Stefaans Brummer
THE irony of their own attendance at Monday’s Southern African Development Community summit could not have been lost on Constand Viljoen and Pik Botha. A succession of regional leaders made sure they had no
Both men sat attentively in the large but select World Trade Centre audience when three presidents, including Nelson Mandela, made reference to apartheid South Africa’s destabilisation of the region.
>From the stage, nine more leaders — presidents and prime ministers or their deputies, most of whose countries at some stage had felt the effects of a decade and a half or more of South African overt and covert military agresssion — peered down on Viljoen, who headed the South African Defence Force during the roughest of that time, and Botha, who as long-serving Minister of Foreign Affairs must have had input in a campaign estimated to have cost a million lives and more than a hundred billion rand.
Mandela thanked other SADC countries in his welcoming speech for their role in “the liberation of South Africa and the end of Southern Africa’s destabilisation”; Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi referred to “economic and political destabilisation of the region … used as a grand strategy to delay the liberation of Namibia and South Africa”; and Botswana President Ketumile Masire spoke of “the impact of apartheid-sponsored destabilisation”.
But in a sense, this year’s summit was the final farewell to that period. South Africa, who last year joined SADC — founded in 1980 as the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC) with the express purpose of decreasing dependency on a destabilising South Africa — not only hosted the summit this year, but also played a leading role.
Mandela, always the great reconciler, made it clear that the past had to be consigned to the past. “SADC’s mission reflects the reality that Southern Africa has long passed the stage of lamenting the privations of the past. The challenge is to find within ourselves the resources to overcome this legacy, with the co- operation of the international community.”
So the wheel had turned a full circle. There was Viljoen, now leader of the Freedom Front, the man who has gained acceptance from those same leaders on the stage for his scheme to export Afrikaner farmers to the
And Botha, now Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs in Mandela’s Cabinet, had the honour of co-signing with his SADC counterparts a memorandum on the establishment of a regional power pool.
Security in the region has come a long way since SADC, and its sibling body, the Frontline States, joined battle with the old South Africa. Mwinyi, who is retiring as Tanzanian president this year, recounted how “when I came to power ten years ago, Namibia was not yet free. South Africa was still governed by and apartheid regime. Civil war and discord characterised life in Angola and Mozambique.”
Today, even Angola appears to be on the road to peace. Democracy is on the upswing in SADC countries and in the space of 18 months South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique and shortly Tanzania will have held their first unfettered multi-party elections.
SADC, after South Africa joined it, and with a substantial role played by South Africa, has successfully averted crises in the Mozambican elections and the Lesotho coup attempt. Lesotho’s prime minister Ntsu Mokhehle thanked his SADC colleagues for their mediation in his country, “Not because you re-instated my administration, but because you demonstrated the supremacy and invincibility of democracy”.
Perhaps South Africa’s transition from apartheid bully to a stable and co-operative neighbour, the domino that started a democratic trend, will yet prove to be SADC’s greatest asset.