Negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa
Although there had been gestures towards negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s, the process accelerated in 1990, when the government of F. W. de Klerk took a number of unilateral steps towards reform, including releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and unbanning the ANC and other political organisations.
However, increasing local and international pressure on the government, as well as the realisation that apartheid could neither be maintained by force forever nor overthrown by the opposition without considerable suffering, eventually led both sides to the negotiating table.
On 4 January 1974, Harry Schwarz, leader of the liberal-reformist wing of the United Party, met with Gatsha (later Mangosuthu) Buthelezi, Chief Executive Councillor of the black homeland of KwaZulu and signed a five-point plan for racial peace in South Africa, which came to be known as the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith.
The declaration stated that "the situation of South Africa in the world scene as well as internal community relations requires, in our view, an acceptance of certain fundamental concepts for the economic, social, and constitutional development of our country."
Shortly after it was issued, the declaration was endorsed by several chief ministers of the black homelands, including Cedric Phatudi (Lebowa), Lucas Mangope (Bophuthatswana) and Hudson Nisanwisi (Gazankulu).
[5] The very first meetings between the South African Government and Nelson Mandela were driven by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) under the leadership of Niel Barnard and his Deputy Director General, Mike Louw.
[6] To facilitate future talks while preserving secrecy needed to protect the process, Barnard arranged for Mandela to be moved off Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982.
Although the South African government arrested the Cape Times editor, Tony Heard, for conducting and publishing the interview it was important for setting the political ground work for a negotiated settlement.
[10] As the secret talks bore fruit and the political engagement started to take place, the National Intelligence Service withdrew from centre stage in the process and moved to a new phase of operational support work.
Police raids also turned up Operation Vula material which de Klerk believed substantiated his concerns about the sincerity of the ANC's commitment to negotiations and about its intimacy with the South African Communist Party (SACP).
[16] The Pretoria Minute was followed on 12 February 1991 by the D. F. Malan Accord,[19] which contained commitments arising from the activities of the working group on political offences, and which also clarified the terms of the ANC's suspension of armed struggle.
[20][21] Its case was strengthened by a major scandal in July 1991, known as Inkathagate, which unravelled after journalist David Beresford published evidence, obtained from a Security Branch informant, that the government had been subsidising the IFP.
[24] The first multi-party agreement towards negotiations, it did not resolve substantive questions about the nature of the post-apartheid settlement, but did include guidelines for the conduct of political organisations and security forces.
[26] Buthelezi personally, though not the IFP, boycotted the sessions, in protest of the steering committee's decision not to allow a separate delegation representing the Zulu monarch, Goodwill Zwelithini.
[26] In the interim, electoral losses by the NP to the Conservative Party had led de Klerk to call a whites-only referendum on 17 March 1992, which demonstrated overwhelming support among the white minority for reforms and a negotiated settlement and which had therefore solidified his mandate to proceed.
[33] However, de Klerk's triumph in the referendum did not curtail – and may have inflamed – political violence, including among the white right-wing;[20] nor did it resolve the deadlock that the working groups had arrived at on certain key questions.
In terms of the content of the constitutional principles, the ANC favoured a highly centralised government with strict limitations on regional autonomy, while the IFP and NP advocated for federal systems of slightly different kinds, but with strong, built-in guarantees for the representation of minority interests.
[26] The ANC viewed such proposals as attempts to dilute majority rule and possibly to allow the maintenance of de facto apartheid in the country's minority-majority regions.
[34] On the other hand, the NP held that the constitution should be negotiated among parties, in a forum resembling CODESA, and then adopted by the existing (and NP-dominated) legislature – both to protect minority interests, and to ensure legal continuity.
[35] With CODESA stalled, the ANC announced its return to a programme of "rolling mass action", aimed at consolidating – and decisively demonstrating – the level of popular support for its agenda in the constitutional negotiations.
In the aftermath of the massacre, the ANC capitalised on public sentiment to further promote its mass action campaign, and also harnessed the increased international attention – on 15 July, Mandela addressed a meeting of the United Nations (UN) Security Council in New York about state complicity in political violence, leading to a UN observer mission and ultimately to additional UN support for various transitional structures, including the Goldstone Commission.
On political violence, the parties agreed to further engagements, to a ban on carrying dangerous weapons in public, and to security measures at a specific list of hostels which had been identified as "problematic".
This concession on the ANC's part was in keeping with an evolving internal debate, much of which revolved around a paper published during the same period in the African Communist by Joe Slovo, an influential SACP leader and negotiator.
[47] In February 1993, the National Executive Committee of the ANC formally endorsed the sunset clause proposal and the idea of a five-year coalition GNU,[48] a decision which was to lubricate multi-party negotiations when they resumed later that year.
[32] Among them were Slovo of the SACP, Ramaphosa of the ANC, Meyer of the NP, Colin Eglin of the Democratic Party, Benny Alexander of the PAC, Pravin Gordhan of the Transvaal Indian Congress, Frank Mdlalose of the IFP, and Rowan Cronjé of Bophuthatswana.
However, in a new innovation, the Negotiating Council at the end of April resolved to appoint seven technical committees, staffed mostly by lawyers and other experts, to assist in formulating detailed proposals on specific matters.
[57] On the day of the council's inauguration in late 1993,[57] Mandela and de Klerk were travelling to Oslo, where they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end apartheid.
Buthelezi's IFP was convinced to participate in the elections by a secret deal negotiated with the NP in which all of the land of KwaZulu was transferred into a trust with the Zulu King as sole trustee.
[60][61][62] Opposition from other wings of the former COSAG was also neutralised: in March, days after Mangope announced that his "country" would not participate in the elections, his administration was effectively paralysed by the Bophutatswana crisis.
[64] In 1995, the government passed legislation mandating the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice tribunal which over the next three years investigated human rights violations under apartheid.
