Alex Duval Smith
The smouldering remains of Lesotho, a kingdom raped of its constitutional integrity after South Africa’s heavy-handed military intervention, lie as visible proof of the post-apartheid government’s disastrous foreign policy.
Political analysts believe that it is chiefly South Africa’s failure, since elections in 1994, to invent a credible role for itself in Africa which has led to a series of foreign policy about-turns and blunders that have impacted on Congo and its neighbours, as well as Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria and Libya.
The Lesotho intervention – which many experts refer to as an invasion because it was not approved by King Letsie III – came as a result of a plea from the country’s prime minister to quash military opposition to his government.
It resulted in the devastation of Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, and in anarchy – partly because the intervention was ill-conceived but also because, apartheid-era style, it ran roughshod over the Constitution of a neighbouring, if tiny and landlocked, country.
Molapo Qhobela, leader of the Basotho Congress Party, said: “We had our problems. but when South Africa says we were `hours away from a military coup’, it is lying like a cheap clock. It was looking for an excuse to flex its military muscle and to say, `I am the biggest in the region.’
“The invasion is sickening when you think of those of us who died in support of the liberation struggle in South Africa,” said Qhobela, whose party is among the main five opposition groups in Lesotho.
The botched intervention in Lesotho comes only weeks after President Nelson Mandela lost the whip hand in the negotiations over the Democratic Republic of Congo conflict to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Zimbabwe, along with Angola and Namibia, sent military backing to fight the rebellion against President Laurent Kabila. Mandela argued for a negotiated settlement, a stance closer to the United States’s position and seen by some as tantamount to letting the rebels do their work.
South Africa’s lack of subtlety and knowledge has impacted throughout Africa. In 1994, Mandela briefly said South Africa would recognise the Saharawi of western Sahara, until Morocco, the occupying power, objected.
The following year, it attempted to take a brokering role in the Algerian civil war, but was politely told to back down.
n Iden Wetherell reports from Zimbabwe that there was insufficient time to call a meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)Organ on Defence and Security to discuss the Lesotho situation. But the intervention is clearly sanctioned under SADC inter-state security agreements, in particular Article 5 of the protocol on politics, defence and security agreed on at the Gaborone summit in 1996.
This provides for intervention where there is large-scale violence between sections of the population, or between armed or paramilitary forces and sections of the population; if there is a threat to the legitimate authority of the government; or if there is any crisis that could threaten the peace and security of other member states.
While Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will almost certainly have been consulted, both as chair of the organ and as a member of the presidential troika of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe which in 1994 sought to resolve a previous crisis in Lesotho, his forces are otherwise fully engaged in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some 3 000 Zimbabwean combat troops are propping up Laurent Kabila’s regime.
Mugabe’s office said on Wednesday Zimbabwe fully supports the intervention in Lesotho, but will not be sending in troops.
“Any military attack to undermine a sovereign government is viewed by all of us in the SADC and the OAU [Organisation of African Unity] as rebellious and therefore as a matter of great concern requiring immediate redress wherever it occurs.
“We continue to pledge full support to the government of [Lesotho] Prime Minister [Pakalitha] Mosisili, and therefore to our joint SADC force which is currently helping to secure the tenure of that legitimate government,” the president’s office said.
The Congo war has excited controversy in Harare, with members of Parliament demanding to know how much it will all cost and why they weren’t consulted first.