Africa

by Guy Arnold

  MORE WAR AND MORE TALKS

  Smith may have scuppered détente but other developments continued to narrow his options. Mugabe replaced Sithole as the leader of ZANU in 1976 when the commander of the ZANU Liberation Army (ZANLA), Josiah Tongogara, joined Mugabe’s delegation at the Geneva conference convened by the British. Mozambique became independent on 25 June so that Rhodesia lost a sympathetic neighbour and instead faced a hostile border that was 700 miles long and ideal for guerrilla incursions from ZANU bases sited inside Rhodesia’s neighbour. When, at the end of the year, South Africa sent a military column to invade Angola, the war in Rhodesia resumed on a bigger scale than ever. The war would become increasingly intense from this time until the end of the decade, imposing greater strains on the white minority whose isolation became far more pronounced following the Portuguese withdrawal from Mozambique and Angola and the South African ‘disengagement’ from Rhodesia’s defence.

  In January 1976 ZANU mounted a new offensive in the north-east. In April the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) (ZAPU’s military wing) began infiltrating into northern Rhodesia from Zambia and Botswana. In August the crack Selous Scouts raided Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA) camps deep inside Mozambique. ZANU and ZAPU agreed to form a Patriotic Front to put their case to the international community. Meanwhile, Dr Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, had entered the picture as chief Western negotiator. As Ken Flower recorded:

  It took three months for Kissinger to come out in the open, three months during which he was preparing his quid pro quo with Vorster: American support for anti-Marxist forces in Angola and no further pressure on Vorster over Namibia, provided that Vorster increased his pressure on Smith and thus cleared America’s name in black Africa.15

  In Salisbury that September Kissinger put on a show about how much he and his wife admired Smith. He thought he had secured a deal. On Friday 24 September Smith announced his acceptance of the Kissinger proposals on the radio: ‘The American and the British Governments, together with the major Western powers, have made up their minds as to the kind of solution they wish to see in Rhodesia and they are determined to bring it about. The alternative to the acceptance of the proposals was explained to us in the clearest terms, which left us no room for misunderstanding.’ Smith had been offered a package deal: sanctions to be lifted, an aid package to follow, and terrorism to stop. Smith continued, ‘backsliding’ in Flower’s words: ‘It will be a “majority rule” constitution and this is expressly laid down in the proposals. My own position on majority rule is well known. I have stated in public many times, and I believe I echo the views of the majority of both black and white Rhodesians when I say that we support majority rule, provided that it is responsible rule.’ In the following days, in his own inimitable way, Smith conveyed to his white electorate that any change would be ephemeral. All Kissinger’s negotiating skills were no match for Smith’s obduracy.

  Smith might hold out, twisting and turning to prolong white control, but in the second half of 1976 the situation was steadily deteriorating. Flower’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) made a remarkably accurate assessment of the Rhodesia situation. It painted a picture of a country suffering severe strain in every quarter and argued that the solution had to be political. The CIO argued: ‘Rhodesia is being increasingly subjected to various forms of external and internal pressure which are seriously affecting the country’s security, politico/economic and social structure.’ The assessment listed the problems as: the terrorist capacity to recruit; the kill rate was not equal to the recruiting; the blacks wanted the nationalists to triumph; without a future guaranteed the whites would continue to emigrate; Britain, the EC and now the US were pushing for majority rule; Rhodesia was wholly dependent upon South Africa which in turn was being pressured to exert pressure upon Rhodesia to accept majority rule; Zambia (post-détente) was committed to assisting the guerrillas; Mozambique was providing full support; Tanzania was switching the training facilities it had developed for FRELIMO to use by the Rhodesian terrorists; and Soviet support for the nationalists was being increased.

  During 1977 neither cross-border raids by Rhodesian forces into Mozambique nor bombing ZAPU camps in Zambia slowed down the war. Lt-Gen. Peter Walls argued publicly for negotiations, saying the whites could not win the war. The Smith government then began to seek an internal settlement. The United States became directly involved in the Rhodesia question as a result of Dr Kissinger’s 1976 roving diplomacy; he had persuaded Smith to accept the Pretoria agreement endorsing majority rule. Subsequently, when the Geneva talks collapsed at the end of the year, Kissinger left further initiatives to Britain. When Dr David Owen succeeded Anthony Crosland as Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1977 he favoured joint US–UK action while also insisting that Britain should assume direct responsibility during a transition period to Zimbabwe independence. He worked closely with the US Ambassador to London, Andrew Young, who said: ‘I would say that President Carter sees there can be no future for Southern Africa unless there is a rationally-negotiated peaceful and meaningful agreement.’ In July a joint Anglo-US approach was made in Lusaka to the Patriotic Front, which had been recognized by the OAU as the only representative body of black Rhodesians, but the approach was turned down; the Patriotic Front argued that it was wrong to seek an agreement for an independence constitution before securing Smith’s surrender. He had described the Patriotic Front as Public Enemy Number One. The front-line presidents insisted upon the complete dismantling of Smith’s army, which was to be replaced by guerrilla forces, but their demand was flatly rejected by Vorster when Owen and Young arrived in Pretoria for talks. He said he would only support what was acceptable to Smith.

  An article in the Daily Telegraph quoted Rhodesia’s two leading generals:

  As General John Hickman, Rhodesian Army Commander, said at the weekend, ‘the most important battle the guerrillas could win would be the destruction of national morale.’ General Hickman, one of a new breed of increasingly vociferous military commanders, warned the politicians that while morale of troops in the field was very high, when they returned home they were given a different picture… Today, General Peter Walls, Commander of Combined Operations, and another of the military school which feels increasingly obliged to speak out, says the whole of Rhodesia must be regarded as an operational area.16

  In other words, the two leading generals were saying the war could not be won. Ten days after the appearance of this article in Britain, Ken Flower recorded in his diary:

  John Hickman has just come to see me, late at night, seeking advice on what to do in response to approaches from the Nationalists. Peter Walls is more heavily involved: all of which is symptomatic of the desperately uncertain time in which we live because the government won’t give a steer as to where we’re supposed to be going. Or, to be brutally frank: they’re determined to hang on to power at any cost.17

  Once Smith had rejected the Anglo-American initiative launched by Owen and Young, who insisted that the Patriotic Front had to be part of any settlement, he resumed negotiations for an ‘internal settlement’ with Muzorewa, Sithole and Chief Chirau. The Operations Co-ordinating Committee (OCC) advised the government that the war was being lost and that a political settlement was essential. South Africa’s Pik Botha told Smith that ‘a peaceful settlement is no longer possible and there will have to be losers’. As the war intensified towards the end of 1977, the Rhodesian Security Forces intensified their attacks upon targets in Mozambique that included ZANU camps at Chimoio and Tembue. Such attacks were more a policy of despair than sound military strategy though they may have given comfort to Rhodesians who saw that something was being done. They did not affect the fighting inside Rhodesia.

  While the Anglo-US negotiations with the Patriotic Front continued, the announcement on 15 February 1978 of a successful ‘internal settlement’ in Salisbury opened a new chapter in the increasingly tortuous Rhodesian story. The Patriotic Front saw the settlement as a betrayal
by ‘Smith’s Black collaborators’, refused to take seriously Smith’s promise to hand over power to the majority and regarded the agreement as a ploy to ‘divide and rule’. Smith agreed to introduce a form of majority rule though with provisions that effectively ensured a continuation of white control. The agreement made no difference to the fighting in the north-east of the country. Ken Flower provides an invaluable ‘insider’ view of the growing crisis for the embattled whites in his autobiographical account of these years, Serving Secretly. As he described the situation in 1978: ‘For many years now the consensus of opinion in CIO and Special Branch had been that it was more important to accommodate African nationalism than to over-concern ourselves with the communist threat as it was represented in parts of the Western world.’18 Despite his much-vaunted internal settlement, Smith also conducted secret negotiations with Nkomo through 1978 but these were brought to an abrupt halt when on 3 September Nkomo’s ZIPRA guerrillas, using a Russian Sam-7 ground-to-air missile, brought down an Air Rhodesia Viscount shortly after take-off from Kariba for Salisbury. Thirty-five people were killed and of 18 survivors on the ground 10 were massacred by guerrillas before rescuers could reach the scene. Twenty-four hours earlier Rhodesians had welcomed the official release of news of Nkomo–Smith negotiations; but in reaction to the Viscount disaster they demanded an end to the talks. If they expected international sympathy, the Rhodesians were mistaken. ‘Any illusions they might have retained that they were fighting a war, not terrorism, were shattered, and as they waited in vain for condemnation of ZIPRA’s action from Britain, the United States or anywhere else, they began to realize they were completely alone in their grief and anger.’19 And though white ministers demanded retribution and martial law, Gen. Walls responded that only the military would decide military tactics: in other words, they would not impose martial law. The fact that the military could respond in this way demonstrated the growing gap in political-military thinking and Smith’s declining control over events. Although Smith signed an agreement with Muzorewa, Sithole and Chief Chirau to form a transitional government to precede majority rule, the internal settlement never achieved credibility while the transitional government failed to stop the war or curb guerrilla recruiting and Muzorewa lost authority when his minister, Byron Hove, resigned.

  OILGATE

  A major scandal, revealing the duplicity of successive British governments and the complicity in breaking sanctions by Britain’s two largest companies, the oil giants BP and Shell, was uncovered by Martin Bailey, a Granada TV journalist in 1977. As the revelations became public the Foreign Office was obliged to hold an official inquiry and on 10 May David Owen appointed Thomas Bingham QC to conduct it. The previous April a BP spokesman had said, ‘We have never broken sanctions – United Nations, British or any other.’ On 23 May, President Kaunda announced that the oil companies had just held a conference in Zurich ‘at which they decided to destroy all the important papers so that we would not have evidence with which to present our case to court’.20 A Shell spokesman dismissed Kaunda’s allegations but Bingham later confirmed that such a meeting had taken place. Kaunda was cynical about the British government investigation, convinced the inquiry was designed to delay real action to tighten oil sanctions. Why had the British not yet discovered the facts? he asked. ‘My little nation with its limited means has been able to learn so much about how oil is reaching the Smith regime and how UN sanctions are being broken, that it is inconceivable to me that British intelligence services should not have known all about it.’ Zambia decided to boycott the Bingham inquiry.21 At the same time the Zambian government filed writs for damages against the oil companies in the High Court in Lusaka and in outlining the case against the oil companies claimed £4,000 million in damages. Zambia stressed that its motive was political and not financial. The United African National Congress (UANC) also wanted to sue the oil companies but ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU did not pursue the matter although they claimed that the oil companies were playing an important role in sustaining the Smith regime. Robert Mugabe said, ‘The West talks of wanting peace – but in reality props up the minority regime through sales of oil.’ And Joshua Nkomo expressed the nationalist frustration with Britain when he said at a press conference: ‘Inquiry! Inquiry into what? This is the British way of tackling things. They know what is happening.’ Plenty of fears were expressed that the inquiry would not ‘get’ the full facts or would be prevented from publishing by the Foreign Office. However, the situation was changed radically when the ‘Sandford file’ that belonged to Arthur Sandford, who was a London-based BP executive dealing with Southern Africa, fell into the hands of the inquiry. It was probably a deliberate leak. When David Owen, the Foreign Secretary, saw it he was extremely angry to discover the companies’ involvement in sanctions busting. Another key source of information was the Portuguese Jorge Jardim, the head of the Sonarep refinery at Lourenco Marques (Maputo); he had left Sonarep and gone into private business, and extracts from his documents showed that both the head offices of the two oil companies and the British government had been deeply implicated in the sanctions scandal for over a decade. The documents revealed Shell and BP discussing how to persuade the British government they were not breaking sanctions and outlined how oil swap arrangements with Total were made. A BP memorandum on ‘Rhodesia’s Freight Services’, prepared by John Rounce in February 1974 in Cape Town, provided a precise explanation of what happened: ‘BP and Shell continue to market products in Rhodesia as a consolidated venture. Supplies to support the marketing activity are effected from South Africa primarily through “Freight Services”, who act as forwarding agents, buying product from BP and Shell SA and reselling to the Rhodesia Government procurement agency Genta for allocation to marketers.’ The ‘Rounce Memorandum’ then went on to explain that ‘devious supply arrangements have thus been made to visibly dissociate the oil companies from any first hand and identifiable part in supply operations’.22 The leaking of these documents made it much more difficult for the government to refuse to publish the Bingham Report since to do so would have led to accusations of a ‘cover-up’.

  Granada’s World in Action did a two-part special (31 July and 7 August 1978) on how Shell and BP broke sanctions. Then, on 27August, the Sunday Times ran a front-page lead under the headline ‘BP confesses it broke sanctions – and covered up’. The article gave precise details of how this had been managed. As a result of this story Shell shares dropped by 20p and BP shares by 28p within four days. As Peter Kellner was to reveal in the Sunday Times ‘… I realized that we had an unparalleled tale of corporate and government deceit. We had quite remarkable evidence of the complicity of Ministers and civil servants – a story which exposed how Britain’s closed system of government could conceal a scandal of international proportions.’23 Despite these revelations, the Chairman of Shell, Michael Pocock, told shareholders: ‘We have no reason to feel ashamed of the record and action of our subsidiary company in South Africa… I feel proud of them.’ While somewhat more circumspect, BP said that over 13 years ‘mistakes’ had been made. Apart from the oil companies, the oilgate scandal clearly shamed Labour politicians: on one occasion when questioned about the sanctions breaking, Denis Healey shouted angrily at reporters while Harold Wilson on another broke off a television interview. George Thomson, who as Commonwealth Secretary in 1968 had had talks with the oil companies, became the main target of attack and in self-defence issued a detailed personal statement: ‘I have exercised my rights as a former cabinet Minister to consult the appropriate papers… they confirm that I conveyed in writing to the Prime Minister [Wilson] and other Ministers most directly concerned a full account of all that passed at my meetings on behalf of the government with the oil companies.’24 The fact that he informed his colleagues did not exonerate either Thomson or the others, including Wilson. Despite these revelations no one in government, the civil service or the oil companies was ever charged with sanctions busting despite their many public denials.

  The Bin
gham Report had overseas consequences. In Zambia, which had suffered extensively as a result of UDI, it caused a major stir. Kaunda told reporters: ‘I am so angry that I cannot describe how I feel.’ He said that successive British prime ministers had lied and cheated over the oilgate scandal and that it was worse than Watergate in the United States because the result of the oil getting through to Rhodesia had cost thousands of lives. The oilgate scandal revealed British political hypocrisy at its worst: contempt for the Africans who got killed; the determination to continue making money out of a war situation that was Britain’s responsibility; blatant racism as Britain secretly bailed out the white Rhodesians while sanctimoniously claiming that it adhered rigidly to UN sanctions. The revelations added profoundly to the deep distrust in which Africans held the British. Oilgate, in any case, was part of a wider pattern of sanctions busting that was always supported by Portugal (to 1975) and South Africa, while many Western businesses were only too ready to benefit from breaking sanctions.

  ZIMBABWE INDEPENDENCE

  In April 1979, following a white referendum which accepted the principle of majority rule, without Patriotic Front participation, elections were held in Rhodesia under the terms of the internal settlement Constitution and on 1 June Bishop Muzorewa became Prime Minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Conservative observers from Britain under Lord Lennox-Boyd had reported that the elections had been free and fair but the front-line Presidents opposed the elections and international recognition of Rhodesia was withheld. Moreover, Lord Chitnis, a British Liberal peer who observed the election, reported that it ‘was nothing more than a gigantic confidence trick designed to foist on a cowed and indoctrinated black electorate a settlement and a constitution which were formulated without its consent and which are being implemented without its approval’.25 On a visit to the United States in July, Ken Flower recorded in his diary: ‘On the one hand some of us have been doing what we can to fortify the Bishop (Muzorewa) – and ourselves – in the belief that the next three months should see the uplift of sanctions, and recognition. On the other hand there has been enough weakening of the Bishop’s position already, through the defection from his party. And the white politicians have been up to their old tricks of divide and rule – a luxury which we can no longer afford when the country is bleeding to death – someone killed each hour of the twenty-four, and the war costing a million dollars a day.’26 Meanwhile divisions were emerging in the Patriotic Front between Mugabe and Nkomo; this was to be expected for there was no trust between the two men and the Front was an artificial creation that was not of their choosing.