Contributions of a Semi-Official Prenegotiation Initiative

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Contributions of a Semi-Official Prenegotiation Initiative

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Contributions of a Semi-Official

Pre-Negotiation Initiative:

Afrikaner-ANC Meetings in England,

1987-1990[1]

Daniel Lieberfeld

The series of prenegotiation meetings between elite Afrikaners (South Africans of mainly Dutch descent) and officials of the African National Congress (ANC) provides a rich example of the contributions that facilitated meetings can make to the settlement of intractable conflicts. The meetings, which took place in England between 1987 and 1990, were the most politically influential initiative involving the exile ANC and those with access to the highest levels of South Africa’s government. The initiative was specifically aimed at starting an official negotiation process. The relatively clear lines of transfer from meeting participants to government elites underscore the potential for transfer from interactive meetings to official decision makers of both changed intergroup perceptions and substantive proposals.

Background and Context for the Meetings

During the twentieth century the conflict in South Africa was essentially between those fighting for equal rights for Africans and other groups deprived, on the basis of their racial and ethnic identities, of political, economic, and social participation, and those fighting for the maintenance of a white supremacist order (apartheid) based on dispossession and domination of the black majority. In the 1940's and 1950's, the African National Congress (ANC) abandoned fruitless attempts to mitigate racist oppression by petitioning the government, and pursued confrontation as a means of pressing for an end to the white monopoly on political power and for a democratic, non-racial, and unified South Africa. By the late 1980's, the ANC-led opposition included the legal, but repressed Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) within the country, along with the ANC, outlawed since 1960, many of whose leaders were in jail and the rest in exile.

After 1948 the Afrikaner Nationalist party (NP) controlled the government. Under President P. W. Botha during the 1980's, the decision-making authority of the defense forces and security services exceeded that of Parliament and the cabinet. Botha's government adopted a counterrevolutionary strategy that included reforms short of sharing actual political power, violent repression of anti-apartheid forces, and a divide-and-rule approach toward subordinated ethnic groups.

The government's superior military power stymied ANC guerrillas' infiltration campaigns from neighboring states. Government propaganda had also demonized the ANC in the minds of most whites, and prohibited the press from quoting any ANC members, or even printing their pictures. Nevertheless, the ANC was central to any political solution in South Africa due to its wide support among the black majority. The government sought to circumvent the ANC by elevating the regional ethnic leader Mangosothu Buthelezi to the status of national representative for Africans. However, this strategy was frustrated by Buthelezi's refusal to participate in state-sponsored constitutional structures without the prior release of ANC prisoners, particularly Nelson Mandela.

The ANC also enjoyed diplomatic support and aid from the Communist East Bloc and from some western European and Third World countries. Western governments began to establish closer relations with the ANC in response to anti-apartheid activism within their countries and to the decreasing importance in the Cold War of regional conflicts after the advent of Soviet President Gorbachev in 1985. The trend toward peaceful resolution of such conflicts was manifest in southern Africa by U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the negotiation process that resolved the conflict in Namibia late in 1988. South Africa's government faced international isolation and an economically crippling decline in foreign investment due to the political situation. Internally, the government was unable to undermine the ANC’s legitimacy or meet the challenges posed by the rapid growth and urbanization of the black population.

Niël Barnard (1994, interview by author), director of South Africa's National Intelligence Service (NIS), conveyed the government's pessimistic assessment of its medium- and long-range prospects:

There was a very deep feeling from 1986 to 1989, that we can still continue, but for how long? Would it be five years, ten years, fifteen years? The basic question was where would we be at the end of those ten, fifteen, or twenty years? Would we be in a situation … of the country just disintegrating? To negotiate in such a climate would be much more difficult than to negotiate in a situation of relative capacity economically, security-wise, and so forth

In sum, the more foresighted leaders on each side perceived a stalemate.

Yet when "talks about talks" began in 1987, there was little evidence of the imminent precipice or impending catastrophe that Zartman (1989, p. 6) has described as requisite to conflicts' "ripeness" for resolution. To the contrary, the government's harshly repressive measures, taken under a national State of Emergency, had beaten back the challenge from the ANC's internal allies, the United Democratic Front and the MDM. The ANC had also lost a major base in neighboring Mozambique, and was on the verge of losing its remaining regional sanctuaries. With no realistic expectation of success in either mass insurrection or guerrilla warfare, ANC leaders also faced pressure from its international allies to negotiate. For elements in the government, including the NIS, the sense of relative control and stability, established during the State of Emergency, bought time to negotiate a favorable political solution. As the Afrikaner group noted at the first meeting with the ANC in England in November 1987:

The [pro-negotiation] position of [the security] apparatus is based on the perception that the mass democratic and armed struggle and the impact of the ANC has been sufficiently controlled so as to reestablish a considerable degree of stability. Given this stability, the state can now act to try to further stabilise the situation by taking steps, which, if properly responded to, can lead to full-scale negotiations (ANC, 1987a, p. 8).

For their part, ANC leaders opposed negotiations so long as the organization was outlawed and the government held ANC prisoners. Prisoner releases were a fundamental pre-condition for negotiation. As ANC leader Aziz Pahad (1994) noted, the ANC leadership in exile "couldn't be discussing [negotiations] externally without the leaders in prison being out." These prerequisites were reaffirmed at the ANC's June 1985 National Consultative Conference in Kabwe, Zambia. While adopting a militant tone, the resolutions of the Kabwe conference nonetheless afforded ANC President Oliver Tambo a mandate for contacts with "a wider group of whites than the small minority actively … supportive of us," so as to "win them over" (ANC, 1985, p. 4/E9). Later in 1985, Tambo tried to establish contacts with Afrikaners close to the government, through Quaker peacemaker H. W. van der Merwe. Van der Merwe approached Willie Esterhuyse and Sampie Terreblanche, two prominent Afrikaner academics with government ties, who agreed to meet with ANC officials in Zambia. When word of the proposed meeting leaked, President Botha dissuaded the two from going. However, separate groups of English-speaking businessmen, led by the chairman of the giant South African mining conglomerate Anglo-American, and of leading liberal members of parliament, did travel to Zambia in 1985 to meet ANC leaders. A watershed encounter came in mid-1987 with the conference in Dakar, Senegal, at which ANC representatives met with about 60 Afrikaners, most of them dissidents without ties to the ruling NP (Lieberfeld, 2002). Bolstered by the success of the Dakar conference in winning over Afrikaner participants, Tambo and his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, pursued contacts with more politically influential Afrikaners than those at Dakar.

The Third Party’s Motives and Approach

Consolidated Goldfields (Consgold), an English-owned mining corporation that, after Anglo-American, was the second largest gold company in South Africa, became the sponsor for the Afrikaner-ANC initiative that Tambo and Mbeki sought. Consgold's corporate image and relations with shareholders had been ruffled by the international anti-apartheid movement’s calls for disinvestment from South Africa. Moreover, Consgold hoped to continue profitable operations in South Africa and, as Consgold consultant Fleur de Villiers noted (2002), "If [the country] was going to go up in flames, it wouldn't be possible. They were looking to the security of their investment." Envisioning a potential transition from white rule, Consgold executives asked de Villiers to suggest ways to moderate the South African conflict.

De Villiers, who also worked as a political editor for the Johannesburg Sunday Times, had been at Harvard University in 1980 on a journalism fellowship and had taken a conflict resolution course there with Roger Fisher. She dismissed most public discussions and conferences on South Africa as "liberals talking to other liberals." The government generally would not send representatives to a conference when anyone with ANC sympathies was attending. Further, "if one did get people from the liberation movement together with Afrikaner nationalists in a public forum, all you got was public positioning and grandstanding rather than dialogue." De Villiers (2002) suggested that Consgold "could act as midwife to a meeting between Afrikaner nationalists who could influence the government, rather than liberals who couldn't talk back in to the government." De Villiers counseled that any productive dialogue between Afrikaner nationalists and the ANC had to be kept secret in order to occur at all, as well as to diminish the incentives for public position-taking that were inimical to trust-building.

When Consgold asked for suggestions regarding Afrikaner participants, de Villiers suggested Willie Esterhuyse, the professor of political philosophy at Stellenbosch University whom Botha had dissuaded from meeting the ANC in 1985. De Villiers had known Esterhuyse for several years as "one of the major instruments of Afrikaner nationalism within the academic community and within the Rapportryers and the Broederbond"—elite and secretive Afrikaner nationalist organizations to which many senior Afrikaner politicians belonged. Esterhuyse had left the National Party and the Broederbond in the mid-1980s, but, de Villiers (2002) noted, had retained political influence while "remaining totally open to ideas that the government thought heretical." Esterhuyse had been a close political advisor to President Botha and had taught Botha's daughter at Stellenbosch (Esterhuyse 1998). For the initial Consgold sponsored meeting in 1987 he recruited two Stellenbosch colleagues with political ties, Sampie Terreblanche and Willie Breytenbach. The latter had worked for the Minister of Constitutional Affairs and had also been secretary to the State Security Council, which, under Botha, was in the upper reaches of the state bureaucracy. Esterhuyse also invited J. P. de Lange, Chairman of the Broederbond who had met informally with Thabo Mbeki in New York in 1985, to be part of an Afrikaner delegation. In the event, concerns over confidentiality caused de Lange to decline, and only the three Stellenbosch professors attended the first meeting with the ANC.

Consgold Chairman Rudolph Agnew had close ties to Britain's governing Conservative party, which was under pressure from the Commonwealth countries to impose sanctions on South Africa. Agnew authorized expenditures of several hundred thousand pounds for the meetings. These were chaired by Consgold's public relations director and strategic advisor, Michael Young, who was the only third party present. In his Consgold position Young had met Tambo, Mbeki, Zuma, Pahad, and other ANC officials in London in June 1986, at a meeting between ANC leaders and representatives of banks and industrial corporations with major interests in South Africa. Young also helped organize an unfruitful effort to connect ANC leaders and Afrikaners in London. As a former advisor to the Thatcher government on Africa, including the negotiations over the end of white rule in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Young had regional expertise and contacts with the South African government.

Young established his bona fides with the ANC four months before the first Consgold sponsored meeting when he arranged a meeting between ANC President Tambo and Linda Chalker, the British foreign affairs minister for Africa. The Tambo-Chalker meeting represented the ANC's first official ministerial-level contact with Britain. Tambo and Mbeki also asked Young to arrange a meeting with politically influential Afrikaners. Thus, an important feature of the initiative is that the intervention request originated with one of the primary parties.

Young's links to the British government, of which the ANC was deeply suspicious, were appreciated by ANC leaders who, as the Cold War waned, sought diplomatic rapprochement with Western governments. According to ANC delegation leader Aziz Pahad (2000):

We aware that Michael [Young] would have been discussing this [meeting] with British intelligence.… It couldn't be otherwise. But for us there was no problem: … It helped us to then get an understanding within the then-British government that we are not all these "mad Russian agents" interested in armed seizure of power; we were serious about transformation.

After pursuing the connection with Esterhuyse that de Villiers had furnished, Young oversaw logistical arrangements for the meetings, acted as chair, and offered his interpretations of the conflict's international political context. Young (2002) considered his goal "to facilitate two sets of people who in the public arena were speaking past each other."

In general, neither the ANC nor the government considered intermediary efforts worth the risk of losing control over the timing and substance of talks. In 1984, for example, ANC leaders rebuffed a proposal by British and South African academics for an informal problem-solving workshop with government officials because, according to the ANC, "informal discussions … between ourselves and members of the National Party, in their personal capacities, do not require any mediation" (ANC, 1984, p. 1). Both the government and the ANC were averse to involving outside parties, "who would invariably come with their own agendas" (ANC, 1989a, p. 2). This concern was reinforced by the two sides' observations of the late-1970's Lancaster House talks on Zimbabwean independence and, more immediately, the talks on the independence of Namibia, about which an ANC Executive Committee member commented (ANC, 1989b, p. 15):

Refer[ing] to the Lancaster House and the Namibian situations … we have to initiate and set the agenda, and not leave it to others to impose it on us. If negotiations come … we do not want to be prescribed to by forces whose interests do not coincide with the interests of our people.

The government team that was meeting with Nelson Mandela likewise told him, "It is important for South Africans to solve their problems without foreign intervention" (ANC, 1989c, p. 4).

While using track two meetings to gather information about and even to pass messages to the ANC, NIS Director Barnard (1994, by Waldmeir) resented the interference such meetings represented:

The more the outside world tried to become involved, the more stubborn we became to try not to let them have any kind of involvement. This is why people like myself fought tooth and nail to convince [P.W. Botha] that there must be no facilitators and no outside involvement. We will talk to [the ANC] on our own, direct.… There was no way that we as a government were going to be prescribed to by clerics, academics, and the private sector as to how we should conduct the political business of this country.

As Barnard's deputy, Mike Louw (1995), noted, "One of the first things we [NIS officials] said to Thabo [Mbeki] and company when we met overseas was 'please let's get rid of all these middle men and facilitators and what have you; we are not going to make any progress with them.'" In Louw's view, which likely represented a consensus in the NIS, ANC officials' meetings with Afrikaners were part of "a very huge effort, well planned by the ANC, who had these naïve people coming to them in order to drive a wedge in the Afrikaans ranks and to break up the Afrikaner hegemony." In fact, the ANC did consider track two initiatives to be a means of widening divisions in the enemy camp (ANC, 1987c).[2]

The government and ANC's shared wariness toward intervention precluded a more active third-party role and helps to explain both the low level of third-party intermediary activity in the South African conflict generally, and the essentially bilateral cast of the meetings in England. Young's substantive interventions during the meetings were largely limited to occasionally pressing parties for specifics, asking, for example, "What do you mean by 'cessation of violence'?" (Young 2002).[3] Nor was Young usually present for walks in the woods, extended fireside discussions and other informal interactions "when the real business of mutual discovery would take place" (Sparks, 1995, p. 83).

Characteristics of the Meetings and Participants

Meetings were held every four months, on average, between late 1987 and late 1989, with 12 meetings in all through the beginning of formal official talks in mid-1990. Follow-up meetings also continued past the beginning of official negotiation. These "circum-negotiations" (Saunders, 2001) bypassed stalled official talks and produced an ANC-business leaders agreement on the National Economic Forum in mid-1991 (Esterhuyse 1994). Each of the meetings in England lasted two to three days, typically over a weekend, with formal sessions on Saturday and Sunday mornings extending to mid-afternoon. After the initial meetings at up-scale hotels in Marlow and Kent, most took place at a secluded Consgold mansion and wooded estate in the village of Mells, near Bath.