Weeks of intrigue and confusion over a report of a military coup against President Nelson Mandela have opened the door for the first black to become chief of South Africa’s armed forces, one of the nation’s most crucial bastions of white power.
A long-expected military shakeup began Monday with the forced resignation of Gen. Georg Meiring, the nation’s top army commander and the man who handed Mandela a report last month claiming that an armed takeover of South Africa was imminent.
The report became public just as Mandela was welcoming President Clinton to South Africa, but it was not taken seriously. Plotting against the government, according to the report’s authors, were the top black freedom fighters who helped put Mandela in power, along with his former wife, Winnie Madikizela Mandela.
In ousting Meiring, Mandela and his advisers repudiated the report and underscored accusations that the report was part of a disinformation campaign staged by South Africa’s white Old Guard to destabilize the country. A judicial commission appointed last week by Mandela dismissed the report as a sham.
Meiring, a 35-year veteran of South Africa’s military, was conceding nothing Monday. Speaking at a news conference in Pretoria, he said his resignation was not an admission of wrongdoing or sinister motives but an attempt to shore up trust and morale among his soldiers.
“My position of trust has been unsettled by the report. . . . My early retirement therefore is an effort to restore the trust in (the military,)” Meiring said, speaking in Afrikaans. “I did not concede that the report was flawed.”
With more ousters in the offing, the report and its reverberations have underscored the suspicions and mistrust that remain between Mandela’s government and the apartheid-era officers who still command South Africa’s fighting forces four years after the white-minority regime stepped aside for the country’s first all-race elections.
Of all the institutional changes under way since Mandela took power, transformation of the military has been the slowest in coming. Reformers have moved cautiously and have met with considerable resistance in trying to integrate some 30,000 black soldiers from former guerrilla armies.
Mandela’s chief of staff, Jakes Gerwel, said the president and his Cabinet would take several days to discuss Meiring’s successor. The front-runner is Lt. Gen. Siphiwe Nyanda, Meiring’s second-in-command, former chief of the African National Congress’ guerrilla wing and one of those implicated in the now-refuted coup plot.
Nyanda and other former freedom fighters have been placed in influential positions, but many of them occupy shadow posts behind veteran white officers because the black officers until recently had more training in infiltration and sabotage than official military administration.
Defense analysts say the shakeup should not ruffle too many feathers within the military ranks because Nyanda and other blacks have been in line for the top posts.
“People have been preparing for this for some time,” said Mark Malan, a former defense force officer and now an analyst with the South African Institute of Security Studies. “They need to do it quickly, though, because what’s left of the force’s morale is hemorrhaging because of (the coup scandal).”
Meiring, 58, owed his top post to one of the unpopular compromises that ensured a peaceful transition from white minority rule to majority rule. Appointed in 1993, Meiring was kept on as defense force chief to persuade the military to go along with the wider political transition and to alleviate the fears of some whites, even though he had been a vocal antagonist of Mandela’s African National Congress and its armed wing, Umkhonto we-Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
The general, who in the past commanded counterinsurgency forces on the Zimbabwe border and occupation forces in Namibia, was known for integrity and professionalism. But last year, in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was implicated by another general in the former regime’s dirty tricks campaign against anti-apartheid activists. Meiring denied the charges.
His demise began Feb. 5, when he handed Mandela the report predicting the coup. Implicated, along with Madikizela-Mandela, were Nyanda and two other high-ranking black officers: former ANC leader and homeland military chief Bantu Holomisa and current ANC stalwart and senior Foreign Ministry official Robert McBride.
The plot thickened March 9 when McBride was arrested in neighboring Mozambique on charges of gun running after trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles. He is still being questioned in a Mozambican jail, but his supporters say he was on an undercover mission and was framed, possibly as a way to reinforce belief in the bogus coup attempt.
McBride is an intensely controversial figure in South Africa. In 1986, he was sentenced to death for the bombing of a bar in which three white women were killed in an anti-apartheid operation. He was later released in another deal aimed at smoothing South Africa’s negotiated passage away from apartheid.
The man arrested with McBride in Mozambique, Vusi Mbatha, turned out to be the sole informant behind the military’s report about the coup plot. Over the years, Mbatha’s veracity has been questioned when he tried to give statements to investigators probing apartheid-era human-rights abuses.
The coup report did not become public until late March, when several newspapers associated with right-wingers among the white Afrikaaner ethnic group disclosed details of the military report just as President Clinton was visiting Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Mandela quickly refuted the report’s contents, saying he suspected it was false from the beginning and assuring the nation that no real threat existed. He and other ANC officials have charged that the report is the work of “elements who are bitter that the minority in this country has lost power.”
“I immediately noticed that there was not one white implicated in the alleged plot. This looked very suspicious to me,” Mandela told one of the Afrikaans newspapers Sunday. “I am convinced that whatever sinister plans there are out there, we will be able to quickly wipe them out. I have complete control over the security forces.”
The day after the report became public, Mandela named a three-judge commission to investigate not only its contents but the manner in which it was compiled.
The judicial commission handed its findings to Mandela on Thursday. Those findings have not been made public, but Mandela’s aides said the commission found that the report was “fraudulent” and had “no substance.” Deputy Defense Minister Ronnie Kasrils called the report “laughable and nonsensical.”
Meiring announced his retirement after several days of high-level meetings among government officials, including a meeting between the general and Mandela on Friday. While Meiring said he was not forced to resign, government officials anonymously told reporters over the weekend that he had been offered a better retirement package if he stepped down voluntarily. The general was scheduled to retire in July 1999.
Government officials indicated that the shakeup in the military would not end with Meiring’s ouster. Speculation is rampant that a full-fledged housecleaning is in the works, targeted mainly at the military’s intelligence agency, which is still dominated by apartheid-era holdovers. The agency allegedly helped put together the report.
“There must have been at least one or two other people that assisted in compiling that report,” Mandela’s spokesman, Parks Mankahlana, said after Meiring resigned Monday. “The motives have to be looked into.”
