(The Star op-ed 10 July 2015)
- Michael Schmidt
When I was growing up,
Lesotho was a mystical mountain kingdom where black and white boys enjoyed true
friendship as in the idyllic 1975 film e’Lollipop,
which I probably saw at the old Star Drive-in, perched on top of a hillock of
mine tailings just south of Johannesburg’s city centre. Of course that dream
was as fake as the brutal reality that unfolded across South Africa just a year
later, for Basotholand was born in warfare as a redoubt against the Zulu,
British and Boers, and has suffered from insurrection ever since independence.
And with Sunday Times reporting last weekend that
Lesotho is on the verge of sliding back into military dictatorship, “as the
army unleashes a reign of terror… arresting, torturing and killing opponents,”
the mountain kingdom has entered another period of armed crisis. This is
despite South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s shuttle diplomacy over
recent months in an attempt to stamp out the fires – which is as starkly at
odds with President Nelson Mandela’s gunboat diplomacy in invading Lesotho in
1998, as it is with Thabo Mbeki’s alleged clandestine diplomacy in the 2000s
with the SA Police Services kidnapping Basotho opposition activists.
Lesotho’s remote geography,
as one of only three countries in the world entirely surrounded by another
state, not to mention an economy almost entirely made up of foreign aid, earnings
from the Southern African Customs Union, and remittances from migrant labour in
South Africa, is dominated by its industrial neighbour which lies coiled around
Lesotho like a fat python whose inconsistent foreign policy towards Lesotho has
helped fuel the conflict there.
By legend, a man named
Lepoqo of the Bamokoteli tribe, with cheekbones as steep as the mountainsides
he rode, earned his chops in the late 18th Century in a raid in
which he emasculated his enemies by shearing off their beards, the sound of the
shears giving him his battle-name, Moshoeshoe. When he succeeded his father as
chief of the Bamotokeli in 1820, he united the refugees and his tribe into the
Basotho nation and built a defensive position at the Mountain of the Night, or
Thaba Bosiu.
Incorporated as a
British protectorate in 1868, the vertiginous snowcapped Maluti gained
independence in 1966 as Lesotho, and a great-great grandson of its founding
father, King Moshoeshoe II, took the throne under a constitutional monarchy
with a bicameral parliament dominated by the Basotho National Party (BNP). But
peace did not come with independence: the 1970 nullification by the BNP of
elections widely believed to have been won by the opposition Basotholand
Congress Party (BCP) caused such instability that in 1986, a military coup
d’etat transferred executive and legislative powers to the king, who ruled
under the advice of a Military Council headed by General Justin Lekhanya,
although in 1990 Lekhanya stripped Moshoeshoe II of his powers and exiled him.
Lekhanya intended to restore civilian rule, but as experienced by Mikhail
Gorbachev in the communist coup attempt of 1991, the old guard’s fears of change
saw him toppled in a coup the same year.
Moshoeshoe II was
succeeded by his son Letsie III who ruled under the 1993 constitution which cut
the king out of political life, still BNP-dominated, but who abdicated in
favour of his father in 1995. Yet stability remained illusory as Moshoeshoe II
was killed in a car accident and Letsie III had to reassume the throne – this
time with political ambitions, for the liberation of South Africa in April 1994
had raised high expectations of change in Lesotho and the country was wracked
by mutinies in police, army and prison services. In August 1994, Letsie III lead
a faction of the military in staging a coup.
International pressure
forced the king to revert to civilian rule within a month, but the damage was
done and another incendiary cycle was initiated, with a critical split in 1997 in
the ruling BCP which saw veteran leader Ntsu Mokhele take two thirds of MPs
with him to form the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD). The LCD won the 1998
elections with 79 out of 80 seats, but despite a Southern African Development
Community (SADC) commission ruling that the LDC landslide was legitimate,
opposition parties, and in particular the BCP-linked military, refused to
believe this was so.
Violent protests in
Maseru set the stage for a mutiny by junior officers who believed they were
toppling a corrupt edifice of South African-swayed senior officers and
politicians. The panicked LDC government appealed to SADC for assistance and on
22 September 1998, SANDF and Botswana Defence Force armoured columns rolled
into Maseru under SADC auspices, while SADF parachutists secured key points
such as the Lesotho Highlands hydroelectric system. I was present and the shock
of the invasion was intense: Maseru was looted and burned by armed mobs
outraged that SADC armoured vehicles had stationed themselves on the grounds of
the Royal Palace, traditionally seen as a sacred safe-haven; and SANDF armour
suffered an eight-hour fire-fight at the hands of rebels armed with recoilless
rocketry, in capturing the main Makoanyane Military Base.
At diplomatic level,
South Africa made the mistake of claiming the mutiny was a coup attempt, which
infuriated the opposition all the more. Many Basotho I spoke to at the time
feared that South Africa was staging a thinly-disguised annexation of Lesotho
as its tenth province. I assured them that South Africa wanted to control their
water supply without the burden of healthcare for mountain peasants.
Ironically, there is a move within
Lesotho to have South Africa annex it – largely driven by migrant labourers who
want to be able to move freely and repatriate their earnings easily, and is
strongly supported by the ANC-aligned National Union of Mineworkers.
Even Lesotho Foreign
Affairs Minister Mohlabi Kenneth Tsekoa stated in 2013 at a ceremony to
consolidate cultural ties and enhance business flows between the countries that
“Lesotho and South Africa have been one from time immemorial.” At the time, Khadija
Patel quoted Johnny Steinberg, writing for the Institute for Security Studies
in 2005 , as saying that commentators had argued “that the raison d’etre for
Lesotho’s sovereignty vanished at the end of apartheid, and that political
incorporation into South Africa is inevitable – or at very least, highly
desirable – in the long run.”
But before we get all
revanchist and start planning ski lodges in the Maluti, we have to decide what
our policy towards Lesotho truly is. Mandela’s kragdadigheid was replaced under Mbeki by a sneaky practice – if
not policy – of the SAPS kidnapping opposition activists, for example the
abduction by helicopter from her place of exile outside of Bloemfontein of BNP
Women’s League deputy leader Malefa Sefora Maphaleba in October 2004. I
interviewed her for Saturday Star and
she told me that she had been interrogated for eight hours in a remote forest
about Basotho politics by policemen who all the time held over her head the
threat of forcibly returning her to Lesotho where the previous year she had
suffered torture for eight days at the hands of the Royal Lesotho Mounted
Police. That threat was real enough as another prominent opposition leader in
exile in South Africa had been kidnapped by the SAPS, bundled into the boot of
a car and illegally driven across the border into Lesotho to be handed over to
his pursuers.
Lesotho remains the
hole in South Africa’s heart; ignored for much of its existence, yet desired
for its water and cheap labour, then battered in the ring by continual shifts
in South African policy which stoked internal fires. It deserves consistent
assistance to become a full democracy at last.
·
Michael Schmidt is a veteran investigative
journalist and defence correspondent. He has written about the 1998 invasion of
Lesotho and the illegal rendition of foreigners by the SAPS in his latest book, Drinking with Ghosts: the Aftermath of
Apartheid’s Dirty War (2014).
