Howard Barrell
Zimbabwe will be pressuring South Africa and other countries in the region to agree to use military force to back peace efforts in Angola when leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) hold a summit in Maputo next month.
“There has to be general consensus within SADC on a military commitment shared by all countries,” a senior Zimbabwean official told the United Nations’s news agency, IRIN, on Wednesday. He claimed there was “a very strong indication” that the necessary “political will” for this would exist at the Maputo summit.
The official said last week’s ceasefire agreement for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was agreed to by neighbouring states, represented “a new vision for peacekeeping in Africa”, which should be extended to the Angolan context. He added: “When we [Zimbabwe] talk of underwriting an Angolan settlement, it is not just in moral terms, but in physical terms.”
Earlier this year, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, his Namibian counterpart Sam Nujoma and Congo’s embattled self- proclaimed head of state, Laurent Kabila, met in the Angolan capital, Luanda, and formed an alliance with President Jos Eduardo dos Santos against Unita. The heads of state resolved to use “all possible measures” to help Dos Santos’s Angolan government.
So far “all possible measures” has excluded Zimbabwean and Namibian military involvement because they already have thousands of troops in Congo propping up Kabila’s regime.
But a major thrust of Zimbabwean regional policy over the past few years has been to try to corral other SADC states – particularly South Africa, the most powerful state in the 14-nation grouping – into getting involved militarily on the side of Kabila in Congo and Dos Santos’s government in Angola. South Africa has been assiduously avoiding this.
The Zimbabwean official’s statement is seen as an attempt by Mugabe’s government to turn up the pressure on South Africa ahead of the Maputo summit.
The head of Early Warning at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria, Richard Cornwell, said: “All the indications are that the South African Department of Foreign Affairs is understandably reluctant to fall into the kind of regional entrapment being suggested by Zimbabwe.
“To proclaim success for the DRC [Congo] ceasefire, as the Zimbabwe official did, is entirely premature. And to talk about resolving the Angolan war easily is simply wishful thinking,” Cornwell added.
Senior South African government officials, who spoke to the Mail & Guardian on condition of anonymity this week, dismissed the Zimbabwean official’s suggestion that a willingness was developing among SADC member states to deploy military forces in Angola to back up a new peace initiative there.
“It is pie in the sky,” said one senior official. “I don’t want to rule it out entirely. But I am not aware of any discussions on the issue.”
The South African sources said they had the impression that the Zimbabwean official’s statement was an attempt by the Mugabe government to claim as its own any success in Congo – if indeed the ceasefire was implemented.
“Basically, Zimbabwe wants to be able to come out of its military involvement in the DRC [Congo] smelling of roses, and then to advocate the same thing in Angola. It is part of an ongoing quest for prestige,” said a South African official.
Underlying the official’s comments is Zimbabwe’s ongoing rivalry with South Africa, particularly acutely felt in the case of Mugabe. For 14 years before the birth of democracy in South Africa in 1994, Zimbabwe was the unofficial political leader of most states in the region. Since then, however, its government has been smarting at South Africa’s predominance.
Much of this rivalry has been played out in a dispute over the status of a SADC body called the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security. The organ was originally chaired by Mugabe, and he continues to convene meetings ostensibly held under its auspices despite the fact that South Africa and most other SADC countries consider the organ to have been suspended. The Luanda meeting earlier this year, for example, at which Mugabe, Nujoma and Kabila met with Dos Santos, was, as far as Mugabe was concerned, a meeting of the suspended organ.
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