Secret documents handed in at the Malan trial last week link two current cabinet ministers to violent raids into Lesotho in the 1980s.
Minutes of the State Security Council (SSC) show Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs Pik Botha was authorised – along with three other ministers in the National Party government – to use force as a way of making Lesotho stop its support for African National Congress guerrillas.
Deputy President FW de Klerk was present at the same SSC meeting. The minutes, dated December 20 1985, say Botha – then Pretoria’s foreign affairs minister – reported to the council that the government of Chief Leabua Jonathan in Lesotho had been warned to stop support for the ANC and that the council then authorised use of “violence across the border”.
That week, nine people were killed when two homes in Maseru were attacked in commando-type raids. Six were said to be ANC members and the other three citizens of Lesotho.
The South African police and South African Defence Force denied being responsible at the time, while the Lesotho National Liberation Army (LNLA) issued a statement saying its guerrillas had carried out the attacks.
The top-secret SSC documents were made available after being handed to court in the Magnus Malan murder trial last week.
Earlier evidence in the Malan trial shows that the military’s special forces ran a base in the foothills of the Drakensberg near the Lesotho border, where dissident forces from the LNLA were trained and armed.
Johan Opperman, a military intelligence officer who provided the state’s main evidence against Malan and his co-accused, told the court that AK-47 assault rifles used by an Inkatha hit team to carry out the 1987 KwaMakutha massacre had been obtained from this base at Ferntree in Natal.
Three weeks after the December 20 raid, the South African government imposed a blockade on all goods from this country entering the mountain kingdom and Jonathan was deposed in a coup led by officers in the Lesotho army, but widely believed at the time to have been orchestrated by Pretoria.
Botha’s wife died this week, thus he was not available to answer questions about whether the Lesotho raid and coup – that placed military strongman general Justin Lekhanya in power – was linked to the security council’s decision.
The documents show that after receiving the report from Botha, the security council agreed that pressure on the Lesotho government to end support for ANC guerrillas had to be stepped up as part of a general programme to contain Umkhonto we Sizwe insurgent operations.
Although the SSC’s documents rarely mention the use of violence as an instrument in the government’s “total strategy” to counter resistance against apartheid, this set of minutes says explicitly members of the council agreed that “geweld oor die grens [use of violence or force across the border]” should be used to discipline the Lesotho government.
The exact text says: “The meeting approved that stronger action must be taken against Lesotho and that the following measures be taken, in stages of intensity, as needed against Lesotho: diplomatic negotiations … closing of the border; repatriation of migrant workers; violence over the border.”
A note in the margin delegates follow-up action to Botha; Magnus Malan, then minister of defence; Louis le Grange, then minister of law and order; and DJ Nel, then deputy information minister.
In the middle of January 1986, South Africa sealed all its border posts with Lesotho causing serious economic hardship in the country. Media reports at the time speculated that “behind South Africa’s contentious ‘blockade’ of Lesotho lies Pretoria’s unshakeable belief that the mountain kingdom has become the ANC’s main operations base against South Africa.”
Days later, Jonathan was toppled and replaced by Lekhanya and it was reported that Botha’s ministry brokered a deal with the new government to lift the blockade in return for all ANC activists being detained and deported.
The new government then chartered an Air Zimbabwe aircraft and flew from Maseru to Lusaka with 60 ANC activists on board. Another two groups of ANC members were deported from Lesotho to Zambia soon after.