The End of Apartheid (2 page)

PROLOGUE

‘Any self-respecting terrorist has an
AK
-47!'

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'.
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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).
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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 
VC
10 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.
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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.

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'.
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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.