'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

The 'Namibia Option', Part I: Strategic Context

The 'Namibia Option' (for a UN-covered US withdrawal from Iraq)

For four decades after 1948, the apartheid regime in South Africa maintained an illegal military occupation over the land of present-day Namibia, which it named 'South West Africa.'  SWA/Namibia lies immediately to the north of South Africa's northwestern border, and to its north again lies the vast country of Angola. Until 1975, Portugal ruled Angola as an overseas possession, but in the wake of the democratic, anti-colonial ('Carnation') revolution in Portugal in 1974, Angola speedily gained its independence.  The black nationalists of the MPLA movement who came to power there had longstanding ties with South Africa's own African National Congress (ANC), and with the Soviet bloc.  At that point, Namibia became an important "front-line territory" for South Africa, from which South Africa sought to combat the black nationalist/pro-Soviet nexus in Angola. That also involved stepping up the brutality with which it oppressed the activities of the territory's indigenous 'South West Africa People's Organization' (SWAPO).

The United Nations had never supported either South Africa's continued military occupation of SWA/Namibia or the attempt South Africa made in 1948 to annex SWA.  As the military situation in that region began to escalate in the years after 1975, the UN Security Council intervened with all the relevant parties and in September 1978 adopted a key resolution, number 435 , that called for:

• "the withdrawal of South Africa's illegal administration from Namibia and the transfer of power to the people of Namibia with the assistance of the United Nations",
• the establishment of "a United Nations Transition Assistance Group ... for a period of up to 12 months in order to... ensure the early independence of Namibia through free elections under the supervision and control of the United Nations",
• "Welcomes the preparedness of the South West Africa People's Organization to co-operate... including its expressed readiness to sign and observe the cease-fire provisions... ",
• "Calls upon South Africa forthwith to co-operate with the Secretary-General in the implementation of the present resolution",
• Declares that all unilateral measures taken by the illegal administration in Namibia... are null and void."

Despite the hopes that some western leaders had entertained, however, South Africa refused to agree to the terms of this resolution.  Through the years that followed, as the apartheid regime continued to battle its opponents both internal and external, Resolution 435 remained uinimplemented.  But at least-- like Resolution 242 of 1967 relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict-- it still remained on the books, providing the central, internationally agreed standard for how any future resolution of the Namibia issue should be approached.  Indeed, throughout the 1980s, successive Secretary-General's Special Representatives for the Namibia issue continued to work at the diplomatic level, fleshing out more details of how resolution 435 might one day be implemented.

By 1988, South Africa was finally ready to agree.  What brought this about this was the quagmire it finally found itself in inside Angola.  Over the years, the South Africans had increased the numbers of their own troops whom they were deploying inside Angola, to fight alongside the two anti-government forces FNLA and UNITA there.  The MPLA-led Angolan government, for its part, had exercised its quite legitimate right to bring its own allies into the equation to help it shore up the defense of  its country.  Fidel Castro responded with particular vigor to the appeals President Agostinho Neto had made to him: some 50,000-plus Cuban troops deployed to southern Angola to help the government forces confront the insurgents and their South African allies.  As Roger Hearn* has written, "By early to mid 1988, South Africa was facing its own 'Vietnam quagmire', with close to 50 000 Cuban troops in Angola now deployed, many provocatively close to the border with Namibia; and mounting domestic pressure for the South African Government to justify its position in Angola."(Hearn, p.47)  Hearn noted that 12 South African soldiers had been killed inside Angola in fall 1987, a development which forced the government, for the first time to admit that it did indeed have active-duty troops inside Angola.  He added:

The acknowledgement of direct South African involvement began to raise concerns of a costly ground war with Cuban and Angolan troops with massive military support from the Soviet Union.  Arguments were raised that South Africa was over stretched militarily because of the cost associated with the state of emergency within South Africa.... The Cuban advance to the Namibian border, along with the direct engagement of SADF's with the Cubans in late June of 1988, intensified the concerns of the South African public to intolerable levels.(Hearn, pp. 47-48)

As you can see, therefore, there were many similarities (though some differences) in the broad strategic circumstances in which South Africa finally-- in 1988-- came to the realization that it needed to significantly (or perhaps wholly) draw down its troop presence in the Angola-Namibia theater, and the situation the US finds itself in today, regarding its troop deployment in Iraq...

(Coming here soon: Similarities in the content of the UN's task during the transition out of illegal foreign occupation and into legitimate national self-rule in Namibia and the task it might perform in Iraq... )

*Roger Hearn, UN Peacekeeping in Action: The Namibian Experience (Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1999)