The End of Apartheid (14 page)

I telephoned Mandela at his house in Soweto. I told him that we knew that De Klerk had never ordered the killing of anyone, any more than Mandela had done. We were continuing to try to narrow the differences between the government and the ANC on violence. The government were allocating some funds for the conversion of hostel accommodation into family units, but the phasing-out of single men's hostels would take years.

Mandela said that he had been encouraged by a telephone call with De Klerk. But he was adamant that there must be a ban on the carrying of ‘cultural' weapons. De Klerk wanted this to be permitted only on genuinely cultural occasions.

I said that the ANC were not going to get satisfaction on all the points in their ultimatum by 9 May (Mandela acknowledged this). It was one thing for them to ‘suspend' negotiations on a new constitution which had not yet begun anyway, but they could not afford to break off discussions on the issues of violence, release of prisoners and return of exiles, on which good progress was being made. We had pressed the government to offer an inquiry, headed by a judge. This would put pressure on the police to behave. We wanted the ANC to reconsider their decision not to participate.

Mandela thanked me for the efforts we were making. He would be back in contact with the government, as would Mbeki. The police must learn to deal with black crowds as they would with white ones.

The police, meanwhile, raided a number of hostels, confiscating weapons and putting a strain on De Klerk's relations with Buthelezi. By this time, following the shots that had been fired at the embassy in Pretoria a year before by an extremist faction led by Piet ‘Skiet' Rudolph, I was being denounced in the extreme right-wing Afrikaans propaganda sheets as, improbably, the reincarnation of Lord Milner, bent on the destruction of the Boers.

CHAPTER XIV

‘We can hardly drop them on Lusaka or Soweto'

The other cause we had been trying to pursue throughout my time in South Africa was to prevail upon the country to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to destroy its small arsenal of nuclear bombs. This was no small ask as, hitherto, no country had ever been prepared to do this. The Americans, too, were working very actively on this cause.

I found a powerful ally in Barend du Plessis. The military nuclear programme by now had cost nearly a billion dollars. Du Plessis could not understand what use South Africa could possibly make of nuclear weapons. ‘We can,' as he said to me, ‘hardly drop them on Lusaka or Soweto.' Since the inception of the programme in 1974, under Prime Minister John Vorster, South Africa had managed to produce six and a half Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. Their scientists were confident that these would work, though no tests had been conducted.

De Klerk had come to the same conclusion. Nuclear weapons had been intended to deter the total onslaught on South Africa led by the
Soviet Union. With the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola, the progressive disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, he concluded that the massive cost of the nuclear programme no longer made any sense. He moved quickly to close it down. Not long after becoming President, at the end of 1989 he gave instructions for the decommissioning of the enrichment plant near Pretoria at Pelindaba – a Zulu word variously translated as ‘end of the discussion' or ‘where important matters are settled'.

On one of the days in this period in which Mandela had suspended negotiations and there was an appearance of deadlock, I spent the evening with him and some of the best jazz musicians from Soweto at the house of his and our friend, Clive Menell. As with Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki, I argued that there was no alternative to getting back to negotiations and speeding them up if possible. Mandela said he agreed. He wanted to do more to curb the security forces, but negotiations would be resumed. He wanted there to be discussion of the new constitution by the end of the year.

Mandela, however, was greatly affected by the trial of his wife, which had begun in February. Winnie Mandela was accused following the kidnapping, in December 1988, of four youths and the murder of one of them by members of the Mandela United football club, her bodyguards. The ‘football team' had been conducting a reign of terror in Soweto. Mandela kept telling me, and even maintained in
Long Walk to Freedom,
that she was innocent.
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It was her infidelity, rather than her association with this bunch of thugs, that caused his rift
with her. More revealingly, he kept saying that he blamed himself for her difficulties, having been unable to offer her any effective support throughout his years in prison.

My term as ambassador was drawing to an end. Before leaving South Africa, I paid a farewell visit to Bloemfontein to see the wise and humane Chief Justice Michael Corbett. I told him that, while Winnie Mandela might well be found guilty, I doubted if Mandela would be able to cope if his wife were sent to prison. Kobie Coetsee was delivering a similar message to the judiciary, who evidently came to a similar conclusion, as the outcome, on appeal, was a suspended sentence for Winnie Mandela.

As De Klerk had confirmed to me that he would in due course be calling a referendum of the white community to seek support for his policies, I asked to see Mandela with, this time, his spokesman on sport, Steve Tshwete, also attending. I said that we had discussed several times the need to help De Klerk to retain the support of his constituency. De Klerk himself believed that a resumption of international sporting contacts would have more impact than anything else. Could the ANC please start considering selective easing of the sports boycott?

I got a positive hearing. Mandela and Tshwete said that they had started discussing, and would be discussing further, what I was proposing. A few weeks later, they agreed to the readmission of South Africa to international cricket and Olympic sport. It was a decision that paid political dividends. On 17 March 1992, De Klerk won his referendum of the white electorate with 68.7 per cent of the votes, a result universally recognised to have been helped by the fact that a South African cricket team at the time was playing in Australia.

Six months before, Margaret Thatcher had been deposed as Prime Minister by fellow members of the Conservative Party. De Klerk regarded it as a debt of honour to invite her to visit South Africa. The visit was bound to be tricky in some respects, as the more militant members of the ANC were threatening to stage demonstrations against her.

In Cape Town, De Klerk gave a state dinner in her honour. During a visit to the Independent Development Trust, the police were alarmed when a crowd gathered outside … only to burst into applause when she emerged. More predictably, she got a similar reception from the students in the Afrikaner citadel of Stellenbosch.

The ANC secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa had expressed to me one major worry about her visit. This was that the Johannesburg city council had declared their intention of awarding her the freedom of the city. Ramaphosa warned that, if this happened, there were bound to be demonstrations. I assured him that she had no intention of receiving this award from an all-white council which represented a tiny fraction of the people of Johannesburg. Instead we took her to Soweto, where she got a warm welcome from the nurses at the Baragwanath Hospital and from Aggrey Klaaste at the
Sowetan
.

Having spent two days with De Klerk and his wife at the Mala Mala Game Reserve, I accompanied Mrs Thatcher on the last leg of her visit, to meet Mangosuthu Buthelezi at Ulundi. She was greeted by the usual array of Zulu warriors with their assegais and shields and visited the battlefield on which the British army finally managed to defeat the Zulus on 4 July 1879.

On leaving South Africa she asked me a question which I and others and African governments themselves are still struggling to
answer. Given that the independence constitutions in much of the rest of Africa had been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, did I believe that governments in Africa were prepared to accept the Western notion, dating from the eighteenth century, that it was in their own interests to limit their own power and that, however irksome a free press and independent judiciary might prove to be, the alternative was worse? Though she was no friend of the liberation movements, it was thanks to her willingness to take the necessary risks that we had been able to end the Rhodesian war. Throughout my four years in South Africa, I had received no instructions, but full backing from her.

I was now on the verge of leaving South Africa to take up my post as ambassador in Washington, DC. I travelled from Ulundi to Pretoria for a farewell party given by my deputy, Anthony Rowell, who had himself established close relationships with several of the ANC leaders. I arrived to find Mandela there, together with his wife. She was in an ebullient mood, having managed to get herself arrested twice in the course of the day. I was described unkindly by the British press as ‘struggling in her embrace'. They were accompanied by Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and much of the ANC hierarchy.
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Mandela had made a special effort to make the journey from Soweto, as at the time he still hated visiting Pretoria, where most of his previous experiences had been at police headquarters. Among our other friends there was Johan Heyns.

I told Mandela that we were concerned that the ANC should not paint itself into a corner by making non-negotiable demands at its conference in Durban in July. Mandela asked me to write him a personal note about this, which I did on the following day.

Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma were worried about the temporary ascendancy of the radical wing of the ANC. I said that we had worked hard to persuade the government and Buthelezi to accept the ban on the carrying of assegais by Inkatha supporters in the Transvaal townships. We had tried to help the ANC out of the corner they had got themselves into with their ultimatum, with working groups making progress on issues other than the constitution. The discussion paper I had seen for their conference, demanding a transfer of power to an interim government, was a complete non-starter. Where had this come from?

I was told that it had been put forward by a white SACP faction. Zuma said that Mandela was infuriated about police behaviour and the alleged persecution of his wife, causing him not always to think clearly. It was a tragedy that Tambo was so ill. Would I please make some of these points to Mandela, to help counter the influence of Chris Hani, the youth wing and Winnie?

I paid a farewell call on De Klerk, who said that by 21 June all the apartheid laws would have been repealed. I said that we had helped to persuade most of the neighbouring countries to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and hoped that South Africa would now do so. De Klerk said that this was imminent. I described the effort we were making to try to ensure that Mandela was not bound into impossible negotiating positions at the ANC conference. However frustrated he might become at times, trying to proceed without the ANC was not going to be a successful course of action. De Klerk agreed with this. He wanted us to go on using our influence with Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma to help ensure that negotiations on a new constitution were engaged by year end.

There followed the dismantling and destruction of all the nuclear weapons that had been developed. South Africa signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and opened all its nuclear plants for inspection, thereby becoming the first and only country voluntarily to have dismantled its military nuclear capability. Apart from having opened the way for a fully democratic constitution and removing from the statute book all the apartheid laws, for this decision also FW De Klerk well and truly deserved his Nobel Peace Prize.

The press began publicising the fact that the government had been providing covert support to Inkatha. De Klerk had been aware that two hundred Inkatha members had been trained by the South African military, ostensibly to provide protection to Inkatha leaders at risk of assassination. But, unsurprisingly, it turned out that some of those involved themselves had launched attacks on the ANC, no doubt with the connivance of those who had trained them. Elements of both the police and the army had been responding to appeals from Inkatha for weapons to help them in their fight with the ANC.

De Klerk removed Magnus Malan from his post as defence minister, assigning him to Water Affairs, where it was thought he could not do much more harm. Adriaan Vlok was removed from Law and Order and put in charge of the prison system. In the democratic era, Vlok would apply for amnesty for authorising the attempted poisoning of the ANC-aligned secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches, the Reverend Frank Chikane, whose name was at the head of a death list handed down to him by PW Botha. Vlok was to make a sincere repentance for this scarcely believable crime.

De Klerk appointed Judge Richard Goldstone to launch a further, and this time successful, investigation into the dirty tricks departments of the police and army. His discoveries, and those of air force general Pierre Steyn later in the year, led to the ‘night of the generals', on which De Klerk dismissed sixteen senior members of the SADF. Clearly, the head of the SADF, General Kat Liebenberg, should have gone as well. But Hernus Kriel, Minister of Law and Order, warned: ‘What if they decide to get rid of us instead?' Liebenberg was replaced six months later by General Georg Meiring. When the former head of the army, General Constand Viljoen, told Meiring that they could take over the country in an afternoon, Meiring replied: ‘Yes, and what would we do then?' (General Viljoen subsequently was persuaded by Mandela himself to stop thinking in these terms and to participate in the 1994 elections.)

Judge Goldstone was clear in his report that, notwithstanding the contribution made to it by elements of the security forces, the ‘primary cause' of the violence was ‘the political battle between supporters of the ANC and Inkatha'. Mandela dismissed this as ‘superficial'. Although episodically referring to violence from all sides, it was not until 1993 that Mandela fully acknowledged that ‘there are members of the ANC who are killing our people. We must face the truth. Our people are just as involved as other organisations in committing violence.'
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Having talked to all the main political leaders over my last few days in South Africa, I left convinced that the process of political change
was indeed irreversible and that agreement would be reached on a fully democratic constitution. There would be a lot more violence and turbulence, some serious setbacks and apparent breakdowns. But Mandela and De Klerk knew that in the end they were condemned to agree. I did not believe that De Klerk, having gone this far, would try to stop halfway. I felt sure that in due course we would see an ANC government, led by Mandela, with De Klerk and the National Party participating in it. My main worry was whether an accommodation could also be reached with Inkatha.