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I am not sure how Serbian people can trust the man who overlooked kilings of 2000 people?
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A grave case of memory loss
John Matshikiza: WITH THE LID OFF
28 November 2005 10:42
Amnesia is a wonderful thing. How delicious to hear a spat reaching decibels of hysteria between former Boetie Gaan Border Toe Jannie Geldenhuys and the mild-mannered, high-foreheaded, comfortably chubby former president of Finland, Marti Ahtisaari, who was also the United Nations’s point man in the disputed territory of Namibia, South West Africa before that.
The spat has come about because neither of them can quite remember how it came to pass that some 1 700 South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) combatants should somehow have disappeared into shallow mass graves, most of them manacled and some of them shot in the back, at the time when the country was nearing independence in 1990.
There seems to be amnesia all round. The Swapo leadership of the time, led by recently, reluctantly retired president Sam Nujoma, also doesn’t seem to remember too clearly why it sent 2 000 of its trained armed cadres, 1 700 of whom would never be heard of again, into the country at a time when there was finally a ceasefire in place to allow the antagonists, namely Swapo, who clearly had a right to be there, and the South African army, who clearly didn’t, to get together under the auspices of the UN and talk about the nuts and bolts of handing over power.
The Swapo guerrilla war against the occupying apartheid South African army had been spluttering indecisively since the 1960s. Why suddenly a bravura incursion of 2 000 soldiers, who probably had no idea what the game plan was, at a time when the whole world knew the war was over? Was the idea to make it seem as if Swapo had suddenly mustered the guile and muscle to send the high-tech, Western-sponsored South African army into ignominious retreat with a few AK-47s and a Stalin organ or two? Or was the idea, as some have suggested, to find a less-than-subtle way of getting rid of a few battalions of potential troublemakers who had been languishing restlessly in Swapo camps in Zambia and Angola for years, and who might turn out to be a Pandora’s box of unfinished business in the murky, mysterious politics of an emerging Namibia? Who might have a lot of uncomfortable and uncomplimentary things to say about their own leadership in the lead up to a period of triumphalist electioneering back on home soil geared to assuring Nujoma a clear run to the presidency?
Alas, poor Yorick and Co. Who were all those guys whose skulls have just been dug up anyway? Would anybody miss them? To Geldenhuys and his faceless masters in Pretoria (some of whom were to go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in later years), they were just so many units of vaguely menacing vermin. To the UN, far removed among the wealthy towers of New York, they were abstract black pawns in a recently abandoned East-West power game. To the liberation movement, they were troublesome mouths to feed and clothe, the voice of the people taking on a life of its own of a kind that was never intended. Believe me, there were rebellions in all the Southern African liberation movement camps, the rank and swine, as they came to call themselves, champing at the bit in the face of leaderships that veered from indecisiveness to naked corruption.
So when Geldenhuys points a finger at Ahtisaari when mass graves are discovered in the Namibian wilderness and says, “Don’t ask me, ask him. I wasn’t there,” he is right in a sense -- although somewhat reticent and selective with the truth. The UN had claimed to be in charge of Namibia since about 1964, when a tousle-haired Russian diplomat from the UN secretariat landed at Windhoek airport in a timid-looking Cessna and declared that he was taking over the country from the South Africans in the name of the world body. He was given a swift and precise kick in the pants by the South Africans and told where he could go with his Cessna.
But from that time on, the UN blustered to the world about its authority over Namibia, based on some vague League of Nations mandate written up after the end of World War I, and stamped around talking about the occupying South African army and its vicious Koevoet and other special terror units like ineffectual prefects talking to an uninterested headmaster about bullies in the school playground. They never actually sent in any of the many military forces at their disposal to actually do anything about it -- as they would have done in the twink-ling of an eye if, say, the Russians had decided to occupy apartheid South Africa and free the people, or the Communist Chinese had invaded New Zealand to free the Maoris and the sheep from centuries-old oppression by British settlers.
When Geldenhuys says he and his boys were no longer in Namibia, so how could they have committed that appalling atrocity, he is being somewhat forgetful of the facts -- that South Africa had no intention of pulling out of Namibia until it absolutely had to. In fact, they were sticking their tongues out at the world community and waiting for the Swapo army to march in so that they could teach them a final, useless lesson they would never forget.
Except that the Swapo leadership did forget, and hoped that they would stay forgetful for a long time to come -- until some nosey parker dug up those bones and brought the whole shameful episode back to sickening life for all concerned.
Ahtisaari, meanwhile, is off on another mission of mercy to sort out more civil war atrocities in Bosnia. He just wishes he could forget about that whole sorry gang in that long-forgotten, brutal war for Namibia.
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