S. Africa Sees Rebel Defeat in Namibia

After fighting the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) for two decades in one of the world’s longest guerrilla wars, the South African army believes that it has won the military battle. But it knows too that it could still lose the more important political struggle for the future of Namibia, Africa’s last colony.

The SWAPO guerrillas, who have been fighting since 1966 for the independence of Namibia, or South-West Africa, have been reduced by an intensified South African counterinsurgency campaign to little more than hit-and-run attacks that are virtually suicide missions.

The South African army would like to claim victory, a major achievement since modern insurgencies have proved difficult to defeat and SWAPO appeared to be winning 10 years ago. But it knows that the real battlefield in Namibia is the political arena, where SWAPO remains strong.

“This is a political war,” Col. As Kleynhans, a senior intelligence officer, said at military headquarters in Windhoek, the Namibian capital. “The military aspect is only a small component . . . but a military defeat for the enemy creates the opportunity of a political victory for us.”

The costs of this war, long forgotten by most of the world and eclipsed in the last three years by the turmoil within South Africa itself, have been horrendous.

More than 10,000 SWAPO insurgents have been killed over the last decade, according to South African figures, and reported civilian deaths totaled more than 1,500. Over 20 years, nearly 25,000 are believed to have been killed. In a population of only 1.2 million, these casualties are nearly on the scale of those in the last years of the Vietnam War.

Peace Is Unknown

Although South Africa has been increasingly able to replace two-thirds of its forces with troops recruited from Namibia itself, it keeps several battalions of white draftees “on the border.” The war still costs Pretoria an estimated $1.5 million a day and nearly that much again in economic assistance. Such sums are punishing for a country with its own urgent needs.

And life here in Ovamboland, where half of Namibia’s population lives and where most of the fighting occurs, has been on a war-footing for so long that people have difficulty conceiving what peace would be like.

Ovamboland lies in the extreme north of Namibia and borders Angola.

A permanent state of emergency is in force here. Soldiers and police seem to be everywhere in their armored vehicles, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew is in effect. Land mines make many roads a risk. Children are abducted from their classrooms to become guerrillas. Village headmen and other leaders are still targets for assassination, and police counterinsurgency units track suspected SWAPO guerrillas and supporters with a frightening ruthlessness.

SWAPO Fights On

“A guy here sits between two fires, either of which can destroy him,” said Maj. Jock Seaward, an intelligence officer at the army’s Oshakati operational headquarters. “He’s never been too keen on us, but I think he’s not so keen on SWAPO any longer. . . .

“SWAPO has lost its strongman image through the beating we gave it in the past four or five years. It still has considerable support among the Ovambos, but not on the scale or of the same intensity.”

But the ever-resilient SWAPO fights on, putting more of its efforts now into broadening its political base throughout Namibia and into seeking international support for free elections that it is convinced it would win despite its military setbacks.

Time, in SWAPO’s view, is on the insurgents’ side, says Anton Lubowski, a SWAPO spokesman in Windhoek.

“The more time we have over the next two to three years, the better it is for us,” Lubowski, a white lawyer, argued. “We want to strengthen and restructure our grass-roots organizations and to increase our recruitment and mobilization of the people throughout the country, not just in Ovamboland.

“While there may have been some setbacks in the armed struggle, it is only one form of struggle, along with political and diplomatic efforts, intended to put pressure on South Africa to withdraw and finally give Namibia its independence. . . .”

But South African commanders, who have become students of counterinsurgency campaigns around the world, are persuaded that they are winning where most others have failed.

“Time is generally on the side of the insurgent, but that is not so here,” Kleynhans said, adding that local residents, once SWAPO supporters, are providing security forces with most of their intelligence now. “SWAPO can see that time is running out on them in terms of the support of the people, who won’t follow losers.”

The struggle for Namibia, a mineral-rich hunk of bush and desert twice the size of California on the southwest coast of Africa, is an obscure problem left from the continent’s colonial history. A German colony for 30 years, the territory was taken over by South Africa during World War I and promised independence first by the League of Nations and later by the United Nations.

But that quest for independence has been bedeviled by Namibia’s own complex politics, South Africa’s fears of a black revolution and the rivalries of the world’s superpowers.

“I’d like to say that, if everyone would leave us alone, we could solve our problems and settle down to live in peace with one another,” Fanuel Kozonguizi, justice minister in the territory’s appointed government, said in Windhoek. “Unfortunately, our problems are very difficult in themselves, and now they are mixed up, really mixed up, with everyone else’s problems.”

South Africa continues to administer Namibia in defiance of repeated U.N. calls for its independence, and years of international negotiation, including American and West European mediation, have failed to resolve the issue.

Pretoria apparently fears that an independent government in Namibia, where whites number only 100,000 and apartheid is rapidly crumbling, would heighten demands among South African blacks for majority rule there. It also argues that SWAPO, which it contends the South African Communist Party helped found as the Ovambo People’s Organization in 1957 and which the Soviet Union finances and arms today, would probably dominate any Namibian government and threaten South African security.

In its efforts to prevent SWAPO guerrillas from infiltrating Namibia from their bases in neighboring Angola, South Africa regularly chases the insurgents across the 1,000-mile-long border and occasionally clashes with Angolan troops. South African officers credit the cross-border operations, including major offensives in 1981 and 1984, with greatly reducing the military threat but acknowledge that Pretoria wants to avoid an escalation.

Soviet Assistance

To maintain pressure on Angola’s Marxist government and on SWAPO, South Africa supports the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, an anti-Communist group known as UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi. His forces are fighting the Luanda government and also help to prevent SWAPO infiltration into northern Namibia.

Angola, to protect itself from South Africa and UNITA, reportedly has 37,000 Cuban troops and advisers, and Luanda has grown increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for military and economic assistance.

And the United States, hoping to reduce the resulting tensions in southern Africa, to get the Cubans out of Angola and to bring Namibia to independence, has been negotiating, on and off, with both Luanda and Pretoria, while assisting UNITA.

“Namibia is an international problem, and the world community has a duty and responsibility to solve it,” Lubowski contended. “While we are putting all our efforts into the struggle for independence and self-determination, we frankly depend on the international community to get things moving toward a solution. South Africa, however, is making a concerted effort to take Namibia off the international agenda, and that is what lies behind its attempts to destroy SWAPO militarily and politically.”

Although SWAPO’s military setbacks began when South African commanders got permission from Pretoria for cross-border operations against the insurgents’ bases in Angola, the more telling blows politically have come in the past three years in keeping the guerrillas out of Ovamboland, where SWAPO’s strength has been greatest.

Taking advantage of the dense bush during the rainy season from December to May, SWAPO commits about 900 guerrillas to its annual infiltration campaign, according to South African intelligence officers. Aimed primarily at Ovamboland, the guerrillas focus their attacks on South African forces, the police, government facilities, power lines and certain “prestige targets,” such as white farms and the Namibian capital of Windhoek, which was rocked by a huge car bomb last week that did considerable damage but caused no injuries. They are also assigned to propagandize local villagers and recruit new members.

But most of the insurgents no longer get much beyond the border, according to military commanders.

Security forces, which military spokesmen say normally number about 30,000, including police counterinsurgency units, in northern Namibia, are beefed up and undertake aggressive search-and-destroy operations as soon as the SWAPO detachments are within reach.

Army reaction forces and police counterinsurgency units track down those guerrillas discovered inside Namibia and boast of a high rate of success. And “hot pursuit” back across the border into Angola is routine, the spokesmen say.

The guerrillas’ total presence in Namibia, as a result, has been cut to no more than 90 at a time, according to South African intelligence officers. SWAPO’s front-line detachments, which used to operate within 10 miles of the border, have pulled back at least 40 miles and have only a third of their previous strength. The small groups of insurgents who do infiltrate often find themselves pursued by whole companies of troops in armored vehicles, supported by helicopter gunships and artillery.

“When they get in, they are in twos, threes and fours,” said Maj. Derek Els, a deputy battalion commander at Eenhana, about five miles south of the border. “They are damned hard to find then--we are looking for a handful of men in areas that are 10 miles by 10 miles, if we have good intelligence--but there is also not too much they can do militarily in those numbers. . . . Terrorism, yes, but an attack on the security forces, even an ambush, is very hard and very dangerous for them.”

The 200-man attacks that SWAPO used to mount against South African bases like Eenhana and Oshakati have been reduced to occasional mortar and rocket bombardments, according to intelligence officers here. Land mines and sabotage have replaced ambushes.

In 1980, when the fighting was heaviest, 1,175 incidents were reported, more than half of them skirmishes between South African troops and SWAPO guerrillas; last year, according to intelligence officers, there were 476 incidents, two-thirds of them land mines, sabotage or terrorism.

SWAPO’s Strength Cut

The security forces reported killing 645 guerrillas last year, up from 599 the year before; in the first six months of this year, they said they had killed 515.

“A guy who starts moving south in a SWAPO detachment at the start of the rainy season in December to infiltrate in January or February has no better than a chance in three or four of surviving to head back north in June,” Seaward said.

This grinding war of attrition has cut SWAPO’s strength from an estimated 16,500 in 1978 to the present 8,700, according to Kleynhans and Seaward. Three-quarters of those are either fighting with Angolan forces against the UNITA rebels or defending SWAPO’s rear headquarters and supply lines against South African attack.

Although the South African command headquarters does not disclose its total casualty figures, military authorities last year did announce individually the deaths of about 35 South African soldiers and about 30 members of the South-West Africa Territorial Force and police.

However, government critics, both in Namibia and South Africa, believe that the security forces conceal many casualties, not reporting the deaths of most black soldiers and policemen or of whites in special operations units.

“By the book, you need a ‘kill ratio’ of better than 10-to-1 to defeat an insurgency,” one senior staff officer here commented, “and we have that. . . . I don’t think there comes a time when you totally eliminate an insurgency militarily, however good your ‘kill ratio’ may be, but you can reduce its effectiveness to where it is not much worse than a nuisance. . . .

Visibility Is a Must

“SWAPO can’t afford to stop fighting, however, because it would lose even more prestige. If they are only able to mount a fraction of their previous attacks, they will do so, however high the cost to themselves, just to keep their visibility. A bomb once a month still delivers a message.”

South African strategy appears to be shifting to deprive SWAPO, if it can, of this remaining advantage of its “armed struggle”--propaganda that makes SWAPO more than just another of the 41 registered political parties seeking Namibian independence.

“What SWAPO is doing is armed propaganda, but armed electoral propaganda,” says Dr. Kenneth Abrahams, a former member of SWAPO, who broke with the group over its basic strategy and is now active in community organization in Windhoek. “SWAPO wants to get votes for its sacrifices if there is ever an agreement on Namibia’s independence and elections under United Nations supervision. The armed struggle keeps SWAPO’s profile high and helps it retain popular support, although it accomplishes virtually nothing.”

SWAPO, identified for most of its life with the Ovambos and the war in northern Namibia, is now actively trying to build its ranks in Windhoek and other towns, helping to organize labor unions, establish youth groups and mobilize community organizations around a variety of political, economic and social issues.

But SWAPO’s rivals, a bewildering array of ethnic parties and splinter groups, are competing with it for popular support, and the security forces have stepped up their own “hearts-and-minds struggle,” seeking through a variety of civic action and economic development programs to build support for political moderates, if not for the government.

“We can’t relax even though it may seem that we have won,” a senior security official said in Windhoek. “The winner of the political struggle will be the real winner.”

Lubowski, an increasingly important figure in SWAPO, linking its internal wing with its exiled leadership, calls the present political maneuvering “the start of the end-game.”

“This is what always happens in liberation movements toward the end of the struggle as the people get near power and the opportunists seek it for themselves,” he said. “We in SWAPO aren’t worried. All the military power of South Africa has not defeated us; our boys are still there, facing the most formidable army on this continent. So why do they believe that they will defeat us with a few political puppets and tricky maneuvers?”

Michael Parks recently was in Namibia on assignment.