Pioneer reformer, Pieter Botha, dies in 'sullen obstinacy'

ALFRED MULENGA
Correspondent | Friday November 5, 2010 00:00

Most analysts at the time believed that if it were not for Botha, Ian Douglas Smith's rebel Rhodesian regime would have collapsed within weeks following the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965.

The international community condemned the rebellion and the United Nations (UN) duly imposed comprehensive sanctions on the Smith regime with British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, declaring that the rebels would be brought to their knees 'in a matter of weeks'.

Alas, that was to prove utter wishful-thinking because Botha and his clique in Pretoria devised a covert sanction-busting operation, which saw, for instance, oil imports destined for land-locked Zambia from South African ports, like Durban and Port Elizabeth and Beira in Mozambique, diverted to prop up the white regime in Salisbury, now Harare. 

President Kenneth Kaunda, who had wisely or naively supported and actually imposed 'tough' economic sanctions on the rebel regime, paid the highest price for his principles because it was Zambia's economy - not Rhodesia's - which collapsed, as its oil imports had to be transported by road at tremendous cost from the East African port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

While Kaunda and Julius 'Mwalimu' Nyerere were scratching their heads in frustration and harbouring millions of refugees from South Africa, Rhodesia, South West Africa (Namibia), Angola and Mozambique, Botha and Smith were celebrating with each freedom fighter gunned down and every Zambian bridge blown up by rebel troops in their hot-pursuit of 'terrorists'.

The former South African president died on Tuesday aged 90. According to the British Daily Telegraph, Botha apparently won widespread praise during the early 1980s as the architect of a reformed constitution, framed ostensibly to ease the stranglehold  of apartheid as the guerrilla war intensified.

But Botha was destined to illustrate de Toqueville's maxim that a government is most at risk when it is reforming itself. When his reforms back-fired in a welter of black rioting and anger among white extremists, he shed his reformist image and ordered a brutal crackdown on dissent.

Within two years, Botha had become reviled internationally as the symbol of a regime which tortured women, imprisoned children and shot workers on strike. As a consequence, he added to the pressures that eventually led to the downfall of the apartheid system he had fought very hard to defend.  

A tall, bald, gimlet-eyed figure known for his quick temper and outbursts of emotion, Botha - 'The Great Crocodile' to his fellow countrymen - was once described by a colleague as 'a mixture of sentimentality and intolerance'.

His true motivations during his early years as president remain something of a mystery.

Many claimed that his commitment to reform was never anything more than a charade designed to perpetuate white minority rule. Others doubted whether such an irrational man was capable of such calculation.

Yet the man who once said that his country must 'adapt or die' showed genuine political courage during the early 1980s in removing some of the more vexatious aspects of apartheid and pushing through a political settlement that offered  enhanced rights in parliament to Indians and coloureds.

He legalised black trade unions and abolished laws forbidding mixed marriages and mixed-race political parties, demonstrating a reformist stance which won him friends abroad and among South Africa's previously hostile English-speaking business community.

In 1984 he signed the 'Nkomati Peace Accord' with the presidents of neighbouring Mozambique and Angola. The same year he paid a visit to Europe, painting a vision of a reformed South Africa moving to an era of peaceful co-existence with its neighbours.

The 1984 constitution, accepted in a referendum by two-thirds of the white population, introduced assemblies for the two groups in addition to the chamber for whites under a new executive state presidency, to which Botha was elevated from prime minister to president.

There was, however, no forum for South Africa's 21 million blacks, 70 percent of whom had been assigned to nominally independent homelands within South Africa's borders, the rest living as 'legal aliens' in the 68 percent of the country  remaining in white hands.

The main black political party, the African National Congress, remained banned as was the Pan-Africanist Party founded by Robert Sobukwe and the Black Consciousness Movement of Steve Biko.

Botha's plan gained only a lacklustre reaction from the Indians and coloureds when the elections to their assemblies were held in August 1984. The turnout of Indians was 29.6 percent of registered voters, while a mere 20.3 percent of coloureds  went to the polls.

The idea of any 'non-whites' being brought into parliament with even a muted voice in the president's council had already brought a breakaway of extreme whites in the Nationalist Party, with the formation in 1982 of the Conservative Party under Dr Andries Treurnicht. There was also strident opposition from other extreme  white groups.

The constitution coincided with the outbreak of black township violence and widespread arrests that led, in July 1985. The declaration of a state of emergency restricted press reporting of the disturbances. All foreign correspondents were subjected to government censorship.

But the real turning point came a month later, when Botha delivered an address, known as the 'Rubicon' speech, widely trailed as promising more reform, but in which he made it clear that he had no intention of breaking from the laager of white minority rule.

The speech brought a torrent of international censure and calls for economic sanctions. Though Botha attempted to repair the damage by promising further reforms, it was too little too late. The country became increasingly unstable.

By the spring of 1986 the black townships were almost ungovernable, with an average of 135 deaths a week from violence. ANC terrorists were stepping up their attacks and the trickle of white emigration threatened to become a flood.

As the violence worsened, Botha took an increasingly intransigent line. In May 1986 he deliberately snubbed a visiting Commonwealth peace team by ordering bombing raids against ANC bases in neighbouring countries. In June he re-imposed an indefinite state of emergency, giving the police unprecedented arbitrary powers of arrest and detention without trial. South Africa, he proclaimed, would not 'crawl to anyone'.

In July a peace mission by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, ended in failure, with Botha defiantly rejecting calls to release the ANC leader, Nelson  Mandela, from jail and refusing to 'commit suicide' by yielding  to 'threats and prescriptions from outside forces'.

By early 1987, his crackdown on black unrest was total. By special decree in March that year, he banned  meetings to commemorate the deaths of nearly 90 black South Africans killed by police in the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and another 20 blacks  killed in police gunfire at Langa, in the Eastern Province, exactly 25 years later.

He also signed regulations prohibiting public calls for the release of an estimated 25,000 detainees; anyone praying aloud for their release faced fines of up to £6,000  and 10 years' imprisonment. Archbishop Desmond Tutu defied the president by doing just that when he led a special church service to seek freedom  for blacks jailed under the state of emergency.

The archbishop was not arrested. In announcing a general election for whites on May 6, 1987, Botha made it clear that the key issues would  be security and outside interference in South Africa's internal affairs.

He accused 'some Western nations' of raising funds for terrorists, who committed 'barbaric deeds' in South Africa. He ruled out discussions with the banned ANC, unless it abandoned violence and cut its ties with communism.

In the end, Botha's intransigence lost him not only international support but also the support of his own party. In February 1989, following a mild stroke, he resigned from the party leadership, and was succeeded by Frederick Willem (FW) de Klerk.  However, his refusal to resign the presidency led to a power struggle between the two men in which the party backed de Klerk.

For a while, Botha remained in office, maintaining an attitude of sullen obstinacy. Matters came to a head in August 1989, after Botha had given de Klerk a public dressing-down over his decision to meet President Kaunda of Zambia. Botha's behaviour provoked a bitter row in Cabinet which ended in his resignation.

He retired to his home in Wilderness, in the Western Cape, living as a virtual recluse, reviled and ridiculed by his former colleagues. He quit the National Party in May 1990, and it was left to de Klerk to announce the release of Mandela and take  South Africa on the road to democracy.

Pieter Willem Botha was born on January 12, 1916, on a farm in the Orange Free State. His mother was a missionary who, he claimed, 'taught me not to hate other people or other races'. He was educated at the nearby Voortrekker High School in Bethlehem and joined the National Party while still in his teens.

He studied Law at the University of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein, but dropped out before graduating to devote himself to party affairs.

At the age of 20 he became full-time party organiser in Cape Province. The party was then in opposition and Botha relished the rough side of the Afrikaner's struggle for political supremacy. He organised youth groups which broke up the meetings of Field Marshal Smuts's ruling United Party. He ascended the political ladder as the party's national public information chief and secretary to the National Youth League in 1946. Two years later he was elected member of parliament for the town of George, Cape Province. He was credited with playing a key role in the defeat of the United Party in 1948.

In the 1950s and 1960s Botha was successively deputy Minister of the Interior, Minister of Coloured Affairs, Minister of Community Development and Housing, Minister for Public Works and, finally, Defence Minister. Within the parliamentary  ambit, he was elected leader of the National Party in Cape Province, becoming leader of the House Assembly in 1975.

As Minister of Defence, Botha campaigned for South Africa's military independence, earning himself  the nickname 'Pieter the Weapon'. He shrugged off the UN's arms embargo of 1977 by increasing the defence budget twenty fold, developing an indigenous arms industry and launching an anti-insurgency training programme to deal with possible attacks from neighbouring African nations. 

He brought in voluntary military service for non-whites and women, organised  the Cape Corps, a crack force of coloureds, and established a Civil Defence College for women.

He remained oblivious of international pressures. In June 1975, when Britain broke off the Simonstown naval agreement as an anti-apartheid gesture, Botha described the decision as 'a challenge rather than a tragedy'.

He promptly invited friendly nations to use the base facilities. In the same year Botha was responsible for secret South African military raids into Angola to protect the Cunene River hydro-electric dam, in which South Africa held a major interest.

Within months, the clandestine South African operations became official, with thousands of troops committed to helping pro-Western forces battling Russian and Cuban-backed guerrillas  threatening a take-over. This represented a severe set-back for Botha, who was forced to withdraw from Angola in March 1976, after failing  to get the support of Western nations. He concentrated on South African interests in mineral-rich South West Africa (Namibia), the former German colony occupied by the Pretoria government after the First World War and administered under a League of Nations mandate. In 1966 the UN nullified the mandate, but South Africa refused to surrender control, strengthening  its military presence and introducing its apartheid system into the  territory. Trying to solve the problem  of independence for Namibia became a major headache for the Western powers.

Botha managed to circumvent a series of proposals to prise the territory from South Africa's grip.

Following the resignation of John Vorster in 1978, Botha emerged triumphant from a fierce, three-way, contest with Connie Mulder, Minister of Plural Relations and RF 'Pik' Botha, Minister of Foreign Affairs.

On September 28 he became the eighth prime minister of South Africa since the Act of Union in 1910,  and the fifth Nationalist in succession to hold the premiership since  the party came to power in 1948. John Vorster became the country's president.

Soon after he became prime minister, Botha found himself immersed in a scandal arising from the misuse of public funds by senior government officials. Press reports claimed that vast sums had been used to win foreign support for South  Africa's racial policies and to establish a pro-apartheid newspaper,  The Citizen. A public inquiry was held by Judge Anton Mostert, who confirmed the reports. He was promptly dismissed by Botha, who appointed a three-man commission which subsequently revealed that several high-ranking officials in the former administration had been involved in the scandal.

Botha was not listed among them. White minority rule having ended three years earlier, in 1997, Botha was summoned out of retirement by Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's new Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to answer allegations that he had sanctioned the bombing in 1988 of Khotso House in Johannesburg, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches. Botha refused to appear, and in 1998 he was charged  with contempt.

Botha cut a curious figure in court, attempting to portray himself as Afrikanerdom's martyr fighting alonely crusade against victimisation by the ANC. Although expected to remain silent, he harangued the court for 40 minutes, defending apartheid as mere 'good neighbourliness'. When sniggers spread across  the court, he demanded: 'Who laughed?'

The commission's report, published in October 1998, found him guilty of ordering the bombing of Khotso House, and accused him of leading South Africa into 'the realms of criminality'. In his old age, Botha was attended by a staff of 10 and a posse of security guards. To the end he maintained that 'one man, one vote' had been a serious mistake. He always read the Bible before going to sleep at night. 'I never take a guilty conscience with me to bed,' he said.

In 1943, PW Botha married Anna Rossouw, the daughter of a Dutch Reformed Church minister. She died in 1997. Their two sons and three daughters survive him, as does his second wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1998. (Sila Press Agency) SPA source: British Daily Telegraph  (Great Lives Remembered)