{UAH} SOUTH AFRICA’S POLICY TOWARDS ZIMBABWE – A SYNOPSIS.

SOUTH AFRICA'S POLICY TOWARDS ZIMBABWE – A SYNOPSIS.

By Thabo Mbeki
February 22, 2016

Historically, with regard to the Zimbabwe liberation struggle, the ANC
had good relations with ZAPU and none with ZANU when it broke away
from ZAPU. This was a product of a continuous process in Zimbabwe
which had started with the establishment of the Southern Rhodesia
African National Congress in that country and the membership in the
South African ANC of Zimbabwe students and workers while they were
studying and working in South Africa.

ANC relations with ZANU

Despite this history, in 1978 ZANU sent a delegation from Mozambique
to Lusaka, led by the late former Vice President of Zimbabwe, Simon
Muzenda, to meet the ANC. The delegation had come to propose that the
ANC should send Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres to Mozambique to join
the units of ZANLA, the ZANU military wing, which were operating along
the Limpopo River. The delegation suggested that this would give MK
the possibility to infiltrate its cadres and materiel into and through
the then Northern Transvaal.

Though the political leadership of the ANC warmly supported this
proposal, the MK leadership opposed it on the basis that there were
already MK cadres embedded in units of ZIPRA, the military wing of
ZAPU, which were also operating along the Limpopo. These might end up
fighting their comrades in the ZANLA units as there were occasional
skirmishes between ZIPRA and ZANLA. Consequently we did not take up
the ZANU offer.

However we interacted warmly with the ZANU delegates at the 1979
Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka which decided on the Lancaster
Conference on Zimbabwe.

ANC relations with the Zimbabwe Government

On the very day that Zimbabwe achieved its independence in 1980, the
President of the ANC, the late O.R. Tambo, met then Prime Minister
Robert Mugabe in Salisbury, later Harare, to discuss the possibility
of the ANC opening an office in Harare and using Zimbabwe as a base to
carry out underground political and military work in South Africa.

Prime Minister Mugabe suggested that the ANC should assess whether it
could operate from Zimbabwe, given that the new Zimbabwe
administration would include many people it would inherit from the
Smith regime. These included General Peter Walls who led the Zimbabwe
Defence Force and Mr Ken Flower who headed the Central Intelligence
Organisation (CIO).

A few weeks thereafter, President Tambo informed Prime Minister Mugabe
that we had conducted our on-the-spot assessment within Zimbabwe and
thought that we could indeed operate from Zimbabwe despite the
presence in various Zimbabwe state organs of people inherited from the
Smith regime.

Prime Minister Mugabe immediately agreed that we could then operate in
Zimbabwe as President Tambo had proposed. I was therefore directed to
interact with then Minister of Security, and now Vice President,
Emmerson Mnangagwa, to work out all the details for our 'underground'
work and open representation in Zimbabwe, which was done.

The late Chris Hani was then put in charge of our 'underground'
operations in Zimbabwe, while the late Joe Gqabi, who was later
murdered in Harare by agents of the apartheid regime, served as our
public Chief Representative, with Geraldine Fraser, now
Fraser-Moleketi, as one of his assistants.

Zimbabwe land reform and South Africa

In 1990 as we began our negotiations to end the system of apartheid,
the then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku,
engaged President Mugabe to persuade him that the Government of
Zimbabwe should not proceed with any programme to implement a radical
land reform, given that the Lancaster House Constitutional 10-year
prohibition of this had expired.

Chief Anyaoku and the Commonwealth Secretariat feared that any radical
land redistribution in Zimbabwe at that stage would frighten white
South Africa and thus significantly complicate our own process of
negotiations.

President Mugabe and the Zimbabwe Government agreed to Chief Anyaoku's
suggestion and therefore delayed for almost a decade the needed
agrarian reform, which had been a central objective of the political
and armed struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe.

ANC intervention in Zimbabwe

All the foregoing resulted in the establishment of firm fraternal
relations between the ANC and now ZANU-PF, which created the
possibility for the two organisations to interact with each other
openly and frankly.

During these years of our interaction and working together with
President Mugabe, the Government of Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF, we came to
understand that all these were committed to such objectives as
improving the lives of the people of Zimbabwe, defending the
independence of our countries and advancing Pan Africanist goals.

We supported all these objectives. However their achievement required
that as a country Zimbabwe should remain a democratic and peaceful
country with a growing economy of shared wealth, and a country which
would continue to do everything possible to eradicate the legacy of
colonialism.

When the ANC felt that problems were arising with regard to these
objectives, it did what nobody else in the world had done. It prepared
and shared a document with ZANU-PF which was a comprehensive critique
of developments in Zimbabwe, with suggestions about what ZANU-PF
should do to correct what was wrong.

Done in 2001, the document was entitled "How Will Zimbabwe Defeat Its
Enemies!" It dealt with a whole variety of issues, including the
political and economic.

Though the then planned ANC/ZANU-PF meeting to discuss the document
did not take place, ZANU-PF never raised any objection to the fact
that the ANC prepared the document to assist Zimbabwe to overcome some
of its challenges.

We probably made a mistake when we did not insist that this meeting
should be held.

The South African Government and the Zimbabwe land question

When the war veterans and others began to occupy white-owned farms, we
intervened first of all with Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 to
encourage the UK Government to honour the commitment that had been
made at Lancaster House in 1979 to give the Government of Zimbabwe the
financial means to carry out the required land redistribution in a
non-confrontational manner.

This led to the September 1998 International Donors' Conference on
Land Reform and Resettlement held in Harare, which the British
Government attended, but whose very positive decisions were not
implemented, thanks to the negative attitude adopted by the very same
British Government.

Unfortunately, contrary to what the Conservative Prime Ministers
Margaret Thatcher and John Major had agreed, Tony Blair's Secretary of
State for International Development, Claire Short, repudiated the
commitment to honour the undertaking made at Lancaster House.

In a November 1997 letter to Zimbabwe Minister of Agriculture and
Land, Kumbirai Kangai, she wrote: "I should make it clear that we do
not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs
of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse
backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins
are Irish and as you know, we were colonised not colonisers."

In a February 22, 2015 article in The Telegraph, the Conservative
Party Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, commented about the parlous
state of Zimbabwe and said:

"But it is vital to recognise that Zimbabwe was not always like this,
and did not have to be like this…And Britain played a shameful part in
the disaster. Readers will remember the 1979 Lancaster House
Agreement, by which Margaret Thatcher granted independence to
Rhodesia…So it was crucial that the Lancaster House Agreement
protected the interests of these white farmers. They could, of course,
be bought out, but their land could not be simply seized. There had to
be a "willing buyer, willing seller". The British government agreed to
fund the arrangement, compensating the former colonial farmers for
land that they gave up… And then in 1997, along came Tony Blair and
New Labour, and in a fit of avowed anti-colonialist fervour they
unilaterally scrapped the arrangement…It was Labour's betrayal of the
Lancaster House Agreement – driven by political correctness and
cowardice – that gave Mugabe the pretext for the despotic (land)
confiscations by which he has rewarded his supporters."

Later, Prime Minister Blair told me that the British Governments he
led never formally took this decision to repudiate the Lancaster House
Agreement and regretted that in the end, his Government had to accept
it because Claire Short had succeeded to convince the UK public that
it was indeed Government policy!

Further to help resolve the conflict on the land question, at some
point we also got commitments from three (3) other Governments to
finance land acquisition by the Zimbabwe Government which would then
distribute the land to those who had started to occupy some farms. The
Zimbabwe Government welcomed this initiative.

At the suggestion of the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, the
UNDP assumed the responsibility to work with the Zimbabwe Government
to implement this land acquisition and redistribution. Unfortunately
the UNDP acted in a manner which led to the failure of this
initiative.

The South African Government and Zimbabwe politics

Our Government started to work more intensely with the opposition MDC
after the 2000 Zimbabwe Constitutional Referendum, which rejected the
Constitution that had been put to the nation by the Government.

The MDC approached us to help secure the agreement of ZANU-PF to amend
the extant Constitution by including in it various matters, many of
which had been included in the Constitution which had been rejected.

From then onwards we did our best to encourage ZANU-PF and the MDC to
work together to find solutions to the constitutional, political,
economic, security and social challenges which faced Zimbabwe.

It was exactly this same approach we took which resulted in the
conclusion in 2008 of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) by the
Zimbabwe political parties.

Though we acted as a Facilitator, the fact of the matter is that the
GPA was negotiated and elaborated by the three Zimbabwe Political
Parties which had been democratically chosen by the people in the 2008
elections. No part of the Agreement was imposed on the Parties by the
Facilitator.

This approach was informed by our unwavering determination to respect
the right of the people of Zimbabwe to determine their future, firmly
opposed to any foreign, including South African, intervention to
impose solutions on the people of Zimbabwe.

Writing in the privately-owned Zimbabwe Independent on September 25
last year, Wilbert Mukori said: "The best chance the nation has had to
end Mugabe's dictatorship was by far during the Government of National
Unity (GNU) when all the nation had to do was implement the raft of
democratic reforms already agreed in the 2008 Global Political
Agreement (GPA).

"However, MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai and other opposition parties,
who were tasked with implementing the reforms, sold out and joined
Mugabe's gravy train. So after four or five years of the GNU, no
meaningful reforms were implemented…The people of Zimbabwe failed to
recognise the importance of the 2008 GPA reforms and so they did not
pressure GNU leaders to implement the reforms."

Regime change in Zimbabwe

There were others in the world, led particularly by the UK, who
opposed our approach of encouraging the Zimbabweans to decide their
future. These preferred regime change – the forcible removal of
President Mugabe and his replacement by people approved by the UK and
its allies.

This is what explained the sustained campaign to condemn us for
conducting the so-called 'quiet diplomacy'. What was wrong with 'quiet
diplomacy', which led to the adoption of the GPA discussed by Mukori,
was that it defended the right of the people of Zimbabwe to determine
their future, as opposed to the desire by some in the West to carry
out regime change in Zimbabwe and impose their will on the country!

In the period preceding the 2002 Zimbabwe Elections, the UK and the US
in particular were very keen to effect this regime change and failing
which to impose various conditions to shorten the period of any Mugabe
Presidency.

Our then Minister of Intelligence, Lindiwe Sisulu, had to make a
number of trips to London and Washington to engage the UK and US
governments on their plans for Zimbabwe, with strict instructions from
our Government to resist all plans to impose anything on the people of
Zimbabwe, including by military means.

Accordingly it was not from hearsay or third parties that we acquired
the knowledge about Western plans to overthrow President Mugabe, but
directly from what they communicated to a representative of our
Government.

In its 11 November, 2007 edition, the UK newspaper, the Independent on
Sunday, reported that during its interview of Lord Guthrie, former
Chief of Defence Staff of the UK armed forces, it learnt that
"Astonishingly, the subjects discussed (with Prime Minister Tony
Blair) included invading Zimbabwe, "which people were always trying to
get me (Guthrie) to look at. My advice was, 'Hold hard, you'll make it
worse.'"

According to John Kampfner in his book, "Blair's Wars", Blair once
told Claire Short that "if it were down to me, I'd do Zimbabwe as well
– that is send troops." In his Memoir "A Journey", Blair explained
that the reason he could not "get rid of Mugabe" which he "would have
loved to" was because "it wasn't practical (since…the surrounding
African nations maintained a lingering support for him and would have
opposed any action strenuously)."
South Africa and the Zimbabwe elections

The 2002 elections in Zimbabwe were observed by two South African
Observer Missions among others. One of these was a multi-party Mission
deployed by our Parliament, not Government. The second was composed of
people seconded by civil society organisations. The Government
contributed to this latter Mission by appointing Ambassador Sam
Motsuenyane as its leader.

With no intervention by Government, these two Observer Missions, like
all others, determined that the declared outcome of the elections
reflected the will of the people of Zimbabwe.

The same thing happened with regard to the 2008 elections which
resulted in the MDC (Tsvangirai) gaining 100 House of Assembly seats
as opposed to 99 for ZANU-PF and 10 for MDC (Mutambara). None of the
two leading Presidential candidates, Robert Mugabe and Morgan
Tsvangirai, got the required 50%+1 to emerge as the outright winner.

The second round of the Presidential election was marked by a lot of
violence, resulting in the withdrawal of Tsvangirai. Our view was that
the level of violence had made it impossible for the people of
Zimbabwe freely to exercise their right to choose their President.

I therefore met President Mugabe in Bulawayo to propose that the
election should be called off and conducted afresh in conditions of
the total absence of any violence. President Mugabe did not accept our
suggestion, arguing that the action we were proposing would be in
violation of the Constitution.

During the 2013 Harmonised Elections, ZANU-PF won 196 of the House of
Assembly seats as opposed to 70 for the MDC (Tsvangirai), and
President Mugabe was elected during the first round. All the Observer
Missions which actually observed these elections agreed that the
announced results 'reflected the will of the people of Zimbabwe'.

Over the years ZAPU, ZANU and, later, ZANU-PF saw it as part of their
responsibility to contribute to the victory of our struggle against
the apartheid regime and system and the building of the democratic
South Africa, and acted accordingly. The ANC took the same position
with regard to the struggles of the people of Zimbabwe to defeat
colonialism and reconstruct the new Zimbabwe, and acted accordingly.

Throughout these years we defended the right of the people of Zimbabwe
to determine their destiny, including deciding on who should govern
the country. This included resisting all efforts to impose other
people's solutions on Zimbabwe, which, if this had succeeded, would
have served as a precursor for a similar intervention in our country!

Consciously we took the position that democratic South Africa should
at all costs avoid acting as a new home-grown African imperial power
which would have given itself the right unilaterally to determine the
destiny of the peoples of Africa!

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