Gukurahundi – Apartheid SA-Zim Collaboration

THIS is a continuation of the article by Kent State University’s Professor Timothy Scarnecchia on the Zimbabwean government and apartheid South Africa’s role in the Gukurahundi massacres which Vice-President Phelek-ezela Mphoko recently claimed had nothing to do with President Robert Mugabe and were, in fact, a Western conspiracy.
Historian Sue Onslow has investigated South Africa’s role in trying to make sure Mugabe and Zanu PF did not come to power in 1980.
Onslow sums up South Africa’s strategy after Mugabe’s electoral victory and its impact on the conflict between Zanu and Zapu.
“Mugabe’s victory shocked Pretoria. This drove South Africa back onto violence and subversion in neighbouring countries, rather than trying to manipulate the political process,” she says.
Onslow argues that the involvement of South Africa in supplying a small amount of weapons to Super-Zapu dissidents “rebounded on Zapu/Zipra forces” in the Gukurahundi “as the Mugabe government … was able to stigmatise the disaffected Zipra combatants as stooges of the apartheid state, manipulated by a malevolent and oppressive foreign power”.
South Africa did more to destabilise Zimbabwe in these years, but the support for Super-Zapu dissidents proved to be the most important factor in helping the Zanu PF government rationalise the Gukurahundi.
South Africa’s apartheid president PW Botha launched his “total strategy” to defend South Africa from communist aggression in 1981.
As Stephan Chan describes it, Zimbabwe was not the main military target. Angola and Mozambique were. The idea was to make Zimbabwe and Zambia feel as if they were caught, west and east, in a pincer — so anxious they dared not look south.
This is an important point to remember, how in a Cold War context, Zimbabwe’s relative insignificance in South Africa’s “total strategy” permitted Zanu PF to take advantage of the South African threat internationally while avoiding a direct conflict through co-operation at the highest levels.
The Zimbabwean economy was still almost 75% dependent on South African trade in these first few years, so there was little alternative, but to co-operate with Pretoria.
As Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba have shown, the South African military attacked ANC targets in Zimbabwe with little opposition. Such attacks included the assassination of the ANC’s Joe Gqabi in Harare in July 1981.
South African agents made a series of bomb attacks against the Zimbabwean government. One of these attacks, in December 1981, was an unsuccessful attempt to kill the Zanu PF central committee members in their Harare headquarters.
The bomb was detonated in a room above, but the central committee had postponed the meeting.
Given the ability by South Africa to act with impunity in Harare, there was little chance that Zanu PF would be able to confront South Africa militarily.
The Zimbabwean government responded by using the existence of these attacks to consolidate power internally by arresting those former white officers allegedly serving as South African agents, Zapu leaders and attacking the party’s supporters.
By 1982, South Africa’s strategy to attack Mugabe had begun to create its desired effects.
As Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger argue in their history of Matabeleland, of all the South African acts of sabotage between 1981 and 1982, the most important for understanding the Gukurahundi was “Operation Drama” of late 1982, an effort which involved recruiting and arming a Zimbabwean insurgent group dubbed Super-Zapu.
Various South African agents, many of them recruited from the Rhodesian intelligence service, also played a key role in fomenting distrust.
Alexander et al describe the conflict between these South African-trained and armed Super-Zapu and the “pure Zapu” dissidents between 1982 and 1983 with the South African supported ones “never more than 100 (and probably substantially fewer) inside the country”.
Although outnumbered by the “pure Zapu” who wanted nothing to do with South Africa, these Super-Zapu dissidents had better weapons and more ammunition, which was in short supply by 1983. The former Zipra fighters who became dissidents never totalled more than 400.
Joseph Hanlon suggested that the Super-Zapu developed as a response to the deployment of the Fifth Brigade, as South Africa took advantage of the growing anger of former Zipra fighters and civilians living in refugee camps in Botswana.
While Alexander et al stress the small numbers of South African-trained and supplied Super-Zapu, and the response to them by former Zipra dissidents, the reality was that public knowledge of South African support supplied Mugabe, in the Cold War and regional context, the necessary pretext to rationalise the attack on Zapu and Zipra as primarily a response to an external intervention.
In January 1983, the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), consisting of between 2 500 and 3 500 soldiers, was deployed by Mugabe in Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces to “crush” the dissidents.
Made up almost entirely of former Zanla fighters, the Fifth Brigade’s operation was called Gukurahundi, a Shona term that translates as “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains”.
It proceeded to terrorise the populations of the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces, leaving thousands of dead civilians and many others traumatised by their terror tactics.
Mugabe’s ability to contain information about Gukurahundi was one reason for the lack of international outcry. The Zimbabwean state invoked curfews and denied the media access to those areas witnessing the worst atrocities.
The state also used Rhodesia-era laws to impose a state of emergency, arrest and detain Zapu leaders, and deport international journalists for exposing human rights abuses.
But another reason was the general sympathy most informed Westerners had for Mugabe and Zanu PF given its role as a Frontline State. The Zanu PF official line — that given the South African support for the dissidents, the response of the Fifth Brigade was warranted — fits well with the anti-apartheid movement’s solidarity with the Frontline States.
But stories of the Fifth Brigade’s atrocities did manage to get out to the wider world. One of the most perceptive commentaries came from the Guardian’s Nick Davies: “The slaughter of innocent villages in Matabeleland is only the most bloody symptom of a government clampdown which has seen thousands detained without trial, opponents tortured, the press muzzled, the courts defied and trade unions brought to heel.
“The rebellion of armed ‘dissidents’ in Matabeleland is a direct challenge to the government’s whole posture. The government’s response has been equally direct — a deliberate and determined campaign to wipe out the dissidents, to liquidate Nkomo’s Zapu party accused of directing them, and to cause such terror among ordinary civilians that their popular support will wither.”
Davies’ reporting presented the realpolitik behind the rhetoric. It shows that there were brave reporters willing and quite capable of unmasking the masquerade at work in the rhetoric and propaganda produced in Harare and echoed in London and Washington.
The views expressed in South African Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) files for 1983 pointed out the failure of Western Cold War powers to criticise Mugabe for the Gukurahundi, but there is also a sense that the Gukurahundi was viewed as a “success” from the South African point of view.
It offered a number of “benefits”, first and foremost making it difficult for the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe to use Matabeleland as a base for training and attacks across the border into South Africa. It also worked to discredit Mugabe’s international reputation as a prime minister representing a party committed to national reconciliation.
It also, paradoxically, pushed Zimbabwe to co-operate with South Africa on military and intelligence issues, however tentatively and mistrustingly.
Bi-annual meetings between the intelligence staff of Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and their counterparts in the South African Defence Force (SADF) were held in 1982 and 1983. The SADF notes of a February 7 and 8 1983 meeting in Harare are in the DFA files.
The minutes of this meeting, which took place one month after the Fifth Brigade had been deployed in Matabeleland North, indicate a much less strident tone concerning South Africa’s role in supporting dissidents than that heard in the Zimbabwean media.
The joint intelligence leaders talked about the “role of communist powers in Southern Africa”, “internal terrorism”, and the “security situation in Angola, Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe”.
The discussion reportedly noted that “Botswana is falling heavily under the influence of the USSR and accommodating Zipra, ANC and Swapo, which is a cause for common concern” and that “Zimbabwe does not consider political support of the ANC in the same category as military support.
“For this reason, they provide office facilities to the ANC in Harare, but do not allow them to infiltrate over the RSA/Zimbabwe border”.
At the same time, the CIO stated that the so-called dissident problem in Matabeleland was serious and that the rift between Zanu PF and PF Zapu was deep. They conceded that the Lancaster House formula was partly to blame for this situation.
The Zimbabweans repeated the caveat that “although Mr Mugabe was an outspoken Marxist, it did not necessarily mean that he was in the USSR camp”. The South Africans proposed the formation of a “Joint Crisis Committee” to handle “any matter which caused tension to the relations between the two countries and needed prompt rectification to diffuse the situation”.
The Zimbabweans’ reply was that “such a committee is not deemed necessary as no conflict existed between the two countries”. The South Africans suggested the Zimbabweans should accept PW Botha’s “offer to sign a non-aggression pact and the deployment of monitoring teams on either side of the Zimbabwe border”.
Zimbabwe’s Minister of State for Security, Emmerson Mnangagwa, met personally with the SADF team. According to the SADF report, Mnangagwa took personal credit for obtaining “permission from the Prime Minister (Mugabe) for the SADF visit to Harare and for future intelligence meetings of a similar nature.
He claimed that he initiated the “RSA/Angola and RSA/Mozambique dialogue”. Mnangagwa also stated that “there were no matters in the Zimbabwe/RSA relations that were so serious that it required meetings at ministerial level”.
Mnangagwa’s lack of interest in addressing Zimbabwe’s issues with South Africa directly with the SADF demonstrates the inequality of the relationship between South Africa’s military and Zimbabwe’s, as well as the fear that any formal co-operation would be detrimental to Zimbabwe’s image internationally.
In September 1983, American diplomat Robert Cabelly told the South Africans that “Zimbabwe felt that Mozambique and Angola had in fact let them down by having ministerial meetings with South Africa”.
This is an interesting example of how the Americans and South Africans were hearing different things from the Zimbabweans, especially given Mnangagwa’s taking credit for initiating ministerial dialogue between South Africa and the two countries most affected by South African military intervention. Cold War and regional diplomacy were obviously not on the same channel.
Later, in October 1983, Mnangagwa held a press conference reported in Zimbabwe’s state-controlled Herald newspaper and recorded with commentary in the DFA files. Mnangagwa presented two young Zimbabweans, one 16 and the other 18 years old, who were allegedly trained by South Africa to return to Zimbabwe to fight as dissidents.
These two young men were described as having confessed to murdering “a white farmer, his children and the foreman in the Gwanda area”, of ambushes on government vehicles, of “cutting off the hands of two ZNA soldiers and shooting them west of Beitbridge”, and the “destruction of DDF (District Development Fund) tractors, caterpillars, etc, near Kezi”.
Mnangagwa reported that these two young men had admitted to being in South Africa for four months, where they were allegedly trained to go to Zimbabwe “to unseat Mugabe’s government as he was not fit to rule”.
Their trainers allegedly told them Nkomo was “the right man to govern Zimbabwe” and instructed them to return to “destroy everything and murder farmers as they were the ones who grow food that is eaten by Mugabe’s dogs”.
The DFA commentary pointed out “the fact that Zimbabwe authorities did not raise the matter through the normal channels and instead called an international press conference indicates that this was yet another propaganda exercise to reinforce the destabilisation theme.
“The extent of international media coverage will be an indication of the effectiveness of this attempt to prove SA complicity in dissident activities based on dubious circumstantial evidence”.
To be continued next week.

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