The Angola/Namibia crisis of 1988 and its resolution

Abstract

There is now a fairly extensive literature on the war in southern Angola and the negotiations between the governments of Angola, South Africa and Cuba, leading to the signing of the two agreements in New York in December 1988 that provided for the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola and initiated the process leading to the independence of Namibia.1 This literature tends to focus rather narrowly on either the military or the diplomatic events of the Angola/ Namibia affair. Furthermore, because this crisis took place in a relatively obscure part of the Third World and did not escalate further at a time when the Cold War was moving towards an end, it has been given at best a marginal position in the general Cold War literature.2 Yet, the events in Angola/Namibia at the end of the 1980s deserve more attention, not only because this was, at least potentially, one of the last serious crises in the history of the Cold War in the Third World, and, paradoxically, because its resolution helped ease tensions between the superpowers. Had the crisis not been successfully resolved, it could have undermined the process of detente between Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan Administration and perhaps even halted that process, in a sense replicating the impact of Cuban and Soviet intervention in Angola in the mid-1970s on US-Soviet relations at that time. It is too easy now to dismiss the gravity of the 1988 crisis, and to assume the inevitability of a negotiated and peaceful settlement. Had a superpower conflict eventuated over south-western Africa, it would have had dramatic consequences for global international relations. In recent years those who were involved in the Congo crisis of 1960, the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 and the Namibian peace process, have met to look back at those events,3 but no such meeting has been held on the Angola/Namibia crisis of 1988. Yet the considerable material now available on that crisis makes a reassessment of its Cold War context possible, even though there is no access yet to the relevant documentation in Washington and Moscow. The relevant files now accessible in the archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in Pretoria, South Africa, were placed there as a result of my intervention.4 I have been able to interview a range of actors, including the late Robert Frasure, key aide to Chester Crocker; Vladillen Vasev, the main permanent official on the Russian side, the head of the Third African Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry; Vladimir Shubin of the Russian Institute of African Studies; and DaveSteward of the South African DFA.5 Among the many other sources one could mention, there is the long and detailed memoir by the leading player on the American side, Chester Crocker, a diplomat with strong academic credentials. Not surprisingly, his High Noon in Southern Africa emphasises his own diplomatic skills and tends to play down the importance for the resolution of the conflict of the winding down of the Cold War.6 More recently, the memoir of the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, Anatoli Adamishin, published in Russian, contains a wealth of relevant material, although, like Crocker’s memoir, it is a self-serving account.7 Accounts by key players from the region, the head of the South African Defence Force (SADF), Jannie Geldenhuys, the South African Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, and the President of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), Sam Nujoma, are also now available, along with other relevant works based on interviews with leading members of the South African military.8