Struggle for Southern Africa

Robert G. Mugabe

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1987/88

Summary:  The Republic of South Africa is both engaging in a 'vicious and ugly' civil war and 'waging an undeclared war against its neighbours'. After reviewing RSA intervention in Mozambique and Angola, and arguing that the front-line states are opposed to apartheid, not to whites or to Western interests, calls for US policy-makers to match words with deeds, namely by backing a policy of economic sanctions. Then prime minister, now president of Zimbabwe.

Robert G. Mugabe is Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, and currently chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement.

At the time of our independence no Zimbabwean trade passed through the Mozambican rail and port system, but by the end of 1983 almost half of our trade was transiting Mozambique. Today South African-instigated sabotage has cut that figure back to less than 20 percent. We are increasing it again as we rebuild the Beira Corridor and rehabilitate the Chiqualaquala line to Maputo. We need to utilize the full capacity of the two ports of Beira and Maputo to handle about nine million tons of goods from Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

We commend those friendly Western countries that have come to the aid of Mozambique and assisted with the rehabilitation of the port of Beira and reconstruction of parts of the Beira Corridor. South Africa has set out to destroy systematically our alternative communication routes to the sea and ensure our continued dependence on their ports and railways. Our dependence on South Africa has not come about by accident. It has been a strategy carefully worked out over many years.

The landlocked countries of the region can be serviced by five rail-to-port systems other than the South African routes. One is the Tazara railway linking Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam. To the west is the Benguela railway to the Angolan port of Lobito. That has been out of action virtually for a decade as a result of sabotage by the Angolan rebel group UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), an instrument which is supported by South Africa and the United States. To our east, through Mozambique, we have three routes to the ports of Beira, Maputo and Nacala. These three ports could easily handle all the trade of Malawi, Swaziland, Zaïre, Zambia and Zimbabwe. But the routes to Maputo and Nacala have been out of operation for three years as a result of sabotage. And the Beira route is kept open only at huge military cost. Soldiers from the national armies of Malawi, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are now stationed in Mozambique to secure our communications routes and help rid that country of the terrorist menace South Africa has unleashed.

Documents captured from South Africa?s surrogates in Mozambique clearly show their South African military masters ordering them to destroy our trade routes and our power lines, and to begin urban terrorism in our cities. The minutes of a meeting on February 23, 1984, between the South African military and their Mozambican surrogates define the following targets: "Railways, Cabbora Bassa [a large hydroelectric dam in Mozambique], cooperantes and other targets of an economic nature such as the ones belonging to SADCC." This is the type of state terrorism we have to contend with in this region.

Why does South Africa do this to its neighbors? It is certainly not because we are a military threat. South Africa?s motivation is in part economic, in part due to the acquiescence of the international community, and in part due to the deep-seated knowledge of apartheid?s rulers that their system of racial segregation and minority rule is doomed.

We are not militarily at war with apartheid, but apartheid is at war with us. And militarily, economically and socially we are paying an enormous price. Since 1980 the direct and indirect cost of South Africa?s destructive actions against its neighbors has been well over $20 billion. In the case of Mozambique alone the cost from 1980 through 1985 is estimated at between $5.5 billion and $6.5 billion. And even these figures do not give a true picture, for they exclude the vast amounts of money we are forced to divert from development to defense to protect our hard-won sovereignty.

IV

South Africa, while at war with its own people, is waging an undeclared war against its neighbors. The combination of tactics varies from state to state, depending on the political, economic and military vulnerabilities of each, but at the heart of this policy of "destabilization" is the regular sabotage of the regional transportation system to ensure that all trade flows south through South Africa. In order to maintain this regional dependence Pretoria pursues a policy of aggression and destruction that has devastated neighboring economies and caused widespread suffering.

All of South Africa?s neighbors have been subjected to direct incursions by the South African Defense Forces?attacks ostensibly aimed at members of the ANC, but whose victims have almost always been innocent citizens of the target state. Pretoria also relies extensively on the use of the surrogate forces inherited from anticolonial struggles to its north, trained and armed by the SADF to murder, maim, rape and destroy on its behalf.

The history of the so-called Mozambique National Resistance has been told in considerable detail by the former head of Rhodesian intelligence, and was put on the record in Washington recently by State Department testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This group was created by Rhodesian Intelligence and handed over to South Africa?s military intelligence just prior to Zimbabwe?s independence. South Africa converted the MNR, as Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker said, "from a nuisance into a well-armed rebel group" and remains a "reliable supplier of high-priority items." These surrogate forces have no political program and no credible leadership, and their brutalization of the population is not likely to win many converts.