his philosophy of ‘new thinking’ was rigorously reassessing every aspect of Soviet policy, no longer considered South Africa was ‘ripe for revolution’ and believed that a peaceful negotiated settlement of the country’s internal problems would be in everybody’s best interests. At about this time Neil van Heerden established a specialist Soviet desk in Pretoria for the first time since the early 1960s and organised a conference to examine the possibility that the Soviets could be trusted in negotiations.
In early February Crocker and Pik Botha met each other at the South African Embassy in Geneva, Switzerland, soon after the former had again met Van Dunem and Risquet in Luanda and the latter Strauss in the desert. Significantly, an unnamed representative of the South African Defence Force, probably General Geldenhuys, was also present at the Geneva meeting.
Crocker told Botha and the high-ranking SADF officer that the MPLA and the Cubans were now ready to talk. A senior official of the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs present at the Crocker-Botha meeting said: ‘We came home and examined the whole thing at many different levels and we concluded that, yes, we should explore the new opportunity.
‘The cabinet took the final decision, and the matter was also discussed in the National Security Council, but it was our (the Foreign Ministry’s) recommendation that we go ahead.’2
In March 1988 Neil van Heerden and one of his top men at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr Derek Auret, flew to Washington to meet Crocker secretly and ask him for more clarity and firm details on how he intended to proceed. A few days later a letter was delivered to Pik Botha in Pretoria from Crocker proposing exploratory formal talks in London between the MPLA, the Cubans and the South Africans with the Americans playing the role of ‘facilitator’.
Meanwhile, Cuban and Angolan officials in Luanda presented a paper to visiting American State Department officials suggesting that all Cuban troops leave Angola over a four-year period. The proposal included provisions for phased redeployment of Cuban troops towards the north during the withdrawal process. Although the offer was still conditional on the US and South Africa stopping all aid to UNITA, South African troops withdrawing from Angola, and Namibia being granted independence under United Nations supervision, the US negotiators saw the proposal as an encouraging development.
The US followed up the Luanda meeting with a fresh round of talks with Pik Botha on a chilly winter’s day, 14 March, in Geneva. Botha subsequently presented a tough posture in public, saying the Cuban/ Angolan proposal lacked ‘numbers, figures and timetables’. At the same time, President P W Botha, reacting to the Luanda demand for the withdrawal of the SADF from Angola, said: ‘We are staying in Angola until the Cubans leave.’
Pik Botha, however, was privately delighted by what Crocker told him in Geneva. The two men agreed that the way was now undoubtedly open for the Cubans to leave Angola in exchange for the independence of Namibia – a far cry from the early machismo days of Cuban involvement in Angola, when Castro said his forces were on a sacred internationalist mission in support of Cuba’s co-ideologues, the MPLA, and that there could be no trade-off over Namibia.
Botha left Geneva for Pretoria believing that he was on the verge of a diplomatic triumph. The Cuban departure would amount to a de facto South African victory in Angola after one-and-a-half decades of warfare. The Cuban withdrawal would enable him and other ‘reformers’ in the cabinet to sell to the Republic’s white electorate the idea of throwing off the Namibian millstone. In turn, without a Cuban military threat in the region, it might then become possible for the South African government to embark upon the difficult task of internal political reform. But, meanwhile, the War for Africa went on.
1 Chester Crocker, with Mario Greznes and Robert Henderson, ‘Southern Africa: A US Policy for the 80s’, Africa Report (January–February 1981).
2 Sunday Star, Johannesburg (9 April 1989).