The Destabilization of Southern Africa: A Two-Way Street

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THE DESTABILIZATION OF SOUTHERN. AFRICA: A TWO-WAY STREET Colin Legum -fallowing for the inexactitudes of all political analogies, striking parallels are to be found between the present situation in southern Africa and that which existed in the Middle East before the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. By that time, the Middle Eastern region had become seriously destabilized through the refusal of most of Israel's neighbors to accept the reality, or at least the borders, of the Jewish State. Israel had become a fortress-state primed to respond with superior military force whenever it felt threatened from across its borders. The Western powers pursued ambiguous policies, seeking to reassure the Israelis while keeping on reasonable terms with Israel's Arab neighbors. The Soviet Union was firmly on the side of the Arabs as the champion of the Palestinians, and, in this way, striving to establish a wider regional role for itself; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) was then still ineffectually struggling to become a serious military force by acquiring more sophisticated Soviet weapons (especially missiles) and by training professional fighting cadres. The Yom Kippur War was something of a watershed in the Middle East. It showed that while Israel still held military superiority in the region, it was no longer as overwhelming as it once was, and that future battles could be won only with heavy losses. It also restored Egyptian morale sufficiently to enable the late president Anwar Sadat to make peace with Israel—an act that polarized the Arab world and sharpened the challenge of the plo guerrillas, heavily esconced in the destabilized border-state of Lebanon. Instead of relying on short, sharp military Colin Legum is editor ofthe Africa Contemporary Record, associate editor oíMiddle East Contemporary Survey, and editor of Third World Reports. He was associate editor of the Observer, London, from 1949 to 1982. 219 220 SAIS REVIEW thrusts across its borders, the Israelis thought it necessary to make a fullscale assault on Lebanon to destroy the plo "once and for all." Their action not only failed, but resulted in imposing serious strains on their relations with their Western allies, especially with their strongest backer, the United States. Today the future of the Middle East remains as uncertain and worrisome as at any time since the founding of the State of Israel thirty-five years ago. Although there is no valid or just comparison between the parliamentary democratic system of Israel and the racist apartheid system of South Africa, their similarities as unpopular regional powers are unmistakable . Both are willing and able to strike at their neighbors at will. While South Africa has no potential military rival equivalent to Egypt among its own neighbors, the Pretoria regime is at a crucial strategic disadvantage because, unlike Israel, its home front is overwhelmingly opposed to the status quo. This provides an important, but different, dimension to the situations in the two regions. Yet the essential similarities remain: Both countries rely, ultimately, on their military superiority for the preservation of their systems, they also deeply mistrust their friends in the West, while remaining desperately dependent on them— two factors that contribute to their strong antipathy to foreign intervention . Finally, Israel's internal political situation is essentially stable, while South Africa's is not. It is this instability inside the apartheid republic that principally determines South Africa's relations with its neighbors. After thirty-five years of apartheid (interestingly enough, the Afrikaner apartheid regime came to power the same month the State of Israel was born) the experiment in solving South Africa's manifold racial problems has clearly failed. South Africa now stands at a crossroads. The politically dominant white minority is no longer able to maintain a system of government resting, as it does, on white supremacy, and it is anxiously undecided about how to engineer a government that will not be "submerged" under black majority rule. South Africa's black majority appears confident that, eventually, they will rule; however, they remain uncertain about the best ways to produce this change without destroying the country's valuable economy or setting off all-out interracial violence. Nevertheless, violence increasingly has come to dominate South Africa's...