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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 2 February 1990, FW de Klerk made a speech that changed the history of South Africa. Nine days later, the world watched as Nelson Mandela walked free from the Viktor Verster prison. In the midst of these events was Lord Renwick, Margaret Thatcher's envoy to South Africa, who became a personal friend of Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, acting as a trusted intermediary between them. He warned PW Botha against military attacks on neighbouring countries, in meetings he likens to 'calling on the führer in his bunker'. He invited Mandela to his first meal in a restaurant for twenty-seven years, rehearsing him for his meeting with Margaret Thatcher - and told Thatcher that she must not interrupt him. Their discussion went on so long that the British press in Downing Street started chanting 'Free Nelson Mandela'.In this extraordinary insider's account, Renwick draws on his diaries of the time, as well as previously unpublished material from the Foreign Office and Downing Street files. He paints a vivid, affectionate, real-life portrait of Mandela as a wily and resourceful political leader bent on out-manoeuvring both adversaries and some of his own colleagues in pursuit of a peaceful outcome.
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Praise for The End of Apartheid: Diary of a Revolution
‘This is one of the most important books written on the modern history of South Africa. It describes the end of apartheid by a person who was at the forefront of negotiations between all the South African parties involved.
It describes in detail the roles played by the main protagonists, from FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela to Margaret Thatcher. Previously classified reports have been released by the British government to this end.
For anyone interested in Africa, I urge you to read this book.’
Wilbur Smith
‘Only Robin Renwick could have written this riveting first-hand account of the demise of white rule in South Africa, which future historians will find indispensable.’
Richard Steyn, former editor of The Star
Praise for Helen Suzman: Bright Star in a Dark Chamber:
‘Helen Suzman was sharp, incisive, principled and loads of fun. So is this biography by Robin Renwick.’
John Carlin, author of Invictus
‘Wonderfully readable story of someone I think of every day.’
Helen Zille, Premier of the Western Cape
‘The new insights that Robin Renwick brings to the extraordinary life and achievements of the late Helen Suzman will help to ensure that this exceptional South African and universally acknowledged human rights campaigner is accorded her rightful place in history.’
John Battersby, former editor of the Sunday Independent
‘An admirable and affectionate portrait of a remarkable woman.’
David Welsh, author of The Rise and Fall of Apartheid
‘“Don’t be silly, Nelson!” If you think Margaret Thatcher was the quintessential tough woman politician, try Helen Suzman … Robin Renwick writes as both friend and historian about this ferociously wonderful woman.’
Libby Purves, The Times
‘Robin Renwick’s biography, which draws on his time as British ambassador in the frenetic last years of white rule, brims with anecdotes. Happily, in an era of overlong and under-edited biographies, it shares her fondness for clarity, concision and humour.’
Financial Times
‘The truest of liberals … this crisp, lucid account is persuasive in presenting her as the doughtiest of fighters for human rights anywhere and one of the finest parliamentarians.’
The Economist
THE END OF APARTHEID
Diary of a Revolution
Robin Renwick
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
‘If a political leader loses the support of his followers, it will remain only for him to write his memoirs’
This book seeks to provide an insider’s account of the end of apartheid, based on a host of meetings which, as British ambassador to South Africa, I had at the time with the main actors in this drama – PW Botha, FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu – and with many other less well-known figures, who also played important parts in getting rid of a fundamentally abhorrent system sooner and with less bloodshed than most outsiders had dared to hope. There are plenty of heroes in this narrative, along with some cases of pure evil.
Before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, he was told by Helen Suzman of the efforts the British government had been making to help secure his release. When he was released, he needed and received our help in a number of very practical ways. Above all, he sought our support in helping to overcome problems in the negotiations with the government. He did so because he felt that, at this time, we had more influence than others with FW de Klerk and his colleagues, telling me on one occasion that he regarded us as the principal supporters of the negotiating process that, however, was played out entirely between South Africans.
The portrait of Mandela that the reader will find in these pages is not the conventional hagiography. He could be dogmatic and at times distressingly partisan. Egged on by his colleagues in the ANC, he was at times unfair to De Klerk and forgetful of what he owed him. As he confessed to me, he also made a major mistake in failing for nearly a year to meet with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who had refused to negotiate with the government until Mandela was released.
Yet my admiration for him was second to no one’s. Having had the chance to get to know him well before many others, I never ceased to be impressed, and at times amused, at the effect he had on normally hard-boiled visitors, who almost invariably became weak at the knees in the presence of the great man.
As Desmond Tutu observed of him, this diamond had just one flaw, which was to put his trust in colleagues who did not always deserve it. He did so not just out of loyalty, but also from political calculation. Mandela was conscious of the fears of his ANC colleagues in Lusaka that he might start negotiating with the government on his own, and also that the township youth and half his colleagues in the national leadership had more radical agendas than he did. This led him at times to engage in rhetoric and defend positions he did not really believe in, telling me, in one very revealing encounter, that a leader who lost the support of his followers would have nothing better to do than write his memoirs.
Mandela was a far wilier politician, and could be less saintly, than some other portrayals would have us believe, though he did indeed have some saintly characteristics. For at the time there were two Mandelas: in public, much of the time, there was the harshly aggressive, apparently unquestioning spokesman of his party, reading out speeches written by the apparatchiks; and then there was the authentic Mandela, generous in spirit, libertarian by instinct, and inspirational to everyone he met – including me. He used this dual personality quite deliberately to keep his supporters in line behind him. When the chips were down, as in his response to the assassination of Chris Hani, it was the real Mandela who came to the fore.
The reader will find in this account of a series of meetings with him a fundamental difference of approach between Mandela and those of his colleagues whose overriding objective was to win power and hold on to it. Much as he revered the ANC, Mandela, as he showed in government, did not believe in the supremacy of the party over the institutions of the country, including the judiciary and the press. He told Helen Suzman and others that he was relieved that his party did not achieve a two-thirds majority in the first democratic elections, as he wanted there to be no temptation to change the constitution. The least power-hungry of political leaders, he flatly refused to serve more than one term as President.
At the end of every meeting I had with him, he would never fail to ask for money for the ANC, as he was programmed by his colleagues to do. I would explain to him that we provided funding for education, township projects and non-governmental organisations, and not for any political party. Just as he had co-opted his warder in jail and the justice minister, Kobie Coetsee, who kept asking for my help in getting him released, so I found him co-opting me. I was, he kept insisting, his advisor. He also kept urging me to join the ANC. It was, he contended, a broad church ‘and you think like us’. This was a debatable proposition.
His next target for co-option was more ambitious. It was in fact the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. He was determined, he told me, ‘to get her on my side’, and he succeeded in doing so, though not at the expense of her admiration for FW de Klerk.
The reader will also find in these pages a close-up portrait of FW de Klerk as the supposedly conservative leader of the National Party in the Transvaal who, contrary to the expectations of many, including his brother, Willem (Wimpie), set his country on an entirely new path. He did so because, as a clear-sighted, pragmatic and principled person who took his religion seriously, he understood that the status quo could only be maintained by ever-greater violence by the state, and he had developed a visceral dislike of the paramilitary methods of PW Botha and Magnus Malan. There was never any doubt that he believed in civilian control over the military, however hard he found it in practice to exert.
On 2 February 1990, on his way to parliament to deliver his speech unbanning the ANC, the PAC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), he told his wife that South Africa would never be the same. Having made the speech, he told his friends that, as an Afrikaner, he now felt able to look anyone in the eye. The absolute key as to why he launched his country on a new, uncharted course lay in the speech he made in private to the hierarchy of the South African police in January 1990 (see page 110). In it, he said that the alternative to negotiations was for the state to kill thousands more people, which he was not prepared to do, and after this Armageddon, when the shooting stopped, the problem would be exactly the same as it was before it started.
Having unbanned the ANC, released a great number of prisoners and lifted the state of emergency, De Klerk found the country engulfed in a chronic state of unrest as the ‘comrades’ in the townships flexed their muscles, the ANC continued to fight it out with Inkatha and elements of the security forces contributed to the mayhem.
I never failed to be impressed by De Klerk’s resolve in responding to these difficulties. The security forces hated what he was doing. There was a real danger that some of them might actually revolt – as indeed they did in subterranean ways. His own political base was being rapidly eroded.
Yet I never found him contemplating retreat, or what would have been a catastrophic desire to try to stop halfway. Meeting him in his office in parliament or in the Union Buildings, I would find him chain-smoking behind his desk, reacting calmly to the events around him. As I discussed Mandela’s concerns with him, including at times when relations between them were badly frayed, I always found him focused on getting to the next stage and never losing sight of the goal, which was to agree a new constitution that would give political rights to all South Africans.
As I pointed out to Mandela on two or three occasions, it is more difficult to negotiate yourself out of power than to negotiate yourself into it. De Klerk did not start off from that position. He would have liked to see more safeguards for minority rights than ended up in the constitution, and he believed and had hoped that a more extended period of power-sharing between the ANC and the National Party would have benefited South Africa. In the midst of this difficult and turbulent process, the influential academic Hermann Giliomee, himself a reformer, but playing devil’s advocate, went to see De Klerk to ask why he was making all these changes now. ‘You know perfectly well that we could have held out for another ten or twenty years,’ said Giliomee, causing De Klerk to get angry. ‘Yes, and that would entail killing a lot more people,’ he replied, ‘and what would we do then?’
De Klerk was criticised for his failure to prevent the security forces from arming Inkatha and contributing in other ways to the violence in the townships. The feeble report of the Harms Commission (see page 154) and the connivance of the army generals allowed even the members of the so-called Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) and the unit at Vlakplaas under the infamous Eugene de Kock to continue operating for a while. De Klerk had given repeated orders to terminate all such activities, but they had become endemic in sections of the police and army under his predecessors. It took the appointment of a much tougher judge, Richard Goldstone, and the ‘night of the generals’ (see page 170) to bring things under better control.
Mandela and his colleagues knew very well that, beneath the superficial deference, important sections of the police and army were flatly opposed to what De Klerk was doing. Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki asked me on more than one occasion about the danger of a coup, leading Slovo himself to suggest a period of power-sharing between the ANC and the National Party. Through the transition, De Klerk had to manage the police and army generals as best he could, and in the end succeeded in doing so.
I hope that this book will lay finally to rest the contention that Margaret Thatcher was ‘a friend of apartheid’ and called Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist’ (which, as a matter of fact, she never did). Those who have continued to propagate this myth are going to have to explain away for the next several years, as the archives progressively are opened, the innumerable messages she sent to PW Botha and FW de Klerk urging the release of Nelson Mandela, the repeal of all the apartheid laws and independence for Namibia. She kept up these efforts unrelentingly for ten years after becoming Prime Minister, applying far more pressure, far more directly, on the South African government on these issues than her international counterparts combined, earning from Nelson Mandela the accolade that, despite their differences over sanctions, he and the ANC ‘have much to be thankful to her for’. At the time of her funeral, FW de Klerk declared that ‘she exerted more influence on what happened in South Africa than any other political leader’.
I am grateful to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for having permitted me to review all my reports from South Africa, and all the messages exchanged between Margaret Thatcher, PW Botha and FW de Klerk in this period, to help ensure the accuracy of this account.
PROLOGUE
‘Any self-respecting terrorist has an AK-47!’
November 1978
Appointed at this time head of the Rhodesia Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), I was told that I was being given responsibility for a pretty hopeless cause, but I was to come up with some new ideas.
Ever since Harold Wilson’s bizarre assertion in 1966 that economic sanctions would defeat Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in ‘weeks rather than months’, the problem, as Margaret Thatcher put it, had become a ‘long-standing cause of grief to successive British governments’.1 Even US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had tried and failed to defuse this time bomb.
The Rhodesia crisis had led to a long and bloody guerrilla war, ranging the Rhodesian military against the liberation forces of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and the military wing of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu).2 In 1976, Zanu and Zapu had formed a political-military coalition called the Patriotic Front. The Labour government of James Callaghan, represented by the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, had teamed up with the Carter administration to put forward Anglo-American proposals to resolve the impasse in Rhodesia which were rejected alike by Ian Smith and the Patriotic Front. Ian Smith, meanwhile, was pursuing a so-called internal settlement. Having reached agreement with Bishop Abel Muzorewa and his colleagues, he was planning to hold an election in which the African population would be able to vote for the first time. The Patriotic Front were neither invited nor willing to participate in elections organised by the Rhodesians.
March 1979
Visiting Rhodesia on the eve of the elections, we had to land in Salisbury, the capital, in a sharp twisting spiral, as Nkomo’s guerrillas recently had shot down two civilian aircraft of Air Rhodesia with surface-to-air missiles. Within the city, the streets lined with flowering trees gave an impression of calm and orderliness, belied by the fact that travel outside the city after mid-afternoon had become extremely hazardous.
Bishop Muzorewa was likable and well disposed but, manifestly, not really in charge. Even if he had been, he did not appear capable of running a government. I was able to establish a relationship with the person who was in charge, General Peter Walls, a charismatic military commander accustomed to leading his men from the front, who had served with the Black Watch and had led a Rhodesian SAS unit during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s. General Walls was well aware that, while his forces were winning every battle, progressively they were losing the war.
There followed a dinner at Meikles Hotel with the resourceful and cunning head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), Ken Flower. More lucid than others, he clearly was sceptical that Muzorewa’s incorporation in the government would make a difference to the guerrilla war.
I met Robert Mugabe in a broken-down office block in the dilapidated city of Maputo, capital of Mozambique. I did not take, then or later, to his coldly dislikable personality or the extreme aggression of his views. The best course, he declared, was to get on with the war. Negotiations were a waste of time. He was confident that his forces would win in due course. They were doing far more of the fighting than those of Nkomo.
In the Zambian capital of Lusaka, Joshua Nkomo lived in much grander style in a house next to that of his friend and mentor, President Kenneth Kaunda. Nkomo was a mixture of bluster and attempts at charm, with bluster at the time predominating. As he complained bitterly about the failure of the Callaghan government to deliver him to power in Salisbury, I warned that he had better get used to the idea of dealing with the Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher. A few days later, the Rhodesians razed to the ground the villa in which I had met him in Lusaka.
May 1979
On the eve of the general election in Britain, the Conservative Party sent a mission to observe the elections in Rhodesia. It reported positively on the turn-out and clear victory for Muzorewa. At this time, I had never met Margaret Thatcher. But it seemed to me that the argument that we should not recognise the outcome of the elections in Rhodesia because that would annoy the UN and the Commonwealth had not the faintest chance of being accepted by her. But to recognise a Muzorewa government that attracted no other support and then went under would be a fiasco. Margaret Thatcher just might be prepared to consider a much bolder plan. This would mean Britain playing a far more direct and adventurous role than any previous government had been prepared to contemplate.
Following the Conservative victory, the Foreign Office had greeted with a sigh of relief the appointment of Lord Carrington as Foreign Secretary, after a sometimes turbulent relationship with David Owen. The very patrician Carrington detested the Rhodesian Front and their right-wing supporters in his own party, who regarded Ian Smith (who still bore the scars of the injuries he had suffered while serving as an RAF pilot in Italy during the Second World War) as a kindred spirit and the rebellion he had led against the Crown as a mere peccadillo.
Peter Carrington, who had an even more distinguished war record himself, had no more time for Smith than he did for the bluster of Nkomo and the intransigence of Mugabe, or for the means by which they were seeking to liberate their country. Carrington suspected, as I did, that the former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home might well be correct in suggesting that what they wanted was ‘one person, one vote – once’.
With a war in progress, the Foreign Office view had been that it would be unwise for Britain to get more directly involved. But, if the situation deteriorated to the point of collapse, we faced the prospect of having to evacuate large numbers of British citizens from Rhodesia in circumstances reminiscent of France’s exit from Algeria in 1962. There was, I was convinced, no low-risk policy in relation to Rhodesia.
Margaret Thatcher was surprised to find the Foreign Office advocating a far more muscular approach, which was the opposite of what she had been expecting. The first major decision she was asked to take was that this was going to be a purely British initiative and not an Anglo-American one.
What attracted the Prime Minister most about our plan was its boldness. President Jimmy Carter and his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, agreed with undisguised relief that we should take the lead. In the debate on the Queen’s speech, the Prime Minister said that ‘we intend to proceed with vigour to resolve the issue’. It was a promise not many believed her capable of keeping.
We told her that the constitution of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia (as it was called under the internal settlement) was unlike that on the basis of which we had granted independence to any other former colony, as the real power remained in the hands of the Rhodesian military commanders. She agreed that this must be remedied before the country could be brought to independence.
We then sought to persuade her that bringing the country to independence would not be of much avail, nor would a Muzorewa government survive, if we could not get support from the neighbouring countries and find a way to wind down the war. For this very nasty small war was getting steadily worse. To counter the incursions by Mugabe’s guerrillas from Mozambique and Nkomo’s from Zambia, the Rhodesians were launching ferocious cross-border raids to disrupt infiltration and destroy the neighbouring countries’ infrastructure. They also were arming groups opposed to the Frelimo government in Mozambique, notably the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo), fuelling a full-scale civil war in that country. As for Mugabe’s tactics, one of the principal methods used to bring areas of the country under his forces’ control was the torture, mutilation and execution of village headmen in front of the villagers.
June 1979
At this point the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, descended on us in London. Pik Botha was one of the most verligte (enlightened) members of the South African government, but that was not saying much at the time. He gave Peter Carrington and his deputy, Ian Gilmour, a forty-five-minute lecture on the iniquity of Western policy in southern Africa, alleging constant moving of the goalposts, and allowing precious little time for reply. Bent on revenge, I telephoned 10 Downing Street to ensure that, when Pik Botha saw Margaret Thatcher, he did not get a word in edgeways.
Our next visitor was Bishop Muzorewa. A decent man, he always seemed small and insignificant in meetings, lacking Nkomo’s vast girth and bluster and Mugabe’s viperish intelligence. Margaret Thatcher told him that there would have to be a new constitution for Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, comparable to those for our former colonies.
July 1979
Our plans for the Commonwealth conference in Lusaka depended on taking the other heads of government by surprise. They were convinced that the Prime Minister planned to recognise Muzorewa.
Zambia, including its capital, had been treated as a free-fire zone by the Rhodesian army and air force for many months. As the RAF VC10 neared Lusaka airport, Peter Carrington asked the Prime Minister why she was donning dark glasses. Mrs Thatcher feared that, on arrival, acid might be thrown in her eyes.3 There was a sharp exchange with Carrington when he suggested that the meeting was going to be a damage limitation exercise, an expression she claimed never to have heard before! It was completely alien to her thinking.
The discussion on Rhodesia, expected to be stormy, was opened by Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. What was needed, he said, was a genuinely democratic constitution and elections in which all parties could participate. The Prime Minister, as we had planned, upstaged him by agreeing. Commonwealth leaders, she said, had never failed to remind us that it was Britain’s responsibility to bring Rhodesia to legal independence. That was exactly what we were now intending to do. We would be proposing a new constitution and elections to be held under British control.
The conference ended with the improbable sight of Margaret Thatcher dancing with Kenneth Kaunda. She was far too polite to mention that, on her return to her accommodation one evening, the ceiling had collapsed and there was no running water.
She told the press that the problem was to find a solution that would bring an end to the war. But she added, to my dismay, that she had no plans to send British troops to Rhodesia. This was a decision we were going to have to get reversed.
August 1979
The British government invited Muzorewa and the leaders of the Patriotic Front to a constitutional conference, to be held in London at Lancaster House, that would decide the independence constitution and lay the groundwork for new elections. In the run-up to the conference, Margaret Thatcher agreed that she must not seek to play any part in it, otherwise the participants would constantly be appealing against Carrington to her. This included having nothing whatever to do with Ian Smith, who had been greeted with applause by airport workers on his arrival in Britain and fêted by some right-wing members of her party. Ian Smith could not understand the Prime Minister’s refusal to meet him, forgetting that he had led a rebellion against the Queen, which, to Margaret Thatcher, was a capital offence.
A note from Number Ten recorded that Peter Carrington and Thatcher were approaching the conference in ‘rather different ways’. The Prime Minister wanted to do everything possible to enable it to succeed. The more worldly-wise Carrington regarded an agreement as ‘virtually inconceivable’.4
September 1979
Beneath the chandeliers at Lancaster House, Carrington said that the people in the room had it in their power to end the war. After uncompromising statements by Nkomo and Mugabe, the proceedings were interrupted for tea, to force the delegations to mingle with one another. The participants were surprised to see Josiah Tongogara, commander of Mugabe’s Zanla forces, greeting Ian Smith and asking about his mother. Tongogara had grown up on Smith’s mother’s farm: she had given him sweets as a child. This had not, however, had much effect on his political opinions.
We presented a classic decolonising constitution to both sides, providing for genuine majority rule with protections for minority rights. Muzorewa was overshadowed by the brooding and sardonic presence of Ian Smith, who had driven his country full tilt into an increasingly bloody cul-de-sac. When Smith complained, in his grating voice, that we were dragging out the conference while people were being killed in Rhodesia, the normally imperturbable Carrington lost his temper completely. Purple with anger, he told Smith that the responsibility for the war, which they were losing, rested squarely with him.
Ian Smith’s plan was to push the government up against the deadline for the renewal of sanctions in November. Urged by Carrington to find a way to outmanoeuvre him, I told the Rhodesians that not all sanctions depended on the Southern Rhodesia Act, passed in response to UDI, which they knew was unlikely to be renewed in November. A lot of measures existed under other legislation, and these required positive, not merely negative, action to terminate them.
October 1979
This (the threat to continue sanctions) was regarded by Smith as an example of British perfidy. But it had the intended effect. The Muzorewa delegation accepted the proposed constitution, overruling Ian Smith. Nkomo and Mugabe still were holding out, though. To get their attention, we announced that, to organise the elections, we would be sending a British Governor to Rhodesia with full powers, dissolving the Rhodesian government and parliament. As Nkomo and Mugabe’s henchmen said to me, they now realised that, this time, we were serious, which they had never believed we were before.
With extreme reluctance, Muzorewa agreed to stand aside as Prime Minister; a more power-hungry politician would have refused to do so. Nkomo and especially Mugabe, however, still were bent on stringing out the conference while they pushed more of their troops across the border. In the course of many discussions with me at Lancaster House, Mugabe kept telling me that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and that he had a PhD in terrorism. The Rhodesians were responding by launching ferocious cross-border raids into Zambia and Mozambique. As Mugabe demanded that we must ensure the release of all political prisoners, I told him that this would have to include his own dissidents, held in a detention camp in Mozambique.
November 1979
Carrington and I were summoned to see the Prime Minister in her room in the House of Commons. We had presented her with a bill providing for Britain to assume direct control of Rhodesia through a Governor with full legislative and executive powers. Reminding us that she was a lawyer, she insisted on going through every line of it.
