South Africa the Commando Offensive

By William E. Smith

At first, as the two jet fighters came screaming over the Zambian capital of Lusaka, most townspeople paid little attention, assuming them to be air force planes on some kind of training maneuver. But then a series of sharp explosions shook the city, and Zambians suddenly realized that the black-white confrontation in southern Africa had taken a new and dangerous turn.

For several years, white-ruled South Africa has attempted to destabilize some of the black-ruled regimes along its northern borders; on several occasions its forces have made lightning raids on South African dissident groups in nearby Lesotho, Botswana and Mozambique. Last week, in the widest-ranging action yet launched against its neighbors, South Africa's armed forces staged virtually simultaneous attacks in the capital cities of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. The targets, according to a subsequent South African announcement, were operational bases and transit facilities of the exiled, outlawed African National Congress, which the government of State President P.W. Botha regards as a terrorist organization and black Africa considers a liberation movement (see box).

The attacks, which improbably involved rental cars as well as helicopters and jet fighters, came at a time of sputtering unrest throughout South Africa. Early in the week the Pretoria government announced that it had found a large cache of mines, bombs, rockets, grenades and automatic rifles, supposedly belonging to the A.N.C., somewhere near Johannesburg. Rioting continued throughout the week in the squatter camp of Crossroads, near Cape Town, where gangs of conservative black vigilantes were pitted against hundreds of young antiapartheid activists. At least 32 people were killed, and tens of thousands of shacks were burned, reputedly by the vigilantes, leaving as many as half of the settlement's 100,000 residents without shelter. There were riots in at least 15 other places, including the huge black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, where police clashed with a crowd of 8,000 who had gathered to attend a funeral that the government had declared illegal. All told, the number of South Africans killed in disturbances over the past 20 months, almost all of them black, is approaching 1,600. Late in the week, government troops clashed with guerrilla forces in South African-ruled Namibia, leaving 56 insurgents dead.

Despite the widespread unrest, the Botha government's motive in staging last week's attacks was unclear. Even as the raiding parties were carrying out their missions, a Commonwealth negotiating team arrived in Cape Town following talks with A.N.C. leaders in Lusaka. They were trying to set up a negotiating link between Pretoria and the A.N.C. Though the Commonwealth team's leaders, onetime Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and former Nigerian Head of State Olusegun Obasanjo, were reluctant to admit it, their mission had been all but destroyed by the cross-border raids. Criticism was worldwide. The Reagan Administration expressed its "vigorous condemnation" of the attacks, which it described as an "outrage," and expelled a South African military attache. Canada recalled its ambassador, and Argentina broke off diplomatic relations, saying the Pretoria government "threatens international peace."

At home, members of the ruling National Party congratulated the Botha government for its move against the "cowardly terrorists," but Colin Eglin, leader of the small opposition Progressive Federal Party, described the action as a "major political blunder for which not only the government but all the people of South Africa will have to pay the price." Helen Suzman, long the leading voice of the white opposition in Parliament, declared that the action could force other countries to take strong economic sanctions against South Africa.

Noting that the U.S. and Britain had recently struck back against terrorism, Botha sought to draw a parallel between the South African raids and last month's U.S. attack on Libya. He declared, "We will fight international terrorism in precisely the same way as other Western countries, despite the sanctimonious protests of the guardian of international terrorist movements, the United Nations." The U.S. quickly replied that Libya is the "world's principal proponent of state-sponsored terrorism," while the governments of Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe had all tried to limit the cross-border violence directed against South Africa.

What precipitated last week's strikes? One theory is that Botha was seeking to disarm his adversaries in the far-right wing of the ruling National Party. The die-hard Afrikaners are upset by the modest political and racial reforms made thus far, and worried about any further steps that Botha might take to relax the rigid strictures of apartheid. Last week, for instance, the government announced that a new national council, an advisory body that is supposed to be the first concrete step in creating a "government of national unity," would include at least 16 black members. Most black leaders opposed the plan as meaningless when it was first suggested by Botha in January, but it is equally unacceptable to many Afrikaners.

If Botha thought he could win over hard-line Nationalists by staging attacks on black-ruled capitals, he was quite mistaken. Later in the week, a fanatical white organization, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, broke up a National Party rally in rural Pietersburg in the Transvaal. Police had to fire tear gas to quell the resulting free-for-all, in which several people were injured.

The first of last week's three raids began at about 1 a.m. Monday when a bomb destroyed an A.N.C. office above the New Go-Go restaurant in Ottawa House in downtown Harare (formerly Salisbury), injuring a security guard. Almost immediately, a few commandos with automatic weapons attacked a house in Ashdown Park, some five miles from the city center. The raiding party in Zimbabwe apparently consisted of about six commandos who entered the country as tourists and then rented three Hertz cars in the southern Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo.

When they reached Harare, the raiders picked up arms and ammunition from an unknown source and carried out their mission. Then, as they drove south, they scattered metal spikes on the Harare-Bulawayo highway to make their getaway easier and disappeared, probably by helicopter or light aircraft. Authorities in Harare later announced that they had arrested four people suspected of being accomplices.

In Botswana, twelve South African helicopters landed at dawn near a housing complex outside the capital city of Gaborone. Using a loudspeaker, the South Africans warned Botswana soldiers at an army camp half a mile away not to interfere. Then, after scrambling from their aircraft, the South Africans raked the surrounding buildings with automatic gunfire and tossed grenades for half an hour. One Botswanan was killed, and three others were injured.

In Lusaka, the jet fighters fired four rockets at a cluster of buildings before swinging away to the west, presumably to a base across the Namibian border. A Zambian and a Namibian were killed, and some 20 people were injured. Though South Africa declared that the buildings had served as the A.N.C.'s "operational center and information department," a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lusaka maintained that the camp was a transit center for refugees from all over southern Africa and not an A.N.C. base.

Why had the South Africans chosen a refugee camp as their target? Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, after touring the Lusaka site, speculated, "They must have been using false or misinformed intelligence." It would not have been the first such mistake. An A.N.C. official pointed out that in 1983 the South Africans struck a jam factory in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and still claim it was an A.N.C. installation. Nonetheless, the fact that last week's raids killed only three people and were aimed at largely empty buildings suggests that the real purpose of the exercise was less strategic than political or psychological.

The attacks could have grown out of some unexpected developments in the visit of the Commonwealth's Eminent Persons Group to southern Africa. Until two weeks ago, South African Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha, who is not related to the State President, had led the Commonwealth group to believe that his government would consider such concessions as the release from prison of Black Leader Nelson Mandela, the removal of troops from black townships and the lifting of the ban on the A.N.C. in return for a suspension of violence by the A.N.C. When the Commonwealth group met with him a few days later, however, Botha changed his offer and reverted to Pretoria's traditional demand that the A.N.C. must first renounce violence, not just suspend it.

, A clue to the Pretoria government's apparent policy change may lie in a disclosure by Commonwealth secretariat sources that in a secret meeting with the Eminent Persons Group, the imprisoned Mandela had astonished his visitors by agreeing to a truce and to talks with the Pretoria government. Forty-eight hours later, the South Africans staged their attacks on the three African states. The assumption at Commonwealth headquarters in London is that the Botha government never expected Mandela to cooperate in a negotiated settlement and that Pretoria feared the Afrikaner right wing would regard any kind of breakthrough as a betrayal of white interests.

If these reports are true, Botha's ploy can be said to have worked. In Lusaka, the exiled A.N.C. leader Oliver Tambo, who has been running the organization ever since his friend Mandela went to prison in the early 1960s, called on South African blacks to give their full support to a national strike on June 16, the tenth anniversary of the uprising in Soweto. Declared Tambo: "Let every university and school be emptied of its youth. Let every mine, factory, farm and white home be without labor. Let every shop close its doors." With emotions running so high on both sides, and with both camps showing signs of fracturing under the pressure, any hope of peace seemed more remote than ever.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg and James Wilde/Nairobi