Читать книгу Peaceful Revolution - Нил Барнард - Страница 6

Meeting the enemy

The World Trade Centre, near Johannesburg, was a modest, almost spartan, venue. It had none of the splendour or pomp and circumstance of other venues such as the Palace of Versailles where momentous decisions had been made, but it was comfortable enough and practical for the purpose: close to what was called Jan Smuts Airport at the time, as well as to the bureaucratic heart of officialdom in Pretoria. Furthermore, it was structurally adaptable and there was plenty of accommodation in the vicinity.

Regardless of the prevailing excitement – for the first time in the history of the country, representatives of virtually the full political spectrum were going to map out a new future together – there was also tension in the air: the ANC had not yet demobilised Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), relinquished its control over arms depositories, or met the other solemn undertakings to forswear violence that it had made ten months previously in terms of the DF Malan Accord. This was seen in such a serious light that, the day before, President FW de Klerk had even threatened to withdraw the government from the historic first round of negotiations known as Codesa 1.

The previous evening, a lengthy and intense debate had taken place in a meeting of government’s Policy Group for Reform. Eventually, good sense prevailed; it was decided that it would be ill-advised for the government to cancel the multiparty conference. Since the Groote Schuur Minute the previous year, the political dynamics in the country and the negotiations between the government and the ANC, as well as those between the government and other parties, had already gained such momentum that, even at this early stage, the government could not turn them on and off unilaterally.

Chief Justice Michael Corbett opened the convention, after which the joint chairpersons, judges Petrus Schabort and Ismail Mahomed, conducted proceedings.

Appropriately, the proceedings and the peace process were entrusted to Providence with prayers and words of dedication by leaders drawn from South Africa’s full religious spectrum. For many, it seemed strange to see dominees, ministers, rabbis, pastors, bishops and imams officiating at the same event, giving the blessing of their divinity over the gathering. At the very outset, this sent an unmistakeable message about the diversity of the rainbow nation and the willingness to create space for one another.

Leaders of the political parties then presented their opening addresses, while the almost three hundred delegates listened attentively. The nineteen parties, with the exception of three right-wing parties and three left-wing splinter parties, which were absent, represented the full political spectrum.

The main political parties were all present – except Chief Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Zulu monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini, an early indication of the obstacles that were destined to surface from that quarter.

The Codesa negotiation process did not simply fall out of the sky.

Although these days he receives scant recognition for his role, the preliminary step towards the ‘new South Africa’ was taken by President PW Botha in 1988, when he agreed that secret, exploratory – and, later, groundbreaking – talks could take place between representatives of the white National Party (NP) government and the undisputed symbol of the black liberation struggle, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

In this, the National Intelligence Service (NI), which I headed from 1980 to 1992, played a cardinal role. In the course of the 48 rounds of talks held with Mandela, who was put in contact with the ANC leadership in Lusaka and his Rivonia comrades in prison, it became clear that there was sufficient common ground between these two nationalist organisations, the NP and ANC, to carve out a new political dispensation. This, despite the fact that Mandela and the ANC refused to renounce violence – which, for Botha, was a prerequisite for Mandela’s release.

Nevertheless, in July 1989, Botha agreed to meet Mandela secretly – an interaction, contrary to what both sides feared, that took place good-naturedly and cordially.

When Botha resigned and FW de Klerk took over shortly afterwards, Mandela’s release could clearly not be postponed for much longer. However, the external wing of the ANC first had to be won over to the idea of negotiation with the ‘racist white minority regime’. It would simply not do if radical elements outside the country began to suspect that Mandela was ‘selling out’ the liberation struggle.

In the end, these talks took place without Mandela’s full approval – despite concerted efforts at persuasion by me and my deputy, Mike Louw. Mandela was afraid that discussions between representatives of the government and the ANC’s external wing could divide the organisation. Even today, many individuals who wear revolutionary blinkers believe the absolute rubbish that it was our objective to weaken the ANC with divide-and-rule tactics.

There was no time to spare; the wheels were duly set in motion for Operation Flair. While any responsible intelligence service must, naturally, act within the law and with the necessary mandate, we could hardly inform the politicians of the details of the highly secret plan to make contact with the ANC.

With this in mind, the day after FW de Klerk’s election as state president on 15 August 1989, a carefully worded proposal was submitted to the State Security Council (SSC). It read:

It is imperative that more information be gained and processed on the ANC and on the aims, alliances and potential accessibility of its respective leaders and groupings. To realise these objectives, additional direct action will be necessary, in particular with the assistance of the functionaries of the National Intelligence Service.1

The SSC approved this unanimously. I must admit that I did not inform De Klerk about our secret, but well-meant, motives at this stage.

The most obvious member of the ANC leadership to contact overseas was the influential Thabo Mbeki, the organisation’s head of international affairs, who was based in London. There were many avenues for us to contact him and the external wing, but we had to use one that Mbeki trusted and considered credible. Such an avenue was the esteemed Stellenbosch academic and philosopher, Willie Esterhuyse, who had already built up a good personal relationship with Mbeki, thanks to a series of talks held at Mells Park House in England. Mbeki and the ANC’s external wing had to feel secure in the belief that this was not just another false alarm – that the government was serious about negotiating and would act honourably.

By this time, an assortment of self-appointed intermediaries between the government and the ANC had come to the fore. These communicated confusing and sometimes toadying messages to Lusaka.2 The government could simply not afford this. To complicate matters even further, representatives of the government and the ANC were being watched with eagle eyes, particularly by secret service agencies in America and Britain – the CIA and MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service, SIS) – and we could not allow them to manipulate the process from the outset, based on their information about developments.

We met Esterhuyse in a safe house, a flat in Somerset West. He agreed to communicate our intentions to Mbeki in London. After solemn assurances from Esterhuyse that it was not a trap, Mbeki agreed to a meeting with representatives of NI in Lucerne, Switzerland.

After many calls between Maritz Spaarwater (alias John Campbell), NI’s chief director of operations, and Thabo Mbeki (alias John Simelane), it was arranged that the two, each with a colleague, would meet on 12 September in the Palace Hotel in Lucerne.

Early that evening, Mike Louw and Spaarwater booked into the Palace in two adjoining rooms with a shared sitting area. Mbeki and Jacob Zuma (alias Jack Simelane) had landed at Geneva earlier that same day and travelled to Lucerne by car, unaware that they were being followed the entire way by NI agents. At the reception desk in the Palace, they were shown to rooms 338 and 339.

The men on both sides were tense and suspicious. Mbeki and Zuma had every reason to mistrust the situation. ‘It could have been a trap; on opening the door, they could have been mown down,’ Louw said later. So, they left the room door open.

Eventually the two ANC leaders arrived and, when they saw the two South Africans, they walked in.

‘Well, here we are … bloody terrorists and, for all you know, fucking communists as well,’ Mbeki said coolly.3

‘We all laughed. It broke the ice,’ said Louw.4

Four days after President De Klerk’s epoch-making speech in Parliament on 2 February 1990, Louw and Spaarwater were back in Lucerne. This time they met Mbeki and Aziz Pahad in the Palace Hotel. The NI men still travelled under false names and carried false passports to avoid attracting undue attention.

The atmosphere was relaxed and everyone was in high spirits in the afterglow of 2 February. But the time for getting to know one another had passed and there were serious issues on the agenda: how members of the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) – until a few days previously, still banned organisations – were to be brought back into the country; how to prevent the security forces from cracking down on the ‘terrorists’; how to prevent right-wing white extremists from taking the law into their own hands … procedures and structures had to be put in place to manage all these aspects.

The government’s representatives insisted that the ANC leadership at the highest level, preferably its National Executive Committee (NEC), should react positively to De Klerk’s announcements of 2 February; that the organisation should exercise greater discipline to control protest action inside the country; and that a procedure be agreed upon to end the armed struggle. The group decided to form four working committees to handle urgent matters: Mandela’s release; the release of political prisoners and those in detention; and facilitating structures for talks between the government and the ANC, and those between the NI and the ANC’s intelligence network.

Two weeks later, I was joined by Mike Louw and Fanie van der Merwe, the adviser on constitutional matters from the Department of Constitutional Development, for the next meeting with the ANC group, comprising Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, Aziz Pahad and now also Joe Nhlanhla, head of ANC intelligence. For security reasons, the meeting was moved to Bern, the Swiss capital.

President De Klerk was fully informed and we undertook to keep him continually up to date on all developments. This time, comprehensive logistical planning had to be undertaken for the return of ANC members to South Africa and their participation in the opening conference of the negotiation process.

The three of us left South Africa, landed in Geneva on 21 February and travelled to Bern by train. In the same carriage were three of NI’s experienced operators, including two women. We recognised one another – without any acknowledgement of this. While we settled ourselves into the Bellevue Palace Hotel in Bern, Louw made contact with his NI operational colleagues outside the hotel to make sure that everything was in order and that no enemies from other countries were watching us.

On our side, the atmosphere was extremely tense. So much could go wrong. Strolling through Bern’s peaceful streets, we repeatedly went over the agenda for the talks and discussed every last logistical detail. We were acutely aware that we could not make a hash of the talks: South Africa could not afford to begin the negotiations with disagreement and unnecessary suspicion.

The next morning, at the hotel’s breakfast table we recognised the Mbeki team in the dining room, but neither they nor we gave any sign of this. An hour or so later the two old arch-­enemies met one another as South Africans in my hotel room and the negotiations, which were relaxed and good-natured, could begin.

With his quips, Mike Louw had everyone, especially Zuma, in fits of laughter, such as when he related his concern about wasting water in the hotel’s toilets in comparison with the water-­saving pit toilets of his childhood days on a farm near arid Prieska in the Northern Cape.

The discussions were purposeful and went on until the early hours of the following morning. They focused sharply on the arrangements needed for bringing the vanguard group of ANC members back into South Africa so that they could attend the first formal, open negotiations on the country’s political future. There was never any question of undertaking this planning process without the ANC’s full partnership.

Mbeki, the ANC group’s spokesperson, informed us that some of his comrades believed that the government wanted to use the occasion as a pretext for luring the external wing’s leadership back into South Africa, only to put them behind bars. Happily, we were able to make short shrift of this ridiculous suggestion.

We told them that, if we did not accept one another’s bona fides and integrity, there was little hope of tackling the negotiations – or, for that matter, the current talks – with any success. We also pointed out that far greater challenges to mutual accept­ance of our trustworthiness and honesty as negotiating partners no doubt lay ahead.

Mbeki also wanted to know how the government would react if Joe Slovo, chief of staff of MK and general secretary of the SACP, was part of the ANC’s core team at the initial negotiations. We answered that we were hardly in a position to choose the members of their negotiation team – and went on to joke that the government could even consider including right-wing fire-­eater Eugène Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner-Weerstands­beweging (AWB), in its own negotiating team.

However, that evening, when I gave President De Klerk provisional feedback on the course of the discussions, he dug in his heels and objected in the strongest possible terms to the very idea of the inclusion of Slovo in the ANC team, saying that his supporters would refuse to accept it. After a somewhat lengthy exchange of ideas, I reminded him of the Basil D’Oliveira fiasco of 1968: the government had refused to grant the former South African, a coloured batsman of note, a visa to tour South Africa as a member of the English cricket team. This had led to the cancellation of the tour – which, in turn, had encouraged various other sports sanctions against South Africa.

De Klerk finally agreed that we could not afford such foolishness in the upcoming political negotiation process.

In addition to the planning of the negotiations in South Africa, a number of political, economic and social challenges were raised time and again by both sides, but not discussed in detail – which was not the aim of the meeting. Furthermore, as officials, we were neither competent nor qualified to take a stance on matters of policy or core principles.

Another question Mbeki posed was insightful: Would the government permit the traditional practice of toyi-toyiing by his comrades during political demonstrations? The mobilisation of the masses was still one of the ANC’s most potent weapons and, on this, as far as the organisation was concerned, there could be no compromise.

My answer to Mbeki was that mass mobilisation often led to acts of revolutionary violence and that the ANC appeared unable to control its supporters when mass hysteria gained the upper hand. The security forces would then have to step in; after all, we could not conduct orderly and peaceful discussions against a background of threats and manipulation by an uncontrolled mob.

That evening, we enjoyed a delicious meal together in the hotel’s restaurant. And, even later, in the early hours, I ordered a bottle of Chivas Royal Salute – a fitting 21 years old – to be sent to the hotel room. Both sides held their enthusiasm carefully under wraps, but secretly we knew that our peaceful revolution had come of age.

We were delighted with the progress made on the previous day. In a rare moment of light extravagance, and in the spirit of what my mother used to say, I thought: The auditor general be damned! I trusted that he would be patriotic enough to excuse us this transgression in the light of what we were busy doing in the interest of the country and all its people. He did.

Later that day, everyone went back home. For the ANC members, this journey must have held new significance – ‘home’ would soon mean the land of their birth. It was moving to observe their nostalgic eagerness to return to our common fatherland.

A great deal of work awaited us there. We had to provide full details of developments to the president and the relevant ministers, especially Dr Gerrit Viljoen, minister of constitutional development, and his senior officials – especially the efficient Henk Fourie, Fanie van der Merwe’s administrative right hand – because the arrangements for the first official and public meeting between the two parties had to be handed over to the relevant state departments. After all, the spies could not exactly arrange the public peace process!

Furthermore, arrangements had to be made to bring the first members of the ANC leadership into the country. In terms of prevailing law, they could still technically be taken into custody when they set foot on South African soil. Agreement had to be reached with the security police and internal affairs officials, and arrangements had to be made to ensure that their arrival at Jan Smuts Airport was unhindered and inconspicuous.

The ANC vanguard comprised Jacob Zuma, Mathews Phosa and Penuell Maduna. They were brought into the country without incident from April 1990 and were accommodated in an NI safe house in Pretoria North. Here, for several days, talks were held, arguments exchanged and plans laid for the coming ‘summit conference’ between the ANC and the government.

Zuma and Phosa were good-natured, cordial and accommo­dating. In stark contrast, Maduna was acrimonious and frequently on the offensive; he seemed determined to rub our noses in his academic legal background. Perhaps the ANC thought that someone should provoke ‘the Boers’ or keep them in their place with high-handed arrogance. However, this proved unsuccessful.

At the NI house, a legion of administrative measures was put in place. Meanwhile, other ANC members, including some from the National Executive Committee, began to arrive in the country to launch the negotiation process. Both parties began to preen their feathers in preparation for the opening discussions in the process of reaching a constitutional settlement.

1 Minutes of the State Security Council meeting, 16 August 1989.

2 One of the best examples of this is the author Richard Rosenthal, who blames everyone other than himself for the failure of his uncalled-for attempts. See Richard Rosenthal, Mission Improbable (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998); and Willie Esterhuyse, Endgame: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), pp. 159–161, 169–171.

3 Maritz Spaarwater, Die spook wat boom geklim en lig gevind het (Hermanus: Erfenis Publikasies, 2015), p. 236; Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007), pp. 563–567.

4 Aziz Pahad, Insurgent Diplomat (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2014), p. 220; and Allister Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country (London: Arrow Press, 1997), p. 113.