The makers of South Africa’s foreign policy need a long, hard think, suggests William Boot
The king of Lesotho is seldom permitted to make public utterances. But sometimes his private observations are passed on by friends and advisers – like what he said when he returned from the recent Southern African Development Community (SADC)summit in Mauritius.
Lesotho, he said, had been sacrificed to the SADC, and more specifically to the imperative of better relations between two of the organisation’s key players, South Africa’s President Nelson Mandela and Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.
Behind King Letsie III’s gnomic observation lies a sequence of events that starts on September 9, with South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki about to make public the report of the Langa commission of inquiry into alleged irregularities in Lesotho’s May 23 elections.
In the event, Mbeki did not hand over the report to interest groupings. Instead, at the insistence of his partners from Botswana and Zimbabwe in the SADC-appointed troika of nations charged with guaranteeing democracy in the mountain kingdom, he pulled back at the last moment, saying the report would be referred to the SADC summit in Mauritius on September 13 and 14. It was deemed too explosive to release there and then.
By this stage Letsie had already been privy to the interim report of the Langa commission -which found “gross irregularities” in the elections and is believed to have called for the annulment of the election result which returned the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD)to power with only one seat conceded to the opposition.
However, the report was not discussed in the official proceedings of the summit. Mandela, as chair, announced (after Mbeki’s protestations of its explosiveness) at the end that there had not been time to put it on the agenda. Odd. But not so odd when you consider that, as head of state, Letsie would have to have been present in plenaries on the subject.
However, sources close to the summit have confirmed that the report was indeed discussed – at the troika level and especially between the Zimbabwean and South African delegations.
In the end it was the Zimbabwean perspective and the Zimbabwean solution to the problem of Lesotho which won the day, and which shaped the next, horrific chapters of Lesotho’s tragic history.
What was agreed was that the initial report of the Langa commission – which sources at the time confirmed merely fleshed out the contents of the interim report – would have to be rewritten. Those sections which questioned the legitimacy of the LCD government and called for re-elections under an interim government of national unity would have to be excised.
Senior South African intelligence sources confirmed that there was substantial rewriting of the report in the days which followed, and the doctored report was made public nearly a week later. The name of the actual rewriter is known to the Mail & Guardian.
It is worth mentioning that on September 8, in the midst of a military insurrection which effectively rendered his government powerless, and with the release of the initial Langa commission report expected at any moment, Lesotho’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Tom Thabane took time off to slip out of the country to “seek advice” from his close friend Mugabe. The next day the report was withheld, largely at Zimbabwean insistence.
The point in rehashing this history is not merely to identify the bad guys. The questions raised are questions about South Africa’s foreign policy in the context of regional relations.
Much has already been made of the about- turn in South Africa’s approach to conflict resolution in the Lesotho instance: from a blanket insistence on negotiated settlements to a military intervention (cloaked though it might have been in the SADC blanket), complete with murder, rape and pillage.
It has also been noted often enough that the turnaround came just after a stand- off with Zimbabwe over that country’s military adventures (supposedly on behalf of the SADC) in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But this is not really the point. The real about-face in South African foreign policy came in this regard: where the interim report had at least questioned the legitimacy of the LCD on the basis of election irregularities, the reworked version could not find that the will of the people had not been served in the elections.
By the same token, when South African and Botswanan troops were sent into Lesotho, their stated aim was to reinstate the supposedly legitimate and elected LCD government. The intervention was avowedly made at the request of the head of government, Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili – without reference to the head of state, the king.
In short, it was an embarrassingly familiar kind of African intervention, and one which South Africa has been vocal in criticising in the past; the kind of intervention which seeks, regardless of the moral right of a government to be in power, to prop it up in the face of the resistance of its own citizenry. The fact of holding power is used as its own justification in the face of the usually legitimate opposition of the people.
One only has to look at the way the Organisation of African Unity functions to keep the corrupt and the brutal in power – from Mobutu Sese Seko in the former Zaire, to Laurent Kabila in the Congo to Sassou Nguesso in Congo (Brazzaville) – by systematically confusing power with legitimacy,lest their own credentials be examined too closely.
Of course, South Africa’s role in Lesotho has been nothing if not ambivalent. The initial intervention was made, sources say, on the basis of reports by Mosisili’s government of large-scale weapons transfers to rebel soldiers inside the kingdom – and, although these justifications were post facto, on the unsubstantiated basis that a coup had been effected (which, until the moment of the intervention, the South Africans had denied). It was, as this newspaper tellingly dubbed it, the Rambo nation approach.
It is still uncertain whether the military order was given with the informed knowledge or blessing of Mandela or Mbeki. Intelligence sources have said that the order was given on the basis of a supposedly imminent (and possibly manufactured) military threat from the Lesotho insurgents.
On the other hand, where Mandela and Mbeki have actually been involved – in brokering talks and forcing agreements for re-elections within 15 to 18 months – the approach has been markedly different.
Perhaps the most telling moment came last week when, in a televised address to the nation on the subject of an interim government for Lesotho, Mbeki said it had been agreed that a structure would be put in place representing all parties equally until the elections.
The significance of this is twofold: it betrays another about-turn on the part of the South Africans, a return to the interpretation which deems the elections irregular and therefore the government too; and it highlights the crippling arrogance of a South African foreign policy which assumes that because this is the agreement it had drafted, this would be put into place.
While Lesotho’s LCD Parliament finds reasons to refuse to pass proposed re- elections into law, and while the LCD government refuses to buy into an interim government structure, citing earlier endorsements of its legitimacy in justification, the South African policy-makers might do well to use this time to do some pondering.