TACTICS OF TALKS, TACTICS OF CONFRONTATION
- The Road to Vula, July 1985 - December 1986
Insurrection cannot be led from afar. - Mac Maharaj1
Introduction
From about July 1985, the ANC faced a fundamental strategic choice. Its one option was revolutionary confrontation; the other was a negotiated settlement.
The ANC theorised that the two options could be mutually re-enforcing: revolutionary pressures could feed the prospects for negotiations; and, if negotiations started, this might create legal space in which it organisers could advance the prospects for revolutionary confrontation. But old disagreements on how best to apply revolutionary pressures persisted after the Kabwe conference, and realising a symbiotic relationship between them would prove difficult.
Operation Zikomo
Uncertainty over strategy after the Kabwe conference was evident in a large-scale infiltration of MK combatants, which began in mid-1985, codenamed ‘Operation Zikomo’.2 Ronnie Kasrils, then head of MK intelligence, says its purpose was to inject ‘several hundred’ combatants as ‘shock forces’ in the township uprisings.3 They were to form a kind of officer class for township militants, providing them with leadership and training. Ivan Pillay, of operational political structures in Swaziland, says these combatants had minimal back-up. They hadmaybe...R1,000 or R2,000, maybe...12 hand grenades and an AK...many of them just being put across the fence and sent home to integrate themselves with the defence committees, street committees, etc.4
Several arguments preceded Operation Zikomo: over the absence of underground structures able to integrate and deploy those infiltrated; over whatpolitical role those infiltrated could play; over the poor quality of the political briefings they received before infiltration; and over whether they were merely ‘canon fodder’.5 Mac Maharaj, then a key figure in the Political Committee of the Politico-Military Council (PMC), felt that Zikomo was merely another variant of the ‘detonator’ approach - the expectation that the injection of armed activity would somehow spark general conflagration.6
Whatever its declared purpose, Zikomo was a belated attempt by the ANC leadership to compensate for their unpreparedness when the new round of uprisings started nine month’s earlier. MK structures had failed to ensure that stocks of arms were available inside the country. Arms, notably the hand grenades favoured by Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff Joe Slovo, had certainly been smuggled into country, but police statistics suggest a very high proportion had been captured.7 A more serious failure was that the ANC still lacked the ability to absorb combatants from abroad. Combatants hurriedly infiltrated after the Nkomati Accord had suffered an appalling casualty rate. This meant that, when the uprisings had broken out six months later, in September, armed activity had dwindled to levels below the previous year.8
Operation Zikomo did, however, have important short-term effects. As state security forces lost control over some townships in 1985, and for as long as the state’s sources of intelligence in those areas dried up, the newly-infiltrated guerillas survived. Insurgent armed activity leapt to new levels in the period from June 1985. Whereas there had been 30 attacks in the five months to May, there were 31 in June alone and 75 more between July and December - a total of 136 attacks for the year, more than double the number in any previous year. Over the year, the state killed or captured a mere 31 ANC guerillas, which meant a ratio of three guerillas captured or killed for each 13 attacks - MK’s best year and most favourable casualty rate ever.
Death of the ‘Grenade Squads’
If Zikomo was a success, the fate meted out to the ‘grenade squads’ highlighted the ANC’s domestic operational weakness. State security services chose the period immediately after the Kabwe conference to discredit the idea.
As clashes with security forces continued, thousands of young black militants were desperate for arms. Rumours of the availability of ‘pineapples’ [grenades] in a township would attract scores of young militants from surrounding areas.9 The ANC, which had little command and control over either these young militants or, indeed, the grenade squads, was unable to close off the opportunity which presented itself to security services. A state security agent, a young black man who had earlier received training and a supply of grenades from the ANC in Botswana, was used for the ruse. Cal Saloojee, the Botswana-based ANC member involved in training grenade squads, says that, after this particular young man had returned to South Africa,
[p]roblems developed. And we had already [by June 1985] put out an alert to say this guy is suspect. Unfortunately, the structures dealing with him could not do [anything] concrete about it. He went back... At that time in Duduza [the township serving Nigel] we didn’t have anything. On his own initiative, of course in collaboration with the Boers [police], he went into Duduza and said...he was a movement [ANC] guy, he’s been sent in on a mission and, if there are guys interested, they could form a unit...10
The agent was not short of volunteers among the Cosas students he approached.
Mayhem resulted. Eight young activists died in the process of attempting to prime or throw grenades, and seven others were seriously injured, some of them losing limbs. Security services had booby-trapped the explosives.
Township comrades now had cause to be deeply suspicious of anyone offering them arms. The incident received widespread publicity and meant the end of the grenade squad idea. Moreover, it made matters more difficult for guerillas infiltrated under operation Zikomo to link up with township militants. The mechanism which might have brought externally trained guerillas and local militants together securely, area-based underground commands dealing with all operational specialities, did not exist.
Suddenly, within the external mission, reports Saloojee, the grenade squad project - which senior ANC operational officials had once fought to control - became an embarrassment: ‘Everybody was taking cover - nobody wanted to accept responsibility to what was happening.’11
The Tactics of Talks
In May 1984, two months after the Nkomati Accord, Tambo had disclosed that the ANC was under pressure to talk to the South African government (something he denied eight months later).12 Subsequently, a prominent white South African academic13 and a senior journalist from the government-supporting press14 had mounted well-publicised visits to ANC headquarters in Lusaka. Rumours abounded that some form of contact had opened up between the ANC and the state.
In January 1985, Tambo denied categorically that any such contacts had opened up.15 He attributed the rumours of talks to a realisation among some whites that, whereas the state was in crisis, the ANC had, notwithstanding the Nkomati Accord, increased its domestic stature.16 Tambo said the ANC would talk to ‘anybody’ who wanted to know its views on South Africa. It was prepared even to meet MPs from President Botha’s ruling National Party as individuals if it was understood that such talks ‘would not be binding on the ANC in any way’.17 But the ANC had
objections to formal meetings which might create the false impression that somehow there are secret talks going on with the...regime. We don’t think they should be secret... So, if we are talking, we would be talking with a clear mandate.18
Tambo said the ANC was
part of the wish to see apartheid end painlessly, but our experience is that the regime is not prepared for that. Indeed Botha has just said his regime is not prepared to talk to the ANC - so that is that.
As far as the ANC is concerned, we are not opposed to talks in principle. Nobody ever is. But we have not been impressed by South Africa’s policy on talks [with Swapo in 1981 and the MPLA and Frelimo in 1984]. [T]hey are shown not to have been serious about wanting peace.
The ANC approaches the question of talks with the South African government with great caution. And our priority in these circumstances is that we escalate the struggle.19
The first signs of a significant political re-appraisal within the white South African establishment had come shortly before the ANC conference in June 1985. Intermediaries acting for South African business interests had approached the ANC to arrange a meeting. Tambo asked conference delegates for clearance to meet an unnamed group of ‘important people’ who wanted to talk to the ANC; the talks, he specified, would not amount to negotiations with the government.20 The conference gave its approval. While preparations for these talks remained secret, the ANC received a second approach shortly after the conference. An MP from the liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP), Peter Gastrow, approached a journalist in Harare to arrange talks between an ANC and PFP delegation.21
Both groups seeking talks had been impressed by popular support for the ANC evident in the unrest. The uprisings, growing economic disinvestment from South Africa, international pressures for sanctions and the government’s refusal to consider options outside an apartheid framework persuaded them to explore whether the ANC could help formulate a new South African social contract.
The behaviour of these businessmen challenged much ANC and, particularly, SACP orthodoxy. This held that a degree of socialism, and probably the destruction of capitalism, was necessary to ensure the destruction of apartheid and the achievement of ‘genuine’ national liberation of the African majority.22 Indeed, many ANC members considered major South African corporations part of the ‘enemy forces’.23
In mid-1985, negotiations were not a prospect to which the SACP or ANC had given much attention. In 1962, the SACP had acknowledged that a ‘crisis in the country, and contradictions in the ranks of the ruling class’ might open up the possibility ‘of a peaceful and negotiated transfer of power’.24 But, in 1970, the party had rejected this as a ‘highly questionable’ hope.25 The ANC’s 1969Strategy and Tactics had justified the resort to armed struggle partly on the grounds of ANC ‘disillusionment with the prospect of achieving liberation by traditional peaceful processes because the objective conditions blatantly bar[red] the way to change’. But this implied the converse: that, if alternatives emerged, the ANC might suspend armed struggle. ButStrategy and Tactics did not deal with the possibility of future negotiations.
This meant the ANC had now hastily to evolve a set of tactics for talks with non-government groups and possible negotiations with the government. It did so with some skill.
The ANC drew a basic distinction betweentalks andnegotiations.26 In the case oftalks, it identified two categories. The first comprised talks with representatives of non-government white groups, such as businessmen or the PFP. Here, the ANC’s intention was to win over to its basic outlook as many potentially amenable whites as possible: at least to attempt to neutralise some hitherto actively reactionary elements, and thereby as much as possible to isolate politically the diehard defenders of...a racist and exploitative state power.27
The second category comprised talks with organisations which the ANC regarded as allies, such as the emergent trade unions and organisations associated mainly with the UDF. Here, the ANC’s aim was to ‘build maximum unity between all sections and formations of the oppressed, other democrats and progressives’ and to draw them in as elements of an ANC-led assault.28
The ANC realised immediately it had held talks in the first category - the talks with business leaders occurred in Zambia on September 13 - that a new legal climate had been created which might enable it to open up public links to organisations in the second category, namely to allies in the popular and union movements.29
The ANC conceived ofnegotiations as having a clearly defined framework within which attempts would be made to settle the South African conflict.30 Here, a range of preconditions applied. Negotiations, according to the ANC, should be premised on agreement among participants that the objective was to dismantle apartheid and to achieve a modality for a united, democratic and non-racial polity. Another shared premise would have to be the desirability of a change in the character of the SA Defence Force and police.31 Other preconditions for negotiations would include the unconditional release of political prisoners and return of exiles, an atmosphere of political freedom inside South Africa and the agreement of the ‘entire democratic leadership of South Africa’.
The ANC condemned a campaign at the time for a national convention led by Inkatha and the PFP. It was an ‘attempt to cobble out a settlement of the fate of the country over the heads of the people’.32 The ANC said a national convention could be held in South Africa only if its preconditions for negotiations were met and there was ‘a situation of democracy, free political activity and equality’.33
When the first two sets of talks occurred - those with businessmen and journalists, and with the PFP - many ANC supporters were anxious that the contacts presaged an abandonment of revolutionary struggle by the ANC.34 The leadership of the ANC responded that the talks were merely one tacticalongside, and not in contradiction to, its main strategic thrust: the gathering of revolutionary forces through political mobilisation and armed struggle. Nonetheless, the leadership declared that it had to exploit any potential for advantage or the reduction of suffering which talks might offer.35 The leadership said one advantage flowing from the talks was to grant it a status ofde facto legality. This promised more ‘space’ within which to gather and deploy its forces for confrontation.36
In the event, the ANC’s talks with business leaders and editors, and later with the PFP were declared a success by all three groups. They did, indeed, create a new legal atmosphere in which the ANC was able to hold public talks with a range of popular organisations, churches and other bodies to which it felt politically more akin or which it considered its natural allies.37 In the process, the ANC improved its image among elements in the white establishment and deftly promoted itself in militant circles as national aggregator of variegated democratic interests.
Unequal Combat
In South Africa’s streets, grossly unequal combat continued. In the seven-and-a-half months to July 20, 334 people died in political violence, at least 55% of them as a result of security force action. Of the dead, only seven were members of the security forces killed by township residents; none were killed by guerillas.38 In three months to July, 207 people died in political violence, the largest single number on the east Rand, which remained the centre of revolt.39
In Duduza, which seemed to provide security forces with a sort of testing ground for new tactics, right-wing vigilantes had made an appearance in May 1985, attacking activists in UDF-affiliated organisations, such as Cosas and the civic association.40 It was among the first instances in which vigilantes were deployed against anti-apartheid activists - a development that soon became widespread and tipped the scale of combat further against the ANC and UDF. If not initially promoted by security forces, vigilante groups were certainly abetted by them in many instances.41
On July 21, the government declared a partial state of emergency.42 The intention was to isolate, contain and re-establish government control in those black townships affected by unrest. The ANC responded with an address over Radio Freedom two days later by Tambo who said that the fact that uprisings were not affecting all areas of the country had
enabled the enemy to concentrate its forces on certain areas of our country... This is a situation which we must correct. It is vital that all areas of our country should join in the general offensive...43
Moreover, said Tambo,
We must take the struggle into the white areas of South Africa and there attack the apartheid regime and its forces of repression in these areas which it considers its rear.44
The UDF, as a body, was unable to give the unrest any direction in mid-1985. No doubt state repression seriously undermined its ability to do so. More than 10,000 people were detained in the first six months of the emergency,45 many of them leaders of the UDF and its affiliate organisations. A number of the front’s top officials were still in custody facing security law charges. Moreover, as a popular organisation operating in the legal and semi-legal spheres, the UDF could not really be expected to coordinate a violent challenge to the state.
The ANC, however, could be expected to provide tactical direction to the uprisings. The veryraison d’etre of its clandestinity was to enable it ultimately to do so. Yet there was no improvement in the ANC ability to do so after its conference. ANC operational officials acknowledge that their organisation’s role in developing street committees and rent boycotts in the black townships in the 1985-1986 period was minimal. Garth Strachan says the street committees arose as an initiative by isolated internal activists, some with links with the ANC, and ordinary residents. Strachan says the ANC was picking up on initiatives like these and then,post facto, developing strategies which made sense of them.46 Both Slovo and Kasrils agree.47 Strachan adds that the underground’s links into these street committees, as well as defence committees set up by township residents in a few cases to resist security forces, remained weak throughout 1985 and 1986.48 Pillay believes this weakness, and a resultant inability to integrate Operation Zikomo guerillas into the street committees, helps explain why ‘the street committees and defence committees began to crumble pretty quickly’ once placed under any pressure.49
Despite the infiltration of MK cadres under Operation Zikomo, the unrest-related death toll between July 21 and December 31 totalled 545 people, of whom at least 256 were township residents killed by security forces; and of 20 security forces who died, only one was reported killed by guerillas.50
(Continued in PART V)
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