Soviets sought access to ports for their air and naval forces. In an earlier assessment, the CIA also included the geostrategic securing of “Soviet sea lines of communication between the European USSR and the Soviet Far East” as a USSR military objective in the region.[12] However, the CIA acknowledged that southern Africa was “largely peripheral to core Soviet security interests and of lower priority than, for example, South Asia and the Middle East”.[13]
The main issue here is not whether these analyses were accurate or not. The point is that the NP government believed that South Africa was engaged in an “oorlewingstryd” (struggle for survival), as PW Botha put it.[14] Whoever wants to understand the South African security strategy during the 1970s and 1980s must take the National Party government’s fear of the Soviet Union seriously. Rightly or wrongly, this was their point of departure. Their security strategy was therefore in principle defensive.[15]
Probably without realising it, Russian academic Vladimir Shubin has since confirmed the South African and American fears about Soviet intentions at the time. In a 2008 book, he rejects the allegation that the Cold War influenced Moscow’s strategy towards South Africa, but he apparently understands the term differently from the way it was viewed in the West. He emphasises that Soviet support for African liberation movements was “regarded as part of the world ‘anti-imperialist struggle’, which was waged by the ‘socialist community’, ‘the national liberation movements’ and the ‘working class of the capitalist countries’ . . . For us the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’, but a united fight of the world’s progressive forces against imperialism.” Shubin also notes that the Supreme Council of the MPLA decided in 1982 that South Africa was its “main enemy”.[16]
The government’s initial security strategy, after PW Botha took over from John Vorster in September 1978, was to try to establish an anti-communist bloc in southern Africa as a counterweight to the Marxist alliance, consisting at the time of Angola and Mozambique, and aided by the USSR and Cuba.[17]
The government’s stance on SWA and Angola flowed from this strategy. In fact, South Africa accepted fairly early on that independence for South West Africa was unavoidable. Halfway through 1977, Minister of Foreign Affairs Pik Botha told Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith so during a visit to Salisbury. South African hopes, he said, were pinned “upon the formation of an interim government established to draw up the constitution for an independent Namibia”.[18]
But this still did not open a door for SWAPO. Pik Botha wrote to his US counterpart, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, that South Africa strove for an internationally recognised independence for SWA “under a government which does not subscribe to Marxist-Leninist doctrines”.[19] During a visit by Haig’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, Dick Clarke, to South Africa in 1981, Botha explained that his government was not against independence for SWA as such. However, he insisted:
SWAPO must not be allowed to win an election in South West Africa. We were not prepared to exchange a war on the Kunene for a war on the Orange . . . If South West Africa would be governed by SWAPO, then a serious risk would rise that the Russians could threaten South Africa from the Territory. South Africa would then have to decide to invade the Territory in order to protect its interests. Such a situation would probably be less acceptable to the USA than the status quo. If SWAPO would govern South West Africa, Botswana would directly feel threatened, Dr Savimbi would be eliminated and South Africa would be totally encircled with Russian-inspired powers. If the entire Southern Africa then came under Russian tyranny, the strategic sea route around the Cape and its critical minerals would be lost to the West.[20]
In other words, yes to independence, but a definite no to a communist SWAPO government.[21] “There should be no doubt that South Africa did not want to have the red flag flying in Windhoek,” Pik Botha told US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Dr Chester Crocker.[22] A top-secret report by the Directorate of Military Intelligence bluntly stated: “The RSA is planning to let the constitutional set-up in SWA develop in such a manner that a pro-SA government comes to power there.”[23]
And so, on a security-strategic level, the war became an attempt to win enough time to create the conditions in which SWAPO would lose an election.[24]
At times, the South Africans did try half-heartedly to engage with SWAPO. General Georg Meiring – who was GOC South West Africa at the time – related to Hilton Hamann how he, Dr Willie van Niekerk (South African Administrator General in SWA), and Foreign Affairs consultant Sean Cleary flew to the Cape Verde Islands in 1985 to try to get SWAPO to participate in a transitional government of national unity. According to Meiring, the guerrilla movement’s reaction to this basically boiled down to: “Bugger you!”[25]
To Jannie Geldenhuys, who became one of the SADF’s most influential strategic thinkers, the time factor was important. In itself, he reasoned, time was neutral – it was on the side of those who utilised it best. Therefore, the important thing was perseverance: “Soviet Russia,” he wrote in his memoirs, “would in the long run not be able to keep up its attempt in Angola and with SWAPO. And if they withdrew, the scale would swing radically in our favour.”[26] Geldenhuys and the other leading officers in the SADF knew they couldn’t win the war against SWAPO (or, for that matter, the ANC) militarily. The most they could do was to stem the tide for a while in order to gain time. It was up to the politicians to utilise that time wisely in order to reach a tolerable political solution, as Constand Viljoen warned the government in the early 1980s.[27]
All of this meant that apartheid, race discrimination and colonial domination diminished, though not vanished, as casus belli. What remained was SWAPO’s avowed aspiration to convert SWA into a Marxist one-party state (see Chapter 10), thereby enabling Pretoria, ironically enough, to present the conflict in the rather more respectable cloak of communist dictatorship versus liberal multiparty democracy. And that, we may surmise, weakened SWAPO and strengthened Pretoria to some extent.
The importance placed upon the military in South Africa’s purported struggle for survival may also be seen in the increase in defence spending. From a very low R36 million in 1958/59, it increased to exactly double that in 1961/1962 (R72 million), but concomitant with the first security-strategic analysis conducted in 1961, it suddenly jumped to R129 million in the next financial year. The steady increases then resumed until the Savannah debacle, when the R692 million budgeted for 1974/1975 shot up sharply to R1 043 million for 1975/1976. By 1982/1983, the budget stood at R2 668 million. Put differently, whereas 0,9% of South Africa’s Gross National Product (GNP) was allocated to defence in 1969/1970, by 1979/1980 this had risen to 5%.[28]
A strategy for Angola
Major General Jannie Geldenhuys took command in SWA in September 1977. To him and his staff at their headquarters in Windhoek, debating the question of how to turn a losing war into a winning one, things must have looked rather bleak. His orders, as relayed by the Chief of the SADF, General Magnus Malan, were “to keep the level of the insurgency at least at the level necessary to ensure that the constitutional development could take place in an atmosphere of stability and peace.”[29] But SWAPO insurgents were infiltrating across the border in sufficient numbers to cause severe headaches to the South Africans, and the army’s ham-fisted counterinsurgency operations had practically no success.
The key word was initiative. SWAPO had it; the SADF did not. This had to be changed around. But how?
There was a way, and Colonel Jan Breytenbach was the pioneer. Breytenbach took the FNLA troops he had commanded during Operation Savannah to South West Africa, and transformed them into a highly efficient and feared secret unit: 32 Battalion. With these fighters, who spoke Portuguese and the indigenous Angolan languages, he began clandestine cross-border operations against SWAPO soon after the SADF pulled out of Angola in the wake of Operation Savannah. Under his inspired but unorthodox leadership,
