De Wet Potgieter - Total Onslaught: Apartheid’s Dirty Tricks Exposed

TOTAL
ONSLAUGHT

TOTAL
ONSLAUGHT

APARTHEIDS DIRTY
TRICKS EXPOSED

De Wet Potgieter

Published by Zebra Press

an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

Reg. No. 1966/003153/07

Wembley Square, First Floor, Solan Road, Gardens, Cape Town 8001

PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa

www.zebrapress.co.za

First published 2007

Publication Zebra Press 2007

Text De Wet Potgieter 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

PUBLISHER : Marlene Fryer

MANAGING EDITOR : Robert Plummer

TRANSLATOR : Marlne Burger

EDITOR : Ronel Richter-Herbert

TEXT DESIGN : Natascha Adendorff-Olivier

TYPESETTER : Monique van den Berg

INDEXER : Ethn Clarke

ISBN 978 1 77007 328 9 (Print)

ISBN 978 1 77022 231 1 (ePub)

ISBN 978 1 77022 232 8 (PDF)

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The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Wars are not won on the battlefield, but in the minds of men.

Genl Andr Beaufre

Preface

I T was American politician Hiram Johnson (18661945) who sagely observed: The first casualty of war is the truth.

During the Vietnam War, his words constantly assailed the ears of the fighting generals, Richard Nixon and his cronies. Eventually, Johnsons wisdom became a curse for an American government stuck in the trenches of a dirty war, far from home. The people opposed it vehemently, and their leaders had no idea how to withdraw from it with honour.

And then lo and behold! the South African government proceeded to imitate exactly what had caused the Americans to fail so dismally in Vietnam. The defence force and the police opted for the deeply flawed hearts and minds policy that had proved useless as a means of gaining the support of the Vietnamese people and thus emerging as the victors in the war against the Viet Cong.

A similar propaganda war, based on unctuous lies and disinformation in order to win the favour of the black population and subtly turn them against the ANC in South Africa and SWAPO in South West Africa (Namibia) did not work either. Furthermore, it cost taxpayers billions of rand over more than a decade.

The old defence forces so-called ComOps activity (communication operations), also known as Bevkom, and the police StratComs (strategic communication operations) were essentially one and the same. Both were aimed at attacking the enemy psychologically by broadcasting disinformation and falsehoods all over the world, in order to confuse and spread panic in their ranks. At the same time, the idea was to whip up the support of the outside world by disseminating falsehoods about the enemy and thus discrediting him.

It was a grey realm of lies and deception, in which false documents were fabricated to discredit the enemy and score points for the apartheid regime.

In many instances, certain damning information about the enemy was withheld until it was strategically advantageous to release it, and thus achieve maximum success against the foe.

Numerous sensational reports in newspapers and on television over the years were later exposed as nothing but blatant untruths. There was little or nothing that the ANC and SWAPO could do in retaliation against this campaign of disinformation and discreditation, as both were banned organisations whose voices could not speak through the South African media.

After the unbanning of the ANC on 2 February 1990, however, their own lie factory became extremely productive, and the more vicious the psychological battle and war of words became in the run-up to the 1994 elections, the more the organisation churned out its own brand of disinformation and discreditation. One example of this was the coercion campaign designed to intimidate members of National Intelligence, the defence force and the police into coming clean about human rights violations and other horror deeds of the past.

As a young journalist, I frequently encountered a jocular scepticism about the governments Total Onslaught theory and the Rooi Gevaar. There was no end to the jokes about being careful of Reds under the beds, communists skulking in the shrubbery.

Total Onslaught was the brainchild of PW Botha and Magnus Malan.

It was based on the teachings of General Andr Beaufre, the French strategist on whose theories the right-wing Organisation de lArmee Secrete (OAS) built its terror campaign against the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s.

Interestingly enough, Beaufres military textbook, Strategy, was one of the prescribed works that students at the Military Academy in Saldanha were required to absorb. In the late fifties, a brilliant young South African military officer was also sent to Algeria by the South African Defence Force to gain experience under General Beaufres tutelage.

That officer, Magnus Malan, later became the youngest chief of the defence force in South Africas history. The Total Onslaught strategy that he learnt from his mentor, Beaufre, in Algeria, became the battle-cry for the war in South Africa less than a decade later.

Between Magnus and PW, Total Onslaught was chosen in the years when PW was still minister of defence as the catchphrase that would muster the support of the nation behind them in the war against the communist threat to southern Africa.

The strategy devised by Magnus amounted to integration of all available resources in one consolidated effort. This meant that no state department could take ad hoc decisions that were not properly framed by the central war effort.

The effects were not confined to military matters, but stretched across the political, psychological, economic and organisational spectrum.

It was this principle, together with the teachings of Beaufre, that formed the basis of PW Bothas Total Onslaught.

When FW de Klerk became state president of South Africa in 1989, the era of the securocrats came to an abrupt halt. Within six months, he had paved the way for a negotiated political settlement which, in the end, many people denounced as total surrender to the ANC.

Be that as it may, the new South Africa was born in April 1994, with Nelson Mandela as the countrys first black head of state, reconciliation and nation-building the watchwords for the future. Time and harsh reality would prove that it wasnt going to be nearly as easy as some might have hoped to heal the deep wounds of apartheid. Far from learning from the errors of the past, the ANC would, in many cases, perpetuate them or take them out of storage every now and then, dust them off, and rehash them in order to divert attention from its own shortcomings and mistakes.

If there is ever to be something approximating a normal society in South Africa, with all the countrys diverse peoples genuinely and truly accepting one another and living together peacefully, it will probably be thanks to apartheids grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whose lives wont be contaminated by armed struggle and political exploitation. When events such as those described in the pages that follow are found only in the history books rather than in everyday life, our descendants will hopefully be able to pluck the fruits of peace and progess.