Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [329]
But nor did I believe that it would do anything but harm — not least to South Africa — if the South Africans now responded by unilaterally moving their own forces out of barracks to drive SWAPO back. I met Pik Botha, the South African Foreign minister, at Windhoek Airport. I said that SWAPO had done wrong and therefore South Africa must act with scrupulous correctness. ‘Never put yourself in the wrong’, I said, ‘particularly when your opponents have just done so.’ I told him that he must get in touch with the UN representative and General Prem, present his evidence before them and ask for their authority to get his troops and helicopters out of barracks. I rang Mr Ahtisaari myself to alert him to what was happening.
In fact, the UN did authorize the South Africans to use their forces. But it was all legal. Though there were many casualties, a full-scale confrontation was avoided, assembly points were designated to which SWAPO units reported to be escorted back across the border with their arms by UN forces, a new cease-fire was agreed — and this now held. That autumn SWAPO won the elections for the Namibian Constituent Assembly and Mr Nujoma became President — in which capacity he thanked me when I was at the United Nations in September 1990 for my intervention. In fact, I had held no brief for SWAPO. But I did believe that only with the issue of Namibia sorted out could there be peaceful change in South Africa. I had been the right person in the right place at the right time.
But my activities in black Africa had little impact on ‘Commonwealth opinion’. Nor, it seemed, did changes in South Africa itself.
Rhetoric and Reality in South Africa, 1989–1990
I had always felt that fundamental reform would never take place while P. W. Botha was President. But in January 1989 Mr Botha suffered a stroke and the following month was succeeded as National Party Leader by F. W. de Klerk, who became President in August. It was surely right to give the new South African leader the opportunity to make his mark without ham-fisted outside intervention.
The 1989 CHOGM was due to take place in October in Kuala Lumpur, hosted by Dr Mahathir. I went there with a new Foreign Secretary, John Major, and a renewed determination not to go further down the path of sanctions. I also tried to raise the sights of those present to the great changes which were taking place in the world around them. Introducing the session on the ‘World Political Scene’ I drew attention to the momentous changes occurring in the Soviet Union and their implications for all of us. I said that there was now the prospect of settling regional conflicts — not least those in Africa — which had been aggravated by the international subversion of communism. Throughout the world we must now ardently advocate democracy and a much freer economic system. I secretly hoped that the message would not be lost on the many illiberal, collectivist Commonwealth countries whose representatives were present.
But the debate on South Africa brought out all the old venom. Bob Hawke and Kenneth Kaunda argued the case for sanctions. I intervened to read out a letter I had recently received from a British company which had invested in pineapple-canning in South Africa, but found its export markets in the USA and Canada cut off by sanctions and had therefore been forced to close, putting 1,100 black and 40 white South Africans out of work. That was the only sense in which sanctions ‘worked’. I also quoted figures to show that Britain’s share of South African imports and exports had fallen further over the last eight years than that of the rest of the Commonwealth, adding that our share had largely been picked up by Japan and Germany. I pointed out that Britain was providing substantial help for black South Africans, their education, their housing, rural projects, refugees from Mozambique and aid to the ‘front line’ states. We were assisting ‘Operation Hunger’ which provides meals for millions of poor South Africans. By contrast, the aim of many others at the CHOGM seemed to