South Africa's destabilization policy: the Zimbabwe experience

Abstract

The Southern African region is today still a battleground. In two broad interrelated struggles, the mass of the population of the region are ranged against the South African ruling class and its apartheid regime. The first of these is the advancing national liberation struggles inside South Africa and Namibia, led by the ANC, PAC and SWAPO. These struggles are assisted in the region by attempts to co-ordinate the policies of the six African states grouped together as the Frontline States - Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Secondly, the region is characterized by the struggle to advance different processes of economic and social development which are largely blocked by linkages between the economies of the states of the region and South African capitalism. In 1980, on the initiative of the Frontline States, nine Southern African states - Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe — formed themselves into the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC), whose principal objective was the extrication of its member states from the negative effects of the domination of the regional economy by South African capitalism. In simple terms, the issues at stake are clear. Pretoria is fighting to preserve apartheid’s capitalist domination, and imperialist hegemony in the sub-continent, and the people of Southern Africa are fighting to extricate themselves from capitalist exploitation and racial oppression. Confronted by a deep-seated crisis since the early 1970s, the racist minority regime has decided to regionalize apartheid and turn Southern Africa into a battlefield. It is within this broad framework that Pretoria’s strategy of regional destabilization can best be understood.