‘Operation Butterfly’
Meanwhile, two operational initiatives in late 1985 demonstrated that ANC field strategy remained bogged down. The first was a programme to develop an integrated political-military underground command structure in the greater Durban area; the other was a campaign to destabilise the border regions of South Africa.
The first had its origins among a group of operational commanders based in Mozambique and Swaziland. Operations they had conducted in the past had suffered directly from the absence of political-military liaison. Lack of cooperation meant political and military cadres often ‘tripped over’ each other inside South Africa.They believed the solution lay in the integrated approach of the area political committee (APC) plan drawn up in 1981 and they drew up a plan in early 1985, codenamed ‘Operation Butterfly’ to build, in effect, an APC in Durban. But the group felt that they had to disguise this because the APC concept had become a disputed issue. Hence, they called the leadership they envisaged for Durban a ‘regional committee or district committee’.
Thami Zulu, the Swaziland-based commander of MK’s Natal machinery,78 and one of his deputies in MK’s Natal machinery, known as Ralph, together with Sue Rabkin and Terence Tryon from political structures, drew up an organisational chart for the operation, which they sent to PMC headquarters in Lusaka for assessment. When they received no response, they pressed ahead regardless, encouraged after June 1985 by some decisions at the Kabwe conference favouring a closer political-military relationship in operational structures.
Some groundwork for the operation was provided by earlier clandestine missions into South Africa by middle-ranking ANC members, including Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, a former Robben Island prisoner who would soon head the regional political-military committee in Swaziland, Sipho Khumalo and Ivan Pillay. Pillay had overseen the development of, among others, a network of leafleters in Durban, which grew to include about 13 members, among them two young students, Moe Shaik and Yacoob Abba Omar. Shaik also maintained contact with Ebrahim who, together with Khumalo, entered the country in about April 1985 to solicit recommendations from the underground for the Kabwe conference.
The ANC underground in Durban still included the highly efficient network around Pravin Gordhan. There were other formal political units as well, though they were generally less well organised. One of the MK machineries in Durban falling under Swaziland was headed by Vijay Ramlakan.
Operation Butterfly aimed to settle a group of middle-ranking, externally trained political and military cadres of proven discipline in the Durban area; to re-organise the local underground from the top downwards, asserting authority over existing (and often isolated) underground units; to reflect the principle of integrated political-military command in structures; and to prepare the ground for the clandestine entry into the area of more senior leadership.
The operation was to have a single line of command from exile to the district committee in Durban. This district committee would, whatever the individual expertise of its three members, operate as a single unit jointly controlling all specialised operational activities in the Durban area.The specialist units falling under the district committee would include ones dealing with mass mobilisation, propaganda, logistics, communications, security and intelligence. Military headquarters in exile wasnot to be granted its own, parallel line of command to military units involved in Operation Butterfly.
The operation travelled a rocky road from the outset. There were several delays through August and September in infiltrating personnel. In October, underground units inside South Africa heard that the operation might be called off. But, in late October and early November, it was revived. In late November, the Sheik-Omar propaganda unit was told that there would, be ‘one political person’ in the group to be infiltrated from Swaziland for the operation.
From the moment the Butterfly contingent, who totalled about nine, entered South Africa from Swaziland in early December, there were, according to Omar, a series of basic security breakdowns. Notwithstanding the fact that Omar had warned Ramlakan on a previous occasion that his security had been compromised by speculation in Durban political circles that he was involved in MK activity, the Butterfly contingent’s first port of call was Ramlakan’s own house. Ramlakan also used telephone communications with Omar, instead of the less direct methods used in the past. And the political cadre, who turned out to be Terence Tryon, had initially to be accommodated at a hotel, where Ramlakan maintained telephone contact with him. Tryon himself, together with some of his military counterparts, indicated deep unhappiness about the security of the entire project, yet they continued to hold meetings at Ramlakan’s house.
The end came barely a month later, in the early hours of Christmas Eve. Evidently employing good intelligence, police raided several homes and university residences in the Durban area. They netted all the exiles infiltrated for Operation Butterfly, bar Tryon, who had wisely maintained minimal links with his military counterparts, preferring to rely on his own contacts in Durban, and who now returned to exile.Police decimated Ramlakan’s unit, though a few subsidiary structures survived. And Omar left for exile shortly afterwards.
Operation Butterfly was conceived as a subterfuge against both the state and those in the ANC leadership wanting separate military command in underground structures. It failed in both instances. Participants still debate why and how. Some believed they had walked into a trap set by South African intelligence. Ramlakan insisted there must have been a security leak in Swaziland. Years later, one of those who had helped draw up the Butterfly schema, ‘Ralph’, apparently admitted to being a long-term South African security police penetration agent, after which Rabkin and others concluded the entire operation had been ‘drawn up by the enemy’.
Omar argues that, with or without early South African intelligence penetration, breakdowns in securityinside South Africa were, alone, sufficiently serious to guarantee the operation’s failure. These breakdowns were a product of other, long-term shortcomings in ANC organisation. The operation needed to have been commanded by individuals of more seniority and maturity who might have kept a tighter rein on discipline and security. Moreover, the operation envisaged rebuilding the ANC underground in Durban from top downwards - a task requiring the wielding of considerable authority and, so, better suited to senior cadres. Furthermore, there needed to be a higher proportion of political to military cadres infiltrated from abroad - which might have made operatives more sensitive, on balance, to difficult operating conditions.
Destabilising the Border Areas
The programme to destabilise South Africa’s border regions had its origins at the Kabwe conference. The intention was to create conditions allowing guerillas to traverse, and survive in, these areas. After the conference, MK formulated a plan to use landmines to denude the border areas of white farmers. Attacks against white farmers were deemed justifiable because of their role in state border defence networks. It was a role the government also recognised, and valued. From 1980 it had spent more than R200-million in these regions improving radio and telephone networks, tarring roads, enlarging commando forces, improving the security force presence and easing the debt burden on border farmers.
Joe Modise, head of military headquarters, commanded the operation from Zimbabwe, while Chris Hani, MK political commissar, slipped into Botswana on a false passport just after Christmas 1985 to oversee operations from there. Between November 27 and the end of the year, seven landmine explosions were reported, mainly in the northern Transvaal, just across the borders of either Botswana or Zimbabwe, while police reported recovering another six landmines.
The landmine campaign continued through 1986, with the focus of attacks shifting towards the eastern Transvaal (where it was being fed by ANC operational machineries in Swaziland, then working under desperate pressure). But the campaign failed to destabilise border areas significantly. By 1987, it was beginning to fizzle out. Most landmine attacks occurred in narrow belts of South African territory just over the borders of Botswana, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Evidently, the devices had been planted by units who spent no more than a few hours inside South Africa.
Some on the PMC, among them Maharaj, argued this method of operation was bound to be counter-productive. They suggested that the units should set up base and store their armaments deep inside South Africa before commencing operations. Otherwise, the first landmine explosions would prompt a massive increase in South African security activity on the border and anguished objections from those countries whose territory the ANC was using for the campaign; this would not only make the planting of more mines doubly difficult but probably defeat the entire objective of the campaign. Events vindicated these dissenting voices. Security force deployments rose sharply after the first explosions; neighbouring states were seriously embarrassed; moreover, poor intelligence available to MK units meant many casualties were not white farmers or security forces but, instead, blacks from the ANC’s potential constituency.
The Commonwealth Initiative and Negotiations -
By January 1986, the ANC leadership maintained that there were still no ‘fundamental developments’ in the South African situation that warranted a change in strategy. People’s war, interspersed with popular uprisings, remained the organisation’s perspective. There could be no negotiated settlement, said the ANC, ‘while the Botha regime continues to imprison our leaders and refuses to acknowledge that South African must become an undivided, democratic and non-racial country’. Again, the implication was that, if the Botha government did change its mind on those two matters, negotiations might indeed become the ANC’s main approach. This implication was, however, hidden among doomsday prophecies about the South African state and warlike rhetoric.
The ANC said it detected a shift in the balance of forces. The state had ‘lost the initiative’, which was now in the ANC’s hands. The state had ‘no policy either to save the apartheid system from sinking deeper into crisis or to extricate this system [of apartheid] from that crisis.’ The ‘white power bloc’ had ‘never been as divided’. Any state counter-offensive was bound to result in a worsening of the state’s strategic position. On the other hand, ANC members had ‘prepared the conditions further to transform the situation to that position when it will be possible for us to seize power from the enemy’.
In order to seize power, an ‘urgent task’ was the ‘rapid expansion and extensive activisation of Umkhonto we Sizwe within the country, drawing in the millions of our people into combat’. In the previous year, the ANC and its supporters had
made significant strides towards the transformation of our armed confrontation with the apartheid regime into a people’s war. Of crucial importance in this regard has been the creation of mass insurrectionary zones in many parts of our country, areas where the masses of the people are not only active, but also ready in their hundreds of thousands to assault the enemy for the seizure of power.
Yet, when ANC leaders met the Commonwealth EPG between February and May 1976, their amenability to negotiations was again evident. Whatever their movement’s rhetorical flourishes, a number of ANC leaders, it would seem, now viewed armed activity mainly as a form of pressure which might induce negotiations rather than as a credible element of revolutionary strategy.
The South African government, too, indicated some amenability on the issue of negotiations in early 1986. Pretoria’s lifting of the partial state of emergency on March 7 seemed a conciliatory gesture. While the EPG evidently had no reason to doubt the ANC’s sincerity on negotiations, it was apparently more cautious on the postures adopted by the Pretoria government which, the EPG said, were shrouded ‘in a specialized political vocabulary which, while saying one thing, mean[t] another’.
Nonetheless, by mid-May, the EPG had cause to feel optimism that it might, indeed, be able to develop a negotiating concept acceptable to the main parties. Nelson Mandela had responded favourably from prison, and the exiled ANC leadership had asked for 10 days to consider it.
But the South African response, when it came, laid waste the EPG mission. South African security forces mounted raids, ostensibly against ANC facilities, into three neighbouring Commonwealth states - Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. No ANC members were killed; all casualties and fatalities were non-South Africans; and only two (publicly known) ANC properties were hit.
‘From Ungovernability to People’s Power’
The ANC reverted to talk of revolution. Its response was a yet more explicit call to insurrection. The ANC executive released a leaflet under the slogan, ‘From Ungovernability to People’s Power’, which amplified its call for an insurrectionary offensive made a year earlier in its leaflet, ‘ANC Call to the Nation. The Future is Within Our Grasp’.
The new leaflet argued that the uprisings had made it impossible for the state to govern in many areas of the country. It was, therefore, now possible for people to replace the displaced outposts of apartheid administration with their own popular organs of self-government and self-defence. Here was an explicit case of ANC strategyfollowing developments inside the country; inside South Africa, people hadalready displaced state organs of government in some localities with rudimentary governing structures. The ANC was endorsing this development and, via the act of endorsement, seeking to appropriate the development as one which fitted best in ANC strategy and properly belonged under its command.
No comments:
Post a Comment