SOUTH AFRICA’S POLICY TOWARDS ZIMBABWE

A SYNOPSIS.
By Thabo Mbeki
February 22, 2016
Historically, with regard to the Zimbabwe
liberation struggle, the ANC had good relations
with ZAPU and none with ZANU when it broke
away from ZAPU. This was a product of a
continuous process in Zimbabwe which had
started with the establishment of the Southern
Rhodesia African National Congress in that
country and the membership in the South African
ANC of Zimbabwe students and workers while
they were studying and working in South Africa.
ANC relations with ZANU
Despite this history, in 1978 ZANU sent a
delegation from Mozambique to Lusaka, led by
the late former Vice President of Zimbabwe,
Simon Muzenda, to meet the ANC. The delegation
had come to propose that the ANC should send
Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres to Mozambique
to join the units of ZANLA, the ZANU military
wing, which were operating along the Limpopo
River. The delegation suggested that this would
give MK the possibility to infiltrate its cadres and
materiel into and through the then Northern
Transvaal.
Though the political leadership of the ANC warmly
supported this proposal, the MK leadership
opposed it on the basis that there were already
MK cadres embedded in units of ZIPRA, the
military wing of ZAPU, which were also operating
along the Limpopo. These might end up fighting
their comrades in the ZANLA units as there were
occasional skirmishes between ZIPRA and
ZANLA. Consequently we did not take up the
ZANU offer.
However we interacted warmly with the ZANU
delegates at the 1979 Commonwealth Conference
in Lusaka which decided on the Lancaster
Conference on Zimbabwe.
ANC relations with the Zimbabwe Government
On the very day that Zimbabwe achieved its
independence in 1980, the President of the ANC,
the late O.R. Tambo, met then Prime Minister
Robert Mugabe in Salisbury, later Harare, to
discuss the possibility of the ANC opening an
office in Harare and using Zimbabwe as a base to
carry out underground political and military work
in South Africa.
Prime Minister Mugabe suggested that the ANC
should assess whether it could operate from
Zimbabwe, given that the new Zimbabwe
administration would include many people it
would inherit from the Smith regime. These
included General Peter Walls who led the
Zimbabwe Defence Force and Mr Ken Flower who
headed the Central Intelligence Organisation
(CIO).
A few weeks thereafter, President Tambo informed
Prime Minister Mugabe that we had conducted
our on-the-spot assessment within Zimbabwe
and thought that we could indeed operate from
Zimbabwe despite the presence in various
Zimbabwe state organs of people inherited from
the Smith regime.
Prime Minister Mugabe immediately agreed that
we could then operate in Zimbabwe as President
Tambo had proposed. I was therefore directed to
interact with then Minister of Security, and now
Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to work
out all the details for our ‘underground’ work and
open representation in Zimbabwe, which was
done.
The late Chris Hani was then put in charge of our
‘underground’ operations in Zimbabwe, while the
late Joe Gqabi, who was later murdered in Harare
by agents of the apartheid regime, served as our
public Chief Representative, with Geraldine Fraser,
now Fraser-Moleketi, as one of his assistants.
Zimbabwe land reform and South Africa
In 1990 as we began our negotiations to end the
system of apartheid, the then Secretary General of
the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku,
engaged President Mugabe to persuade him that
the Government of Zimbabwe should not proceed
with any programme to implement a radical land
reform, given that the Lancaster House
Constitutional 10-year prohibition of this had
expired.
Chief Anyaoku and the Commonwealth Secretariat
feared that any radical land redistribution in
Zimbabwe at that stage would frighten white
South Africa and thus significantly complicate our
own process of negotiations.
President Mugabe and the Zimbabwe Government
agreed to Chief Anyaoku’s suggestion and
therefore delayed for almost a decade the needed
agrarian reform, which had been a central
objective of the political and armed struggle for
the liberation of Zimbabwe.
ANC intervention in Zimbabwe
All the foregoing resulted in the establishment of
firm fraternal relations between the ANC and now
ZANU-PF, which created the possibility for the
two organisations to interact with each other
openly and frankly.
During these years of our interaction and working
together with President Mugabe, the Government
of Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF, we came to
understand that all these were committed to such
objectives as improving the lives of the people of
Zimbabwe, defending the independence of our
countries and advancing Pan Africanist goals.
We supported all these objectives. However their
achievement required that as a country Zimbabwe
should remain a democratic and peaceful country
with a growing economy of shared wealth, and a
country which would continue to do everything
possible to eradicate the legacy of colonialism.
When the ANC felt that problems were arising
with regard to these objectives, it did what
nobody else in the world had done. It prepared
and shared a document with ZANU-PF which was
a comprehensive critique of developments in
Zimbabwe, with suggestions about what ZANU-PF
should do to correct what was wrong.
Done in 2001, the document was entitled “How
Will Zimbabwe Defeat Its Enemies!” It dealt with a
whole variety of issues, including the political and
economic.
Though the then planned ANC/ZANU-PF meeting
to discuss the document did not take place,
ZANU-PF never raised any objection to the fact
that the ANC prepared the document to assist
Zimbabwe to overcome some of its challenges.
We probably made a mistake when we did not
insist that this meeting should be held.
The South African Government and the Zimbabwe
land question
When the war veterans and others began to
occupy white-owned farms, we intervened first of
all with Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 to
encourage the UK Government to honour the
commitment that had been made at Lancaster
House in 1979 to give the Government of
Zimbabwe the financial means to carry out the
required land redistribution in a non-confrontati
onal manner.
This led to the September 1998 International
Donors' Conference on Land Reform and
Resettlement held in Harare, which the British
Government attended, but whose very positive
decisions were not implemented, thanks to the
negative attitude adopted by the very same
British Government.
Unfortunately, contrary to what the Conservative
Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John
Major had agreed, Tony Blair’s Secretary of State
for International Development, Claire Short,
repudiated the commitment to honour the
undertaking made at Lancaster House.
In a November 1997 letter to Zimbabwe Minister
of Agriculture and Land, Kumbirai Kangai, she
wrote: “I should make it clear that we do not
accept that Britain has a special responsibility to
meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We
are a new Government from diverse backgrounds
without links to former colonial interests. My own
origins are Irish and as you know, we were
colonised not colonisers.”
In a February 22, 2015 article in The Telegraph,
the Conservative Party Mayor of London, Boris
Johnson, commented about the parlous state of
Zimbabwe and said:
“But it is vital to recognise that Zimbabwe was
not always like this, and did not have to be like
this…And Britain played a shameful part in the
disaster. Readers will remember the 1979
Lancaster House Agreement, by which Margaret
Thatcher granted independence to Rhodesia…So it
was crucial that the Lancaster House Agreement
protected the interests of these white farmers.
They could, of course, be bought out, but their
land could not be simply seized. There had to be
a “willing buyer, willing seller”. The British
government agreed to fund the arrangement,
compensating the former colonial farmers for land
that they gave up… And then in 1997, along came
Tony Blair and New Labour, and in a fit of avowed
anti-colonialist fervour they unilaterally scrapped
the arrangement…It was Labour’s betrayal of the
Lancaster House Agreement – driven by political
correctness and cowardice – that gave Mugabe
the pretext for the despotic (land) confiscations
by which he has rewarded his supporters.”
Later, Prime Minister Blair told me that the British
Governments he led never formally took this
decision to repudiate the Lancaster House
Agreement and regretted that in the end, his
Government had to accept it because Claire Short
had succeeded to convince the UK public that it
was indeed Government policy!
Further to help resolve the conflict on the land
question, at some point we also got
commitments from three (3) other Governments
to finance land acquisition by the Zimbabwe
Government which would then distribute the land
to those who had started to occupy some farms.
The Zimbabwe Government welcomed this
initiative.
At the suggestion of the then UN Secretary
General, Kofi Annan, the UNDP assumed the
responsibility to work with the Zimbabwe
Government to implement this land acquisition
and redistribution. Unfortunately the UNDP acted
in a manner which led to the failure of this
initiative.
The South African Government and Zimbabwe
politics
Our Government started to work more intensely
with the opposition MDC after the 2000
Zimbabwe Constitutional Referendum, which
rejected the Constitution that had been put to the
nation by the Government.
The MDC approached us to help secure the
agreement of ZANU-PF to amend the extant
Constitution by including in it various matters,
many of which had been included in the
Constitution which had been rejected.
From then onwards we did our best to encourage
ZANU-PF and the MDC to work together to find
solutions to the constitutional, political, economic,
security and social challenges which faced
Zimbabwe.
It was exactly this same approach we took which
resulted in the conclusion in 2008 of the Global
Political Agreement (GPA) by the Zimbabwe
political parties.
Though we acted as a Facilitator, the fact of the
matter is that the GPA was negotiated and
elaborated by the three Zimbabwe Political
Parties which had been democratically chosen by
the people in the 2008 elections. No part of the
Agreement was imposed on the Parties by the
Facilitator.
This approach was informed by our unwavering
determination to respect the right of the people of
Zimbabwe to determine their future, firmly
opposed to any foreign, including South African,
intervention to impose solutions on the people of
Zimbabwe.
Writing in the privately-owned Zimbabwe
Independent on September 25 last year, Wilbert
Mukori said: “The best chance the nation has had
to end Mugabe’s dictatorship was by far during
the Government of National Unity (GNU) when all
the nation had to do was implement the raft of
democratic reforms already agreed in the 2008
Global Political Agreement (GPA).
“However, MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai and
other opposition parties, who were tasked with
implementing the reforms, sold out and joined
Mugabe’s gravy train. So after four or five years
of the GNU, no meaningful reforms were
implemented…The people of Zimbabwe failed to
recognise the importance of the 2008 GPA
reforms and so they did not pressure GNU leaders
to implement the reforms.”
Regime change in Zimbabwe
There were others in the world, led particularly by
the UK, who opposed our approach of
encouraging the Zimbabweans to decide their
future. These preferred regime change – the
forcible removal of President Mugabe and his
replacement by people approved by the UK and
its allies.
This is what explained the sustained campaign to
condemn us for conducting the so-called ‘quiet
diplomacy’. What was wrong with ‘quiet
diplomacy’, which led to the adoption of the GPA
discussed by Mukori, was that it defended the
right of the people of Zimbabwe to determine their
future, as opposed to the desire by some in the
West to carry out regime change in Zimbabwe
and impose their will on the country!
In the period preceding the 2002 Zimbabwe
Elections, the UK and the US in particular were
very keen to effect this regime change and failing
which to impose various conditions to shorten the
period of any Mugabe Presidency.
Our then Minister of Intelligence, Lindiwe Sisulu,
had to make a number of trips to London and
Washington to engage the UK and US
governments on their plans for Zimbabwe, with
strict instructions from our Government to resist
all plans to impose anything on the people of
Zimbabwe, including by military means.
Accordingly it was not from hearsay or third
parties that we acquired the knowledge about
Western plans to overthrow President Mugabe,
but directly from what they communicated to a
representative of our Government.
In its 11 November, 2007 edition, the UK
newspaper, the Independent on Sunday, reported
that during its interview of Lord Guthrie, former
Chief of Defence Staff of the UK armed forces, it
learnt that “Astonishingly, the subjects discussed
(with Prime Minister Tony Blair) included invading
Zimbabwe, “which people were always trying to
get me (Guthrie) to look at. My advice was, ‘Hold
hard, you’ll make it worse.’”
According to John Kampfner in his book, “Blair’s
Wars”, Blair once told Claire Short that “if it were
down to me, I’d do Zimbabwe as well – that is
send troops.” In his Memoir “A Journey”, Blair
explained that the reason he could not “get rid of
Mugabe” which he “would have loved to” was
because “it wasn’t practical (since…the
surrounding African nations maintained a lingering
support for him and would have opposed any
action strenuously)."
South Africa and the Zimbabwe elections
The 2002 elections in Zimbabwe were observed
by two South African Observer Missions among
others. One of these was a multi-party Mission
deployed by our Parliament, not Government. The
second was composed of people seconded by civil
society organisations. The Government
contributed to this latter Mission by appointing
Ambassador Sam Motsuenyane as its leader.
With no intervention by Government, these two
Observer Missions, like all others, determined that
the declared outcome of the elections reflected
the will of the people of Zimbabwe.
The same thing happened with regard to the 2008
elections which resulted in the MDC (Tsvangirai)
gaining 100 House of Assembly seats as opposed
to 99 for ZANU-PF and 10 for MDC (Mutambara).
None of the two leading Presidential candidates,
Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, got the
required 50%+1 to emerge as the outright winner.
The second round of the Presidential election was
marked by a lot of violence, resulting in the
withdrawal of Tsvangirai. Our view was that the
level of violence had made it impossible for the
people of Zimbabwe freely to exercise their right
to choose their President.
I therefore met President Mugabe in Bulawayo to
propose that the election should be called off and
conducted afresh in conditions of the total
absence of any violence. President Mugabe did
not accept our suggestion, arguing that the action
we were proposing would be in violation of the
Constitution.
During the 2013 Harmonised Elections, ZANU-PF
won 196 of the House of Assembly seats as
opposed to 70 for the MDC (Tsvangirai), and
President Mugabe was elected during the first
round. All the Observer Missions which actually
observed these elections agreed that the
announced results ‘reflected the will of the people
of Zimbabwe’.
Over the years ZAPU, ZANU and, later, ZANU-PF
saw it as part of their responsibility to contribute
to the victory of our struggle against the
apartheid regime and system and the building of
the democratic South Africa, and acted
accordingly. The ANC took the same position with
regard to the struggles of the people of Zimbabwe
to defeat colonialism and reconstruct the new
Zimbabwe, and acted accordingly.
Throughout these years we defended the right of
the people of Zimbabwe to determine their
destiny, including deciding on who should govern
the country. This included resisting all efforts to
impose other people’s solutions on Zimbabwe,
which, if this had succeeded, would have served
as a precursor for a similar intervention in our
country!
Consciously we took the position that democratic
South Africa should at all costs avoid acting as a
new home-grown African imperial power which
would have given itself the right unilaterally to

determine the destiny of the peoples of Africa!