The Third World War: The Untold Story

The great game between the superpowers of reassuring both their friends and themselves that they could be relied upon in times of danger or tension was still much in evidence in Africa during 1983. The continuing exercises by the US Rapid Deployment Force were of some comfort to Somalia and Sudan and were answered by comparable Soviet manoeuvres in South Yemen and Ethiopia. Much more serious was the Soviet build-up of arms and advisers in Mozambique, Botswana and Angola; indeed support for the latter was so extensive that some of it was clearly destined for Namibia. By 1984 there were some 10,00 °Cubans in Mozambique together with increased numbers of Soviet and East German advisers. Botswana had contented itself with accepting technical and tactical experts from these two countries to help with the training of its own gradually expanding army, but it had also established in the north-east a number of training camps for ANC guerrillas who were being equipped with Soviet-supplied small arms, rocket launchers and mortars, together with hand-held SAM. In Angola the number of Cubans and East Germans had roughly doubled. Apart from their traditional tasks of manning sophisticated equipment and training the Angolan armed forces, they were now also involved in welding a large number of former SWAPO guerrillas, who had taken refuge in Angola after the Namibian independence negotiations got under way, into an all-arms force of roughly brigade size for future use in Namibia. These ominous advances in the front-line states' conventional and guerrilla capability — coming as they did at a time when the National Party in South Africa was running into more difficulties with its reform programme and ANC industrial sabotage was on the increase — did not augur well for southern Africa.

Zimbabwe, on the other hand — and this was consistent with its positive initiatives over Namibia — remained ambivalent in its attitude towards the Soviet Union. There were perhaps two reasons for this. One was the closer economic ties which Zimbabwe continued to seek with the West; the other was its association with China. China was willing to back any movement that would advance the struggle against apartheid, yet at the same time it wished to check Soviet influence in southern Africa generally. Quite apart from its special relationship with Zimbabwe, China was also on friendly terms with Mozambique and Angola, offering them limited aid and exploiting the inevitable frustrations and restrictions caused by the Soviet and East German presence in the two countries. In Zambia and Tanzania, too, China was able to build on earlier friendly co-operation, while in Namibia it gave strong support to Western initiatives to bring about a settlement. Despite all China's friendliness, however, Soviet influence in southern Africa's black states remained paramount.

The same could not be said of west Africa. In 1981 Equatorial Guinea had rebuffed the Soviet Union's attempts to reinforce its footholds there and had, moreover, invited the country's former colonizers, Spain, to return and help with the re-organization of the army, the economy and constitution. The USSR had suffered comparable setbacks in two former Portuguese colonies, Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands. France, meanwhile, felt able to swallow some of its socialist-inspired disapproval for the more despotic behaviour of dictatorships in French-speaking west Africa and pledged continued military and economic assistance to the Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic. Perhaps the most encouraging developments of all had been those in the western Sahara. The withdrawal of Libyan aid to the Polisario, continued Saudi Arabian economic props for Morocco, and the OAU's refusal to recognize the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic, all made for compromise, and a solution was at last agreed during 1983 between Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, and the Polisario itself. The idea of a separate and independent Saharan state was abandoned, or at any rate postponed. Instead, federation with Mauritania of much of the disputed territory won the day.