FT921-2552 _AN-CCSBEAA3FT 920319 FT 19 MAR 92 / South African Referendum: Hope at last for a peace throughout southern Africa By MICHAEL HOLMAN THE almost tangible sense of relief that gripped South Africa yesterday will be felt well beyond the country's borders. The white electorate's ringing endorsement of President F W de Klerk's search for a negotiated settlement has as many implications for a long suffering region as it does for South Africans themselves. After three decades of conflict, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and causing incalculable material damage, southern Africa can hope that peace is, at long last, at hand. Not all the trials and tribulations of the states of the region can be laid at apartheid's door. Mismanagement and incorrect policies have contributed to their predicament. But just as the region's wars have been the single most damaging factor, so a regional peace and a stable, friendly post-apartheid South Africa will be the single most important factor in their efforts to revive often shattered economies. Like a malign, irascible, unpredictable giant, apartheid has dominated southern Africa, first propping up minority white governments, later cajoling, coercing or cudgelling black-ruled neighbours into submission. From Angola on the western seaboard to Mozambique in the west, not a country escaped the tactics of Pretoria, sometimes brutal, sometimes misleadingly benign. Mozambique, still battling rebels who not so long ago enjoyed Pretoria's support, has endured both. As one arm of the South African government helped Mozambique's rebel Renamo movement sabotage vital equipment, such as railway rolling stock, the other arm would be providing help in the form of locomotives from South African Railways. 'It is like that Marx brothers film,' said one Mozambican official at the time, 'where one of the characters went down the street throwing bricks into shop windows, followed by his pal, a glazier who then mends them - for a price'. Pretoria's campaign, which only ended when President de Klerk took office two and half years ago, had two main objectives. The first was to drive the guerrilla wing of the African National Congress out of its bases in Angola and Mozambique, and keep them out of Botswana and Zambia, in an effort to create a cordon sanitaire around South Africa. The second was to ensure that South Africa controlled the region's routes to the sea, and direct the bulk of the area's trade through South African ports. Mozambique tried in vain to resuscitate what had before independence been an important source of income - its ports and railways which served the southern African hinterland of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Admittedly, the region provided fertile soil for South African intervention. Support for Dr Jonas Savimbi's Unita rebels fueled Angola's civil war; but the authoritarian stance of the avowedly Marxist MPLA cost the government much sympathy. Southern Africa also had the misfortune to become a focus of super-power tension, and the battlefield for proxy battles - with the US providing military assistance to Unita in their war with the MPLA, backed by the Soviet Union and some 50,000 Cuban troops. 'Southern Africa has had to undergo two wars of independence,' said one African diplomat recently, looking back on events since 1960. 'The first was seeking to end colonial ties with Britain or Portugal, the second with South Africa when we became the front line states'. 'The second has been the toughest - being caught up in South Africa's struggle'. For Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the first round was costly enough. In Rhodesia's (now Zimbabwe) guerrilla war of independence over 25,000 lives were lost. Angola, like Mozambique, was born into chaos as a coup in Portugal in 1975 saw the collapse of colonial rule and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of settlers. But as the African diplomat indicated, the second round of fighting proved the most devastating for Mozambique and Angola, caught up in civil wars skilfully exploited by Pretoria. The final toll of the war in southern Africa will never be known. Directly or indirectly, whether through war or famine exacerbated by conflict, hundreds of thousands of people have died. For these front line countries, trying to sustain fragile ceasefires, yesterday's referendum will be seen as a critical step in a peace process that got under way in the late1980s. Sapped by sanctions, drained by conflict at home, and acknowledging that apartheid was unworkable, Pretoria ceded independence for Namibia in a deal that paved the way to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, and the ending of the country's civil war. The process is now culminating in the most important development of all, reaching into the heart of violence in southern Africa: the devastating giant has taken a fundamental step towards reaching peace at home. The Financial Times London Page 4