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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