14 and 15 March 1988
I was informed by the Department of Justice that the appeal for clemency by the Sharpeville Six, who had been convicted of the murder of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville, had been turned down by PW Botha. They were due to be executed on 18 March and the preparations for the execution were under way at the prison. On the following day, I arranged for Desmond Tutu to speak to the Prime Minister. He asked her to ‘use her considerable influence with PW Botha’. She said that I was being asked to make her views extremely clear to the South African government. Desmond Tutu saw PW Botha on 16 March, only to be berated for leading demonstrations against the regime.
I already had appealed to Anton Rupert to write a letter to PW Botha about the Six. He did so, only to receive a characteristically brutish reply. I contacted Helen Suzman to say that I was planning to see PW Botha before the executions, and so, I knew, was the leader of her party, Colin Eglin. I asked her, in these pretty desperate circumstances, to give up the ban she had imposed on any dealings by her with Botha apart from her attacks on him in parliament. I got in touch with Johan Heyns, who promised me that we would all go separately to see PW Botha to ask for clemency and tell him of the likely consequences if it were to be denied.
16 March 1988
In the meeting with her and Colin Eglin, at the suggestion of her friend Professor David Welsh of the University of Cape Town, Helen Suzman reminded PW Botha of a speech by his former party leader, DF Malan, during the Second World War, when he pleaded for clemency for two Afrikaners sentenced to death for bombing a post office to sabotage the war effort. It was characteristic of Helen Suzman, in dealing with her worst enemy, to find a line of argument most difficult for him to reject. Nor could he afford, on this occasion, to ignore the views of the head of the Dutch Reformed Church or those, which I had made crystal clear to him, of Mrs Thatcher.
17 March 1988
At the eleventh hour, the President announced that the cases would be submitted again to be reviewed by a panel of judges from the Supreme Court. The Weekly Mail commented that the Six had a lot to thank us – and Margaret Thatcher – for.
The saga of the Sharpeville Six was not yet quite over, as the review process dragged on. Margaret Thatcher saw Joyce Mokhesi, sister of one of the accused (Francis Mokhesi), to assure her that we were continuing our campaign for clemency, which I did in a further meeting with Kobie Coetsee. Having delivered the usual warning about foreign interference, Coetsee acknowledged that the Prime Minister’s intervention had been crucial in helping to get them off death row. In November, the Appeal Court judges rejected the appeal of the Six for a retrial, but PW Botha forthwith commuted the death sentences on them to periods of imprisonment.
April 1988
At this time there occurred an episode that made clear the nature of the regime. The US press had reported that a South African general had admitted to an American diplomat that the SADF had been responsible for a raid on Maputo. The South African military were convinced that the diplomat in question was Bob Frasure, a friend of mine in the US embassy (he was later to be tragically killed in an accident in Bosnia). They proceeded to engage in a Soviet-style campaign of harassment against Frasure and his family. He was ostentatiously followed everywhere; on one occasion his car was forced off the road. The telephone lines were cut at his home at night. The windows of his house were broken, also at night. His wife was terrorised, and Frasure had to be withdrawn by the State Department. Why they permitted this to happen without denouncing publicly what had occurred was something I was never able to understand.
Having been invited to address the annual meeting in Johannesburg of the Urban Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded in 1977 by South African business leaders, I decided that it was time to deliver a decidedly undiplomatic speech, of a kind that would have got me thrown out of any other African country. In the 1960s, I pointed out, South Africa had been able to maintain apartheid and still have economic growth. That was not possible any longer. South Africa was approaching a further turning point in its relations with the outside world. ‘We do not believe in your isolation, but we cannot prevent you isolating yourselves … If you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.’ Unless South Africa repealed the remaining apartheid laws, they would get no further support from us.
This was splashed all over the South African press. Pik Botha complained to me formally about the speech, as he was bound to do, while also telling me that he agreed with it. Several other members of the government told me that they agreed, without bothering to complain.
May 1988
PW Botha, meanwhile, was fulminating against the English-speaking universities, which he regarded as hotbeds of subversion. He was threatening to introduce a bill in parliament to curtail the political activities of both students and staff. The vice chancellors of the universities appealed for help, and Helen Suzman and I went separately to see De Klerk, as the Minister of Education, about this. We were told that he had no intention of pushing through such a bill in the current parliamentary session. We seemed to have found one minister who was prepared to stand up to his irascible President.
CHAPTER V
‘The IRA have the vote, the ANC do not’
9 June 1988
Meeting with the Prime Minister in London. I was asked to tell PW Botha and the other members of the South African government of the growing difficulties South Africa would face unless progress was made towards the release of Mandela, a settlement in Namibia, normalisation with Mozambique and steps to dismantle the remaining apartheid laws. Above all, Margaret Thatcher insisted on the release of Mandela. I told her that no reliance whatever could be placed on PW Botha, but that he was becoming increasingly isolated.
July 1988
I told Pik Botha that, if he wanted us to be able to exert any influence on an incoming US administration, there would have to be progress on Namibia and Mandela. He said that he agreed, as did Kobie Coetsee, but the security chiefs were still arguing that with Mandela’s release the situation would be out of control. I protested about draft legislation seeking to ban foreign funding for civic organisations in South Africa. He said that this would be modified. He claimed that support for Renamo was being cut off.
I delivered a reply to Dr Jannie Roux, secretary-general to the President, about his further complaints about the ANC office and visits to London by Ronnie Kasrils, head of intelligence for MK, and Joe Slovo, general secretary of the SACP and also chief of staff of MK. We would not, I said, permit any office in the UK to be used for the purpose of preparing violent acts abroad. If the South Africans had any evidence to that effect, they would need to present it to us.
Dr Roux and the President’s security advisor, General Pieter van der Westhuizen, the two officials closest to PW Botha, inspired as little confidence as the President did himself, with Dr Roux telling me that he regarded Robben Island as the kind of place where he too might end up some day, with others like him, if the ANC came to power. He and his master regarded majority rule as solving our problems but not theirs.
The Prime Minister saw Buthelezi and Laurens van der Post at 10 Downing Street. She agreed that he could not be expected to negotiate with the government with Mandela still in jail, a point she emphasised in a further message to PW Botha. She was, she said, deeply concerned that Mandela remained in prison after twenty-six years. If he died in prison, the consequences would be disastrous.
August 1988
The Prime Minister’s message served only to produce a long argumentative reply from PW Botha, which she found ‘far from helpful’, claiming that Buthelezi was uncooperative and that Kasrils had been allowed to visit London again even though MK had declared that it would be targeting ‘soft’, i.e. civilian, targets.
I asked the Prime Minister to meet Willem Wepener, the editor of Beeld, one of the two leading Afrikaans newspapers. He had published an editorial calling for the release of Mandela, only to be denounced publicly by PW Bo
tha. In response, Wepener had refused to give way, stating that ‘we are not the South African Broadcasting Corporation, at any rate not yet!’
Gerhard de Kock told me about a lunch he had arranged at the Reserve Bank for the senior hierarchy of the South African Police. He had found, to his amazement, that they were convinced that, if further unrest broke out, it could easily be quelled by arresting a few thousand more people. They had no conception of the economic consequences of their actions. South Africa could ‘limp along’ like this, but there would be no chance of raising living standards.
I was invited to join Van Heerden and Barend du Plessis on a visit to a game camp in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Both told me that they agreed with De Kock. Both wanted to see a settlement in Namibia if the Cubans really would withdraw. I stressed our concern that Mandela had been hospitalised again, this time for tuberculosis. Both said that the government supported his release, but PW Botha listened only to the security chiefs. I reported to London that there was currently a great deal of unhappiness among key figures in the Afrikaner establishment about PW Botha and the fix the government had got itself into with the failure of its efforts to co-opt any worthwhile black leaders.
September 1988
Meeting with Kobie Coetsee about Mandela. Coetsee said that he was making good progress and would soon be able to leave the clinic. PW Botha had agreed that he should not be sent back to Pollsmoor prison. I said that we welcomed the humane way in which Mandela was being treated, as he had himself confirmed to Helen Suzman, but what was needed was to release him. Coetsee responded that the government needed some guarantee that he would behave responsibly. I said that his continued presence in prison was, quite simply, a time bomb of the government’s own making.
I had got to know Coetsee well enough to know that he was strongly in favour of Mandela’s release. A courteous and civilised man, he had formed a close relationship with his prisoner, which was to grow still closer over the next eighteen months. (Following the 1994 elections, Mandela ensured that Coetsee became Speaker of the upper house of the new South African parliament.)
Helen Suzman told me that, when she saw Mandela at the Constantiaberg Clinic, he said that he would like to do something to help normalise the situation in South Africa. But when he was released, after twenty-six years, he could not be expected to remain ‘with his arms folded’.
October 1988
I informed Buthelezi that we had told Thabo Mbeki of his desire to end the violence between Inkatha and ANC supporters in Natal. I spoke also to Buthelezi’s deputy, Oscar Dhlomo, to encourage his efforts to reduce the violence through his contacts with the labour unions and the UDF. Inkatha had its warlords, but so did the ANC. The government had released from jail on medical grounds the hardline SACP member Harry Gwala, who was quickly to establish himself as the leading ANC warlord in Natal and to take the lead in opposing any understanding with Inkatha. Asked by a journalist on one occasion about his ‘armies of the night’, Gwala’s reply was: ‘What about my armies of the day?’
November 1988
According to his foreign policy advisor, Anatoly Chernyaev, Mikhail Gorbachev had admitted to the Soviet Politburo that Margaret Thatcher had exposed the contradiction between domestic reform and the continuance of old-style Soviet foreign policy, which had become unaffordable anyway.13 At a time of increasing domestic hardship, expensive support for Soviet-backed regimes in Africa, such as Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, had become increasingly unpopular in Russia. Gorbachev had by then decided to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan, where they had been waging a costly war since the end of 1979.
Niel Barnard, head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), showed himself to be more aware than the police and army generals of the extent to which Soviet policy really had changed. Namibia and the conflict in Angola had become an unacceptable financial drain for South Africa. Mandela, he agreed, could not be allowed to die in jail. PW Botha was old-fashioned and out of touch.
10 November
Meeting with Adriaan Vlok, Minister of Law and Order. He said that he could not recommend Mandela’s unconditional release. As he appeared to be hinting at some form of house arrest, I said that Mandela’s release would be of great value only if it led into negotiations on a new constitution. It would be no use continuing to submit him to all sorts of restrictions.
I pressed for the release of a number of detainees, including the journalist Zwelakhe Sisulu. I warned him against following the advice of the head of the security police, General Basie Smit, who was calling for many more organisations to be banned.
The government announced that Mandela was to be transferred to ‘suitable, comfortable and secure living accommodation’. In fact, he was transferred the following month to a warden’s cottage in the grounds of the Victor Verster prison, near Paarl. While the conditions of his imprisonment had been transformed, he remained every bit as much a prisoner as before.
Beeld published the Prime Minister’s interview with Willem Wepener, under a banner heading quoting her as saying that ‘The IRA have the vote, the ANC do not’. She was, she said, against all forms of terrorism, but the ANC was an important factor in South African politics. The question was how to get them to give up violence. That would entail a suspension of violence on all sides.
December 1988
To increase the pressure on PW Botha, Margaret Thatcher had been seeking to persuade Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany to agree to a joint approach to the South African President. A speaking note was agreed, covering the need to implement the agreement provisionally reached on Namibia (see page 87) but, above all, to release Nelson Mandela and engage in negotiations on a new constitution. The envoy chosen for this joint mission was the Swiss banker Fritz Leutwiler, who in 1985, when the international banks refused to extend further credit to South Africa, had helped the South Africans (and their creditors) by agreeing a phased schedule for the repayment of South Africa’s debts, thereby avoiding a default.
The Prime Minister saw Leutwiler in London. She told him that she could not go on indefinitely exerting her influence against further sanctions unless she could show results. Leutwiler said that he intended to tell PW Botha that in default of further reforms he would lose South Africa’s few remaining friends. But Leutwiler was not hopeful of results.
12 December 1988
Leutwiler called on me in Pretoria to say that he had handed over the joint UK-German message to PW Botha. It had been a tense and difficult meeting. PW Botha was bitter and emotional. Correctly identifying Margaret Thatcher as the main author of this démarche, he felt that she was being unfair. She was constantly pressurising the South African government, and so was I. We were not going to get them to Lancaster House. He had argued that Mandela was ‘practically a free man’, living in a nice house with a swimming pool. He had refused to agree to be sent to the Transkei. If he were released, he might be killed and the South African government would be blamed. He would be likely to go to Soweto and address a crowd of a hundred thousand people. There would be unrest and the government would have to arrest him again. If he as President were to appear on television and say that Mandela was being released, he would have to step down on the same day.
Shifting tack, Botha suggested that the government possibly might release Mandela if Western countries would then lift sanctions. Leutwiler said that he was not there to bargain. The President clearly did not understand that Western governments could not simply instruct the banks to resume lending to South Africa. He had suggested, ridiculously, that South Africa did not have political prisoners, and had bridled at any mention of Buthelezi.
Leutwiler’s conclusion was that the President was a bitter old man, with a very unhealthy atmosphere around him. Pik Botha and Barend du Plessis both had agreed with the message that was being delivered, but neither had said a word in the meeting, except to agree with the President.
Leutwiler reported subsequently to the Prime Minister that the last-ditch atmosph
ere around PW Botha was like that which must have prevailed around Hitler in his bunker.
Notes
13 Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, pp. 99–103.
CHAPTER VI
‘I realise you want to see a new impetus for change’
January 1989
While preparing for the opening of the new parliamentary session, PW Botha suffered a stroke. The Prime Minister sent him a polite message saying that she was sorry to hear that he had been suddenly taken ill. Chris Heunis was appointed Acting President. I reported that this did not mean that he was likely to succeed PW Botha. De Klerk was likely to be the successor. I added that, in this highly autocratic system, the President’s illness was likely to create a prolonged period of uncertainty. I forecast that he would still try to hang on grimly.
A week later, I reported that most of his cabinet hoped PW Botha would retire, but doubted he would do so. He was tired, confused and not capable of taking decisions for the time being. He would have to face an election within a year. His most likely successor, FW de Klerk, was friendly, approachable, personally impressive, much calmer and more pragmatic, but preoccupied with the right-wing threat in the Transvaal. He feared that immediate repeal of the Group Areas Act could cost him his own seat in parliament. But he had strong views on the need for firm civilian control over the military.
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