Southern Africa's Security

Something old, something new*

Prof Peter Vale
Co-director, Centre for Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape

*The future is always a compromise between novelty and repetition ...
John Chipman

Published in South African Defence Review Issue No 9, 1993



INTRODUCTION

Almost all writing on strategic issues in the 1990s begin with this compulsory genuflection: changing times mean fresh security interests. This is as it should be: in this short decade, our thinking about the world has been revolutionalised and this, above all else, should be reflected in our work and our writing.

Sheer commonsense, however, suggests that, unlike a light-switch, strategic interests cannot simply turn off. All conflicts have long tangled roots; although often implanted, these endure way beyond political and economic change even if this is as historic as that which has marked this youthful decade.

The 1990s are, however, teaching us that the most dormant and most buried conflict is capable of suddenly rearing its head and plunging a people, a country, a continent into the deepest crisis; this is the lesson of Yugoslavia.

We readily accept that things are changing which is why, as the Cold War ebbs, new strategic concerns abound. As a result successful writing on strategic studies these days is a little like the proverbial bride's gown - something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Connoisseurs of strategic thinking will find this particular essay no exception.

SOME OLD THINGS


Although the setting has clearly changed, the southern Africa security matrix is still dominated by the fate of the region's strongest power, South Africa. The murderously slow ending of the apartheid scourge - so long the centre piece of deliberations on regional security - has continued into the mid-1990s. True, it has developed new and deceptive features: in the 1980s, strategists identified the dead hand of South Africa's destabilisation1 everywhere in the region. In the 1990s, with negotiations underway in the very heartland of Afrikaner power, it is more difficult to say for sure where the smoking gun points. It is certainly more difficult to prove, for instance, that South Africa continues to support the UNITA faction in Angola.

The underlying lesson for the sub-continent, however, is simple: South Africa's comparative power simply dwarfs the region. Small wonder, to shift the metaphor, when South Africa sneezes the region catches cold!2

It is therefore essential to say that unless - pessimists would say, until - South Africa finds a way of spiking its guns, there will be no peace in the region. Put differently, strategic concerns will dominate the regional horizon until South Africa establishes an accord with its neighbours. This observation - the first of two on the centrality of South Africa in the debate on regional security - is predicated on the recognition of three important issues.

Until this happens, firstly, there will be no serious development in the region. Economic growth, as recent events so pointedly show, follows upon political stability.

Secondly, as happened with such devastation in the 1980s, deep internal discord in South Africa can spew across the region's borders. This spillage can take on new and very dangerous forms in the 1990s. Its potency and, therefore, its destructiveness, are all the more serious because of the high level of small arms within South Africa and the seeming inability to police these. This little snippet highlights the problem. In 1991,
11 577 firearms were stolen in South Africa. Of these 3 338 were taken from private homes. 1 007 from business premises, 1 153 directly from people, 861 from vehicles and 819 from safes according to figures disclosed by the [then] Deputy Minister of Law and Order, Mr Johan Scheepers. The remaining thefts were from 'other sources', not specified. A total of 197 509 applications were received for firearms licenses of which 18 268 were refused.3
The third borders on the unthinkable and belongs, perhaps, in the second half of this contribution. Under the weight of its multiple strains, South Africa can crack and, perhaps disintegrate. This is not a wish but in today's world a rather sensible observation. After all, if the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia disintegrated in the wake of the Cold War, can other states be far behind? As we shall see, there is a high correlation of probabilities between political outcomes in South Africa and the Soviet Union.

This (shall we say) war with itself is the second reason for putting South Africa at the very centre of the debate on regional security. Violence in South Africa, as we shall see, sparks other security concerns: it seems institutionalised in the country and, despite (some would say, because of) political negotiations, it continues apace.

As elsewhere in the region, it is worth remembering that this battle for the soul of South Africa is generational:4 a large young black majority faces an aging white establishment. The prognosis for a more peaceful - no, call it less violent - means of resolving conflict within the country is all the more difficult to envisage. It is safe to forecast that there will be no regional peace until South Africans themselves find accord. And, as sobering, is the opinion of James Blight and Thomas Weiss that in
no place on earth with the exception of the former Soviet Union itself, is the transition to a post-Cold War regime likely to be more complex than in the Republic of South Africa.5
Simply put, South Africa's search for democracy has been extremely vicious: this alone generates huge unknowns for southern Africa's security.

At another level, a number of more familiar security concerns about South Africa deserve consideration.

Given its ugly past, the prospects for a regionally destabilising coup in South Africa cannot be ignored in any view of the region's future. The prospects that this could be successful, however, seem increasingly remote as the military is pushed further and further from the centre of immediate power.

Rocky Williams has judged this an unlikely possibility in these five prescient observations:6
  • The SADF has not developed an interventionist ethic for politics, along Latin America lines;
  • The SADF is primarily a conscript force;
  • The officers corps are supporters of the (liberal) Democratic Party or the 'New Nats';
  • The size and diversity of the country vitiates against a coup;
  • It is doubtful whether the SADF at the command level has the ability to govern.
Still as the world knows, South Africa has a potent warmaking capacity. Its army is well-equipped and highly mobile; its air force, while plagued with aging equipment, is the region's finest; and no other country of the region has a navy. What is, perhaps, more important than all this, is that South Africa's indigenous arms industry is (shall we say) impressive. Solly Nkiwane has recently pointed out that in the period 1985-1989,
South Africa's total military expenditure was $17,109-billion, while the other states of the region, excluding Namibia, together spent $7,185 million as military expenditures. [These latter arms] ... came from outside the region, in fact from outside Africa. South Africa's imports of arms for the same period totalled only $185 million - about 1,2% of its total military expenditure.7
Add to this the country's (as still unknown) nuclear capacity8 and it is easy to see why, in sheer armament terms, South Africa is considered a powder-keg. The theoretical link between domestic disorder and nuclear potential is not as clear as it was in the Cold War days. But complex series of speculations on this particular link in the post-Cold War Soviet Union has clear echoes, as we have noticed, in the South African situation, too.

But rarely are simple issues of weapons divorced from wider regional concerns. The potency of the southern African cocktail - as opposed to the South African one lies, undoubtedly, in the fact that both arms and the capacity to make them are vested in the region's most volatile country. And, as if this were not enough, they are readily at hand to those who, for whatever reason, may want to contest the outcome of any settlement reached in South Africa itself.

It is important at this point to make passing reference to the elements who have made South Africa's 'Dirty War'. The revelation that the MPLA government has captured two South African mercenaries is a timely warning of how potent these forces can be in generating regional insecurity. But while they can generate these, their capacity to sustain themselves over the longer term must be brought into question.9

Because the ending of the Cold War so obviously helped to bring change in South Africa, it has helped to liberate the region. But, alone, it has not ended a series of gnawing security concerns, some of which have little or nothing to do with the region's preponderant power, South Africa.

Take the issue of political change: for decades the collapse of dictatorships has sparked conflict; there is no reason why southern Africa should be spared this experience. In the region's case however, the difficulties which transitions pose are exacerbated by the overall weakness of polities within which change is taking place.

Take Malawi and Zaire: two countries caught in the midst of uncertain near-transitions. They are also both in the process of losing the strategic and political purchase which they once enjoyed. In Zaire's case, the crumbling fortunes of Mr Mobuto are in direct proportion to America's waning interest in Africa. Mr Banda's fate is, at this time, less linked to his long association with South Africa than with his age. But history will, one suspects, show that political change in South Africa had an immense impact on his fortunes. Whatever the case, the point is simple - the end of dictatorship can spark conflict.

These specific examples aside, southern Africa's headlong shuffle into democracy may well be the chief wish on the list of international do-gooders, but for security buffs it opens up opportunities for serious work. A host of regional countries are delicately poised on the brink of a new democratic order - Swaziland, Lesotho, Tanzania, Mozambique. The list is endless - if each, or all of these, efforts go awry, the sub-continent (to put it politely) will have a series of security headaches.

Angola's immensely unstable transition carries with it an important and very dangerous precedent which, if followed, will chronically destabilise the region. The decision by UNITA to contest the outcome of an internationally-acceptable election and to return to war as a means of settling political conflict has obvious implications for Mozambique. Less certain, though undoubtedly detectable, is the pattern which Angola can set for South Africa's future. Many have argued, and the point is worth making, that Renamo, UNITA and South Africa's Inkatha Movement are political movements of a similar genre. Given this and the porousness of the Zululand border between Mozambique and northern Natal, it is easy to see why it is averred that close links exist between Inkatha and Renamo.

This should not be taken to mean that democracy should not bring security: quite the contrary. But - as the global lesson shows - the cadence of political metamorphosis is a very delicate one.

Transformations in the 1990s are very different, for example, to the political developments of the 1960s and 1970s. In those halcyon days, independence gave states political space. What we are seeing now is that democratisation appears to restrict the capacity of governments and leaders. Only the brave would want to be the first democratically-elected leader of a state with soaring unemployment, depressed commodity prices and the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young free-marketeers of the International Financial Institutions beating a path to the door of the proverbial Government House!

In general terms explosive security circumstances can be managed, even contained, by an arrangement between neighbours. This has been a strong feature of inter-state relations in the region where very special military arrangements between neighbours were forged in an effort to resist minority rule. But although the protocols for regional integration are fairly well developed in southern Africa, there is a notable absence of formal agreement on military matters. It is of course true that at the Windhoek meeting in 1992 which changed SADCC into SADC, specific security protocols were included. And is also true that outside of this formal agreement, a series of bilateral and multilateral security arrangements can be detected in the regional geology, there remains in the sub-continent no systematised defence arrangement: there is certainly no arrangement which touches upon areas like arms control.

From a security perspective, the Southern African Development Conference, SADC (formerly the SADCC) has an interesting history. Most international efforts at integration, even of an economic kind, aim to surrender sovereignty. SADCC was a creature of a different kind: it was primarily aimed at defending the sovereignty of individual members from South African aggression. This theoretical point has an important practical spin-off which is important for any debate on the security of the region. Until, and unless, a mechanism is found to share military concerns or to mediate disputes, the region will be prey to nascent conflict which - from South Africa especially, as we have seen - has the potential to ignite regional violence.

Many of the region's national borders are under disputed and this may, perhaps, breed conflict. The most obvious example is Walvis Bay: a case which, incidentally, seems to be handled these days with a degree of equanimity.

Less peaceful, frankly, are the prognosis of other border disputes. Take the case of the conflict between Namibia and Botswana over the territory once known as Swampy Island. The trauma of the case is somewhat graphically highlighted by the fact that the two countries call the territory different names: to Namibians it is Kasikili Island; to Botswana it is Sidudu Island.10 Tuyanjana Maluwa has recently pointed out both the Monty Pythonesque and the serious face of the dispute in the following way:
To the casual observer, the spectacle of two apparently friendly neighbours threatening to fall out over contested sovereignty over an uninhabited island which is, in any case, submerged under water during a certain period of the year seemed somewhat ludicrous, if not farcical ... [but] ... The importance attached by nations to territorial ownership needs little demonstration or emphasis.11
No point is served in belabouring this specific case to make the general point - as everywhere else in the world, borders are under review. In southern Africa the propensity of these conflicts to escalate further seems, if anything, more potent as a result of the cloak which apartheid drew over regional relations. Furthermore, there is no established mechanism - like a regional Court of Justice, along the European model - to deal with conflict of this kind.

Too many discussions of security concerns in southern Africa ignore the particular vulnerabilities which individual states reveal simply because they are small or because they are island-states. In 1985, CE Diggines12 listed a number of acute problem areas for such states. In listing them here, the point needs to be made that, if anything, global change has exacerbated their vulnerabilities:
  • limited economic resources and prospects;
  • lack of opportunity even for their limited pool of human talent;
  • very restricted educational opportunities and facilities;
  • potential political domination by one or a few individuals;
  • potential domination by multi-national corporations and financial institutions;
  • (unusually) excessive dependence on one crop, service or other form of economic activity;
  • inability to influence international events which may closely affect their interests; intensified by
  • inability to provide or afford adequate overseas representation, either in international bodies or bilaterally;
  • consequent isolation from each other and from the outside world;
  • impact upon them of natural disasters; and
  • lack, or poor quality, of their own press, radio and television services.
Therefore, the lack of resources and small populations can play havoc with the physical integrity of states. In addition, states like these are exposed to the predatory ambitions of large neighbours and to coups. A list of these states in Southern Africa includes Lesotho, Swaziland, Madagascar, Seychelles, Comores and the Maldives.

GLOBAL CHANGE AND STRATEGIC THINKING


The ending of the Cold War has helped to establish new strategic matrices. Some of these are breaking the accepted and happy pattern of Strategic Studies with its strong reliance on the 'Clausewitzian tradition after the nineteenth century Prussian strategist who did so much to advance the symbiosis between war and state policy'.13

This change follows from John Chipman's observation that:
The end of the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War did not usher in a new international system without resemblance to its predecessors. ... But a number of trends that affect the capacity of individual states to implement changes at home and abroad were given greater impetus by these events, and these trends need to be absorbed by strategists ...14
Here the lessons are less with the geo-strategic implications of stagecraft and more with the threats which states face from internal and external forces. Used in this fashion, strategic studies seems drawn towards a Hobbesian perspective of man and society. If this is so, how then can we neatly encapsulate this post-modernist understanding of international security? Some helpful insights are proved by Charles Maier who suggests that national security
is best defined as the capacity to control those domestic and foreign conditions that public opinion of a given community believes necessary to enjoy its own self-determination or autonomy, prosperity, and well-being.15
In advancing a thesis that security interests can and do change with time, Joseph Romm16 isolates two moments which have helped broaden the idea of national security in the United States. The first in the mid-1970s, followed American failure in Vietnam, rising inflation, the first oil price shock and the raising power of Europe and Japan.

The second commenced with the crumbling of the Cold War in the late-1980s: here the notion is considerably broadened to encompass issues from the international narcotics trade to domestic questions like budget, taxes, subsidies, industrial policy, science, technology, child care education. To strengthen this point, Romm quotes the former head of the (US) Air-Force's strategic defense program, Robert Bowman, as follows:
Security, after all, means more than military strength. It means an informed electorate, a healthy environment, a strong economy, and just society. We are endangered not just by nuclear weapons, but also by pollution in our air, rivers, lakes and oceans, by leaking nuclear waste dumps, by the hole in the ozone layer, and by the greenhouse effect. We are endangered not just by foreign economic competition, but also by drugs, illiteracy and disease, by regulated corporate greed, and by wasting of technical talent in the weapons industry.17
It is important to add that this is not just an American or northern-inspired notion. Gowher Rizvi, the British-based South Asian strategist, was recently quoted as saying that:
security no longer could be considered exclusively within the military sphere, it is concerned not only with safeguarding territorial integrity, but also with political, economic and social welfare, and above all, inter-communal harmony.18
The impact of all this on the body of knowledge we call Strategic Studies was well illustrated last year. Members of the International Institute for Strategic Studies were asked to change a key text of their Constitution at an Extraordinary General Meeting. They were called upon to approve the following:
The object for which the Institute is established is to promote on a non-partisan basis the study and discussion of and the exchange of information upon any major security issues including without limitation those of a political, strategic, economic, social or ecological nature. With a view to and for the sole purpose of carrying out the foregoing object which is hereby declared to be the sole object of the Institute, the Institute shall have power: - etc.
The original version read:
The object for which the Institute is established is to promote a non-partisan basis for the study and discussion of and the exchange of information upon the influence of modern and nuclear weapons and methods of warfare upon the problems of strategy, defence disarmament and international relations.19
What global change has therefore underscored what some have called 'intermesticity': the mingling of domestic and international affairs. As people, information and resources move across boundaries. The capacity of individual states to control what happens beyond their borders is simply impossible. The result is that:
international strategic interests can be affected by decisions and actions initially purely domestic in origin and purpose. Political dissent and fervour easily become transnational. Regional affairs can be made complex by the fact that the domestic politics of one's neighbour can quickly become part of one's own. Security can no longer be compartmentalised into national, regional, and international categories.20

MANY NEW QUESTIONS


All this has had profound implications for understanding security questions in Southern Africa.

At each level of the debate on the region's painful need to reconstruct itself in the face of global change, severe security concerns surface.

If, as many believe it must, the region is to reduce its dependency on foreign aid, serious policy adjustments will weaken the stability of governments and polities. Let there be no mistaking this; many of these governments are profoundly repressive and very undemocratic but change is disruptive.

Take another issue - the now popular idea that national sovereignty needs to be redefined in the sub-continent. This is really a Southern African variation of a global debate. As everywhere else, sovereignty has been a central concept in the development of the sub-continental state system. But in Africa the notion came to enjoy a far deeper currency than elsewhere with the famous injunction by the OAU that African states should respect, above all else, colonial boundaries.

If sovereignty, which has been the centrepiece of regional or inter-state relations in the region, is under threat, then the entire system of conflict and dispute resolution may well change its cadence. To this entirely new situation, states - as we have noted in the particular case of South Africa - may begin a process of disintegration. The knock-on effect of this shows how difficult it will be to prevent further conflict. Consider Tanzania: if, as the present direction of that country's discourse suggests, the union collapses and Zanzibar is launched on a separate trajectory, then that island will become susceptible to all the security problems which, as we have seen, are faced by small states.

It is instructive to recall, however, that predicting the success of sessionist movements in the Third World is a graveyard for analysts. In the 1960s and the 1970s, there has only been one successful sessionist movement, Bangladesh. On the other hand the bloody conflict over Biafra showed how a state, with the support of its allies, can coerce its own people into submission. It may have been thought that, in today's world, this was impossible: the international community would simply not condone this. But, as Bosnia shows, there is not always the international will to deal with disintegration of this kind.

A further problem is that at the moment at which national sovereignty of the region's states is questioned, so the OAU is in the throes of reassessment, realignment. This means that the one body which, until now, has been capable of regulating conflict on the continent will be at its weakest. This is not conducive to building internal cohesion nor international confidence in the continent.

These generalised points on the security implications of political change in southern Africa are, understandably, augmented by a range of more practical concerns. In turn, each of these is in some form or another to be found at the global level.

Consider the question of natural resources. The ongoing drought - which has itself deeply touched security relations in the region - has highlighted a regional soft-spot. Without water, southern Africa is a dust-bowl. The series of links between South Africa and Lesotho which are known by the genetic phrase, The Lesotho Highland Water Scheme, were politically conceived but we are driven by fundamental strategic considerations.

Conflict over the region's dwindling food basket is a potentially serious source of tension. It is difficult to comprehend the decline in overall agricultural production in a region which, when the rains do fall, is very fecund. The emerging series of explanations which link the decline in food output to the adversarial conditions of drawing a livelihood from the land can no longer be simply ignored.21 The challenge for the entire region, including South Africa, is to develop the kinds of mechanisms which will foster co-operation on food security.22

Scarcity of life-providing commodities is, of course, a long-established strategic concern: but its rediscovery in the 1990s is linked to the deepening concern for the environment. In important respects, the region is well placed to deal with some of the adverse issues which will flow from an increase in the heat of the planet. We do not have a large population living close to a shoreline, for example, but as the increasingly dry summers show other consequences of global warming are affecting the region in quite profound ways.

Although there is a nascent debate on this issue in, particularly, South Africa, it is totally underplayed in the regional discourse. Not surprisingly, therefore, its introduction here - within the parameters of a discussion on security, may appear as a subterfuge.

The truth is that looming environmental problems are generating serious security problems for states right across the world. While its features are not fully manifested in southern Africa, it is as well to recognise its disruptive potential. As a result, governments in the region will be compelled to pay more and more attention to the issue. This will be difficult - perhaps, impossible - since a relatively sophisticated set of responses need to be put into place.

How, for example, does an African state deal with issues of over-grazing which contribute to desertification when cattle populations have grown dramatically? How do they deal with degradation of soil as the human load on the same soil increases? And how do governments counter deforestation in the face of population increases?23 But these are not the only threats to Africa's environment. Others are:
air pollution, acid deposition, ground water depletion, pesticide and heavy-metal contamination, environmental diseases, and (as we have already seen) climatic change are some of the many possible environmental problems that could significantly influence Africa's long-term future.24
The physical capacity of the region to carry ever-increasing numbers of people is an important question which also impinges on security. Malthusian concerns of population questions have, it is fair to say, been modulated by advanced understandings of the carrying-capacity of the planet. But few can seriously believe that a growth rate of 3,5 percent (which is the regional average) cannot have serious and very detrimental affects in southern Africa from all points of view.

This issue is linked to two under-explored issues in the security debate in the region: the first, deals with migration; the second, with the future of the region's cities.

The patterns of transnational migration in southern Africa are in essence no different to that in other parts of the globe. In essence, a series of linked circumstances have set in train a tide of human movement across the face of the sub-continent. The region has a well-established pattern of migration: etched deep with the collective memory is the idea that - sometimes on a seasonal basis - people cross borders in pursuit of work. Then, economic and political dislocation throughout the region have established migration and its cousin, the refugee-condition, as an almost permanent feature of regional life. (There is no better example of this than to look at Mozambique as a case of home country and Malawi as a characteristic host country!) In the region people have also drifted off the land by the myriad of problems associated with two other d's, drought and debt.

And finally, the ending of apartheid appears to have unleashed a strong tide of humanity who see South Africa as suitable target to better their life's chances. Regional migration resembles, therefore, the kinds of migration which the Europeans are currently experiencing.25 Quite understandably, the threat to inter-communal harmony which this has posed in Europe might well come to South Africa, too.26

Aside from the intrinsically destabilising nature of this movement of people both to the host and the home country, the subterranean features of mass migration are very treacherous. The killer-diseases - AIDS, malaria, TB - cross borders at an alarming rate. In the host country, in this case South Africa, these place a significant strain on the health system. Social relations could be transformed to make migrants worse off than the local citizens.

As cross-border migration increases, it also becomes difficult, if near impossible, to control the flow of an additional migrant-borne threats: small arms and drugs are just two obvious examples.

Africa is no longer a rural continent: indeed, the drift to the cities of the last decade has ended the myth of the happy rural-based African peasant.27 Within the continent, southern and northern Africa are the most urbanised: western and eastern Africa, the least. This push towards the cities means much more concentrated urban populations is the prospect, not illusory but real, that the region will face mega-cities. Numbers are very difficult to estimate but cities in excess of 5-million people become very difficult to manage in a First World setting: in Southern Africa, they will be near impossible.28 The problem with the region's cities is that, generally speaking, they have a poor infrastructure. It has taken the recent drought to demonstrate the vulnerability of Zimbabwe's cities as the following shows:
The Cola-Cola Company has initiated a television awareness campaign entitled 'Bulawayo Must Live'. The show airs weekly and feature local authorities, residents and experts telling of Bulawayo's plight. A recent show discussed: the possibility of health and hygiene problems arising from sewerage blockages; domestic and small business water rations enforced by restrictor valves that allow a flow of 3 litres/hour and which will be in place for three years; and the loss of a thriving local intravenous fluid production lab, which requires a continual supply of fresh water.29
Bulawayo's problems are the region's: a city conceive for the comfort of a minority has been invaded by a majority for whom it was not designed!

Unprecedented urban growth will have far-reaching effects on a range of issues upon which we have already touched - 'fertility, employment, education, agriculture, political stability, and other demographic and socio-economic factors'.30

BABIES AND BATH-WATER


Another instructive feature about contemporary strategic writing is how difficult predictions can turn out to be. In the days of the Cold War, the Good Guys all wore white hats, stood for the correct things and supported each others views of the world: the Bad Guys wore black hats, stood for the wrong things and supported the other side. This parody of human and international behaviour no longer plays, however.

The process of global change has made the choices which states must make, far more difficult. Political actors within states have a more narrow series of policy choices because - in the security arena - they are caught between the rock of uncertainty and the hard place of shrinking defence budgets. Throughout the region, for instance, soldiers complain that politicians are clamouring for a peace-dividend.

This has profound implications for southern African strategic issues during the transitionary phase and beyond. These shrinking options are, themselves, being played out in debates on the future of South Africa's military-industrial complex.

Consider for the sake of the concluding point the following statement by a leading South African trade-unionist, Dr Bernie Fanaroff, who writes:
it may be advisable to retain a capacity to produce some armaments domestically, it is by no means given that this would be sufficient to lead to the propping up of the arms industry, which is in crisis. It is also uncertain whether the industry could be a cost effective exporter of armaments, even if this were morally acceptable. However, there is a strong argument for retaining the industry in a modified form because it represents a very large public investment in what is virtually the only major resource of technology, high level skills and sophisticated plant. It can thus play a decisive role in upgrading South Africa's manufacturing sector.31
The message of this paper is not that South Africa's strongly anti-apartheid unionists have suddenly become Cold Warriors: the issue is simply that the changing times have shown, above all else, the need for flexible thinking on a multiplicity of issues including strategy.

Global change has challenged strategic thinkers, like Bernie Fanaroff, as much as it has challenged southern African strategists: Can they respond as creatively?

REFERENCES

  1. The very fact of destabilisation in the region is itself a cause for further security concerns. It is important to set this down because in a forward-looking paper of this kind the physical damage done by apartheid's wanton destruction of the region may well be overlooked.
  2. There is an understandable nervousness about this in some states of the region. Although sensitive to the political and, more especially, the regional political implications of this preponderance, it is short-sighted, in my view, to ignore it. The challenge of South Africa's relative power in the region, surely, is to devise acceptable means to prevent it from being abused.
  3. Paratus, Vol 43, 1992, p 8.
  4. James G Blight & Thomas G Weiss, Must the grass still suffer? Some thoughts on Third World conflicts after the Cold War, Third World Quarterly, Vol 13, 1992, p 240.
  5. Ibid, p 243.
  6. The Argus, Cape Town, 1 February 1992.
  7. Southern Africa, Political & Economic Monthly, Vol 6, 1992, p 10.
  8. See Joachim Krause and Klaus van der Ropp, The New South Arica: Security policy and political aspects, Aussenpolitik, 1/19, pp 89 - 99.
  9. On this see Jacques Pauw, In the Heart of the Whore: The story of apartheid's death squads, London, Southern Books, 1991, pp 309.
  10. This is a small uninhabited island in the Choebe River located within the area bounded by, approximately, the 25º 07' and 25º 08.E longitude and the 17º 47' and 17º 50' S latitude. See Tiyanjana Maluwa, Disputed Sovereighnty over Sidudu (or Kasikili) Island (Botswana-Namibia) in Southern Africa: Political & Economic Monthly, Vol 6, 1992, pp 18 - 22.
  11. Ibid, p 18.
  12. C E Diggines, The Problems of Small States, The Round Table, Number 295, 1985, pp 193 - 194.
  13. Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newnham, The Dictionary of World Politics: a reference guide to concepts, ideas and institutions, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, p 379.
  14. John Chipman, The Future of Strategic Studies, The Round Table, Issue 322, (1992), p137.
  15. Joseph J Romm, Defining National Security, Paper prepared for the Council on Foreign Relations Pew Project on Global Security, (mimeo), 1991, p 4.
  16. Ibid, pp 4 - 5.
  17. Ibid, p 5.
  18. The Commonwealth and a New World Order, A St Catherine's Conference held at Cumberland Lodge, July 1992, [Report], p 4.
  19. Both quotes from a memorandum dated 1 June 1992, From: The Chairman of the Council, to All Members of the Institute p 1.
  20. John Chipman, ibid, p 137.
  21. For a discussion of this see Carol B Thompson, Harvests under Fire: Regional co-operation for food security in southern Africa, London, Zed Books, 1991, pp 176.
  22. See Peter Vale, A drought blind to the horrors of war (... and the challenge of peace), Die Suid-Afrikaan, Augustus/September, 1992, pp 51 - 52, 57.
  23. A discussion of these issues as they affected pre-independent Namibia are to be found in Fiona Adams and Wolfgang Werner, The Land Issue in Namibia: An Inquiry, Windhoek, Namibian Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1990, p 240.
  24. Chinua Achebe et al, Beyond Hunger in Africa, Africa 2057. An African Vision, London, James Currey, 1990, pp 70 - 71.
  25. See Francois Heisbourg, Population movements in post-Cold War Europe, Survival, Vol 33, 1991, pp 31 - 43
  26. Gil Loescher, Refugee Movements and International Security, London, IISS, Adelphi Papers 268, 1992.
  27. This point underpins some of the most interesting books on Africa to come out in recent years; see Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa & the Curse of the Nation State, London, James Currey, 1992, 355 pp.
  28. In early January, 1989, South Africa's Sunday press reported on conditions in the Johannesburg suburb of Bertrams. One story claimed that 63 people were living in a house in Ascot Road (Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 31 January 1993). Another report claimed that 60 people were occupying houses in the same suburb. (Sunday Star, Johannesburg, 31 January 1993).
  29. June Drought Update, Cold Comfort Farm Trust, Harare, 14 July 1992, p 2.
  30. Chinua Achebe et al, ibid, p 45.
  31. B L Fanaroff, A Trade Unionists Perspective on the Future of the Armaments Industry in South Africa, South African Defence Review, Issue No 7, 1992, p 14.