In an article "Opposition braced for dirty war as Mugabe clings to power", RW Johnson reported from Harare in the London Sunday Times (6 April) that South Africa 's President Thabo Mbeki has played an active role in falsifying the elections in Zimbabwe. Mbeki spent last weekend at an international conference on "Progressive Governance" near London hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, where he appears to have fended off efforts by Brown to get the South African government to put pressure on President Robert Mugabe to respect the democratic process. Not much "progressive governance" there, whatever that is supposed to mean.
In his article, Johnson wrote that Mbeki has been "continuously on the phone from Pretoria and had his emissaries in Harare" in an effort to masssage the election results in Zimbabwe. He argued that Mbeki's "overweening interest" was to "maintain Zanu-PF in power as a sister liberation movement of his own African National Congress. He fears a possible domino effect throughout southern Africa if a movement that had wrested power from the whites in a liberation war is seen to fail and perhaps then fall to bits."
Johnson claimed, however, that Mbeki "wants Mugabe to go" and would like the former Zanu-PF Finance Minister (and Mugabe's and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai's political rival), Simba Makoni, to succeed - "a younger, modernising technocrat who would, he hopes, restore both his party's and his country's fortunes". According to Johnson, "Out of Mbeki's discussions came the notion that the results should be ‘adjusted' so that Tsvangirai was brought back under the 50% mark, perhaps to 47%-49%, while Mugabe could get 41% and Makoni 10%-12%." (See here).
If proved true, this would not be the first time that the African National Congress - with Mbeki in a senior role - destroyed the results of an election of which it did not approve. It did so in the country with the largest number of ANC exiles anywhere in the world only a few weeks before the ANC was itself made legal in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela released from prison. This was in Tanzania, where free and fair democratic elections among ANC members had resulted in former prisoners from the ANC Gulag prison camp for dissenters, Quatro, in northern Angola, being elected to the most senior positions in the organisation in the region in September 1989. By the end of December 1989, the election had been forcibly annulled by order of the National Executive Committee of the ANC, based in Lusaka, Zambia, through a bullying intervention at Dakawa camp in Tanzania by Chris Hani (assassinated former leader of the South African Communist Party) and the late ANC MP and High Commissioner in Namibia, Stanley Mabizela.
This anti-democratic annulment of an unwanted election result by the ANC was described in what remains the best first-hand history of the ANC in exile, published in July 1990 in Searchlight South Africa, an exile journal published in London, banned in South Africa and edited by two former political prisoners, Dr Baruch Hirson and myself. Its authors were five former soldiers in the ANC army, Umkhonto weSizwe, who had taken part in a peaceful mutiny at Viana camp near the Angolan capital, Luanda, in February 1984, in a demand for democratic elections within the ANC. (For the full article, see here)
Their protest had been crushed by the Angolan Presidential Guard, and its leaders tortured and imprisoned without trial in Quatro prison camp for four years. Some of their colleagues were killed there. Following the Crocker Accords which led to the withdrawal of Cuban, Soviet and ANC forces from Angola in return for independence for Namibia, ANC prison camps in Angola including Quatro were closed in 1988. The ANC's dissident prisoners were freed and transported to Tanzania, where they were permitted to enter freely into normal ANC political life. During elections for committtees at various levels of seniority to represent ANC members in Tanzania held in September 1989, a number of these former Quatro prisoners were then democratically elected to the most responsible positions.
When these committees were crushed by Hani and Mabizela, by orders of the NEC - then headed by Oliver Tambo as president, with Mbeki and Jacob Zuma both senior members - a number of former Quatro prisoners then left the ANC and fled from Tanzania, fearing for their lives. The five authors of the article in Searchlight South Africa fled to Kenya, where - after many hardships - accomodation was provided for them at the YMCA in Nairobi, after noble-hearted intervention on their behalf by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Another group of former Quatro prisoners fled south from Tanzania via Malawi, where they were arrested and handed over to the South African police, who later released them in South Africa. One of this group, Sipho Phungulwa, was assassinated very shortly afterwards immediately after leaving the ANC offices in Umtata in a hit by the ANC, for which amnesty was later claimed and granted in the Truth and Reconciliation process.
I secured the article for publication from its authors, after they had already made the first verifiable, first-hand reports of atrocities within the ANC in interviews published in the press in Britain in April 1990. As published in Searchlight South Africa three months later, following the handwritten text which they had posted to me, the article contains the Portuguese word "Quatro" (meaning the number four) as mistakenly spelt in its Spanish form, as "Quadro". ANC dissidents had given the prison camp its Portuguese name with grim and telling humour, comparing it with The Fort prison in Johannesburg, known in Soweto argot as "Number Four".
The ANC's undemocratic destruction of an election which it had itself previously organised democratically is described below by those who witnessed it at first hand. Mugabe's destruction of the electoral process in Zimbabwe follows on that carried out by the ANC in Tanzania in 1989, for which Mbeki carries a personal responsibility. A government, a State President and a party that destroyed democracy in the ANC in 1989 cannot be expected to secure democracy in Zimbabwe.
