Page 24 - sadc40en

Box 1.2
“When is war not a war?”

“Apparently when it is waged by the stronger against the weaker as a ‘pre­emptive
strike’,” MwalimuNyerere wrote in the foreword to a book on Destructive Engagement:
Southern Africa at War, offering “with great humility, my congratulations and my good
wishes to all the people and governments of the victim states. They have kept the bea­
con of freedom alight by their endurance, their courage, and their absolute commit­
ment for Africa’s liberation, I salute them.”

Considerable circumstantial evidence about the plane crash, including the
record of cockpit discussions and instrument fluctuations on another plane in the
area, as well as the behaviour of the South African military already based near the
crash site, later investigations and testimonies, suggest that the plane was lured off
course by a false beacon placed for that purpose. President Machel and 33 others
died in the crash, including some of his key advisors, and it is a credit to the pilots
that 14 people survived, although they were assumed dead by the soldiers of apart-
heid who ransacked the wreckage for documents, ignoring the dead and wounded.
Non-aggression pacts signed by South Africa with Angola, Mozambique and
then Swaziland (Eswatini) in the early 1980s were not implemented, leading to this
President Samora Machel of Mozambique
decision by apartheid authorities, as South Africa became increasingly ungovernable,
that President Machel, who was a hero in the townships, must be removed, permanently.
South Africa had tried to assassinate him before and this was announced several times
previously, showing the miscalculation that the death of any one person, including a Presi-
14 dent, could stop the liberation of Namibia and South Africa. Rather his death was an
inspiration to greater action.

The war inside South Africa has engulfed the whole Southern African region…
Without removing apartheid there will be no peace in the region, and also for the whole world.
Rev. Frank Chikane, South Africa’s Destabilization of the Southern African Region

Into that steaming cauldron, SADCC was born and grew. That is the state of the
region during the decade after the SADCC Lusaka Declaration Southern Africa: Toward
Economic Liberation. Even as it transformed from coordination to development, as the
Southern African Development Community (SADC) in 1992, while the region was com-
memorating the victory over apartheid in Namibia, the air still seemed sharp with the sound
of battle that had raged in southern Angola, but not only, the destruction also reached into
the rural areas and capital cities of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Eswatini,
Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The presentation of this detail is intended to illustrate just what has been achieved,
and how far SADC has advanced since its fiery beginnings, and how the region played a
key role in standing together with South Africans in the removal of apartheid from political
power...
Southern Africa: Toward Economic Liberation is still a work in progress.

1.3 The Southern African Development Coordination Conference
The SADCC concept was discussed in Gaborone, Botswana in May 1979 when the foreign
ministers of the five Frontline States met to discuss economic cooperation. They agreed to
convene an international conference in Arusha, Tanzania in July 1979 with representatives
of development institutions and agencies, and donor governments. This historic conference
brought together for the first time governments and agencies from all parts of the world to
discuss regional cooperation in southern Africa.