Page 23 - sadc40en

SADCC estimated the cost of South Afri-
can destabilization to the region at almost one bil-
lion dollars in extra transport-related expenses
alone during the period 1980-1984 of a total cost
of $10.12 billion, and by 1988 the total cost to
all sectors had risen to US$62 billion, according
to a report by the UN Inter-Agency Task Force,
which said the region bordering on South Africa
had lost more than 1.5 million lives, including
children impacted by conflict and resultant lack
of food and healthcare.
President Kaunda (right)
cited “the moral outrage evoked
by the human and economic
cost the system of apartheid has
wrought upon the Region of
Southern Africa as a whole
and... the need to dismiss the
fallacy prevalent in some international
quarters that the evil ideology of apartheid afflicts only the population in-
side South Africa. ...Apartheid’s declared policy of ‘total strategy’ is directed
at all countries, always striking at their soft underbellies.” See Table 1.1.
Transportation routes bind the region together, making it inter- 13
dependent. Although the main road and rail network was affixed to the
South African hub, shorter and cheaper regional routes were also devel-
oped to ports in Mozambique and Angola. Those routes were the key to
reduction of regional dependence on apartheid South Africa, and thus
formed the primary economic and military target for Pretoria’s “total strat-
egy” against the region.
South Africa was therefore in a situation of undeclared war with Mozambique and
Angola from their independence in 1975 throughout the decade of the 1980s until after
Namibia’s independence in 1990, thus cutting alternative transport routes for the entire
region, except for the northern route, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) through
to the port of Dar es Salaam. The southern African region is thus bound together by geog-
raphy, history, culture and economic reality but was torn apart by the moral effrontery of
apartheid.
In the 1980s, apartheid South Africa invaded and attacked Angola and Swaziland
(Eswatini); sabotaged or attacked the capital cities of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique,
Zambia and Zimbabwe; armed dissident groups in Angola and Mozambique, and in Le-
sotho, Zambia and Zimbabwe; obstructed oil supplies to six countries; attacked railways,
disrupting transport and trade routes of seven countries; and blockaded Lesotho, creating
conditions for the coup d’etat in January 1986.
The year 1986 continued as a whirlwind within and outside South Africa, with
the escalation of action within the country and the retaliation against neighbouring coun-
tries reaching a climax with the death of President Samora Moises Machel of Mozam-
bique on 19 October 1986 in a plane crash at Mbuzini, 150 metres inside South African
territory, widely believed to have been caused by a false beacon placed, guided and moni-
tored by the apartheid security forces. Just when regional leaders thought they were gain-
ing the upper hand, with the South African townships in upheaval a decade after the
1976 Soweto uprising, apartheid struck at the heart of the Frontline States (FLS) and
SADCC, and removed a key leader in a plane crash while returning home at night from
an FLS mission on DRC (then Zaire) in Mbala, Zambia. But that didn’t stop the struggle
to end apartheid.