TRC Final Report

Volume 2

Chapter 1

Subsection 6

1965–1973: The regionalisation of conflict

50 Prior to the 1960s, the South African government saw the southern African region as an exploitable resource, a source of cheap labour and a ready market for the country’s products. The continued subordination of the region could be ensured and was achieved through institutions like the Southern African Customs and Monetary Union which came into existence in the early twentieth century.

51 This attitude began to change in the early 1960s, in response to the rise of African nationalism and the steady withdrawal of the European colonial powers from the continent. NP politicians and senior security strategists began to conceptualise the region, and particularly the minority-ruled and colonial territories of Southern Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique and South West Africa, primarily as a military buffer zone.

52 Conversely, black opposition groups drew inspiration from the nationalist movements in other parts of Africa which had led to the independence of most former European colonies in the continent by the end of 1960. Some also became increasingly influenced by Soviet, Chinese or other models of political thought and organisation.

53 From the early 1960s, the ANC, the SACP and the PAC all established administrative headquarters outside South Africa and actively sought financial, diplomatic and military help to launch armed campaigns in South Africa. Following the Rivonia trial, the ANC established bases in exile – initially in Tanzania, later in Zambia and Angola – and began to develop fraternal links with other liberation movements.

54 By the mid-1960s, South Africa’s stance towards the region was becoming more interventionist. In the SANDF’s second submission on the SADF, the country’s military strategy at the time was described as “defensive” but “more outward”, prompted by the perception that there was now, “for the first time, the potential threat of conventional war on the northern borders of the sub-continent”. The SADF’s “strategy was to keep the ‘defence line’ as far as possible away from South Africa itself”. This notion was the direct consequence of the fact that the security establishment’s strategic thinking was deeply immersed in the logic of the cold war. Thus all forms of conflict and instability in Africa were seen as “avenues for Soviet involvement”, with the SADF arguing that South Africa was faced with “a Soviet-backed revolutionary war”.

55 Consequently, from the mid-1960s, the government undertook or authorised a number of defensive and pre-emptive operations outside of South Africa’s borders. The first of these was the establishment of an SAP security police camp in the Caprivi Strip in northern South West Africa in March 1965, under the guise of an engineering company. The camp was under the command of former sabotage squad member, Major Theunis ‘Rooi Rus’ Swanepoel. The role of the camp was to monitor SWAPO activity. Sixteen months later, SAP units were deployed to the area in response to SWAPO’s decision to move its trained cadres into South West Africa. On 26 August 1966, SAP forces attacked SWAPO’s first military base inside South West Africa at Omgulumbashe, marking the beginning of South Africa’s armed intervention in the region.

56 The first armed campaigns launched by a foreign-based South African liberation movement were the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns of 1967 and 1968. According to the ANC’s second submission to the Commission, its Rhodesian campaigns were launched with the aim of “infiltrating trained MK operatives into South Africa in line with the concept of rural-based guerrilla warfare”. The idea was that MK soldiers would thus create a “corridor” along which to infiltrate guerrillas into South Africa. The campaigns were not a military success and resulted in the death and capture of a number of MK combatants.

57 In response to this development, SAP units were sent to Rhodesia in September 1967 to assist Rhodesian forces fighting ZIPRA (ZAPU) and MK (ANC) guerrillas in the north west of the country. In the SANDF’s first submission on the SADF, it was explained that the SAP units were dispatched to Rhodesia “to fight against men who originally came from South Africa and were on their way back to commit terrorism in South Africa”. By 1975, when the police contingent was withdrawn, 2 000 South African policemen were involved in combat operations inside Rhodesia.

58 In the period up to 1974, South African military support to Portuguese forces engaged in operations in Angola and Mozambique took the form of the supply of medicines, the pooling of intelligence information, helicopter support, some joint commando training and occasional joint commando operations. In Angola it included the secondment of a small number of experienced SADF trackers who wore Portuguese military fatigues, and were used to track UNITA fighters operating in alliance with SWAPO at that time.

59 In order to draw lessons from the Portuguese counter-insurgency effort, a number of the SADF’s promising military strategists were appointed to ‘diplomatic’ posts in the two colonies. In December 1965, General Jannie Geldenhuys (later both Chief of the Army and of the SADF) was sent to Luanda as Vice Consul. According to his biography, his brief was “to study the Angola war”. From 1971–75, the post was held by Major (later Major General) Marius Oelschig. After Angolan independence in 1975, Oelschig became the most senior SADF official operating in liaison with UNITA.

60 Similar links developed in Mozambique where SADF officers were seconded to the Portuguese regional military headquarters in Nampula from the latter 1960s. One of these was Brigadier Cornelius ‘Cor’ van Niekerk who was a liaison officer at Nampula in 1972/73. In 1979, he was appointed to head the Military Intelligence Division’s Directorate of Special Tasks. In that capacity he was responsible for running the RENAMO operation against the Mozambican government from 1980.

61 According to the second submission on the SADF, the SADF began working alongside the Rhodesians and Portuguese in the region because of shared perceptions of threat. The SADF also responded to the changing regional security

scenario by initiating a study programme on ‘revolutionary war’. In the late 1960s, the SADF’s Lieutenant General CA ‘Pop’ Fraser, then chief of the army, produced his Lessons Drawn from Past Revolutionary Wars, which in later years became a blueprint for South Africa’s counter-revolutionary strategy. The SADF introduced formal instruction in counter-insurgency into its training in 1968; the SAP had already done so a year earlier.

62 In July 1969, senior security figures from the newly formed Bureau of State Security (BOSS), the Portuguese International Police for the Defence of the State (PIDE), and the Rhodesian Security Police met in Lisbon for a week of talks designed to bring about closer collaboration in their counter-insurgency efforts. Several further such tripartite meetings were held in the next five years, coinciding with the development by the SADF of a high-level think-tank focusing on strategic options in the region. Senior Rhodesian officers also participated in the project.

63 In the 1970s, the SADF actively propagated its views on counter-insurgency throughout the state sector through courses and lectures to groups from both the security and non-security sections of the public service. It was in this period, too, that General Jannie Geldenhuys introduced the military to the ideas of the American security theorist, JJ McCuen. Further US influence was evident in the co-operation between the security forces and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which considered South Africa a local ally against the Soviet Union. Examples include the role of the CIA in providing information which led to the capture of Nelson Mandela in 1962, as well as training given to General van den Bergh prior to the creation of BOSS.

64 Counter-insurgency spoke of ‘national security’ rather than ‘defence of national territory’, thus drawing political conflict into the domain of the security establishment. A successful counter-strategy was seen as being dependent on accurately recognising the particular stage of development of the insurgency war and arresting its development by instituting a counter-phase. The theorists on whom the South African securocrats drew stressed the need for a co-ordinated and organised counter-offensive involving the police, the military and bureaucracy.

65 The South African government drew on Cold War theories to argue that its opposition to local liberation movements with Soviet sympathies or links was part of the same battle that the US and Western Europe were waging against Eastern Europe and the USSR.

66 A few years after the Wankie campaign, the South African security forces began to develop a strategy of clandestine warfare, later known as destabilisation. Although this was widely acknowledged as a policy in the 1980s, there is evidence that it had its origins in a much earlier period. Most of the evidence concerns Operation Plathond.