Rescue Efforts in Mozambique Give Southern Africa Some New Heroes

More than 200 of the expected 600 U.S. troops bound for flood-stricken Mozambique arrived at South Africa’s Hoedspruit air base Monday. But unlike participants in most other U.S. humanitarian efforts around the world, these GIs will have an especially tough act to follow.

To put it in military-speak, South African rescuers have kicked butt in Mozambique. However, unlike in the bad old days of apartheid, a predominantly white team is doing good in the neighboring country and winning praise.

“We all watched that stuff on CNN with the South African crews making those impressive rescues,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Mike Nachshen, who arrived from New Jersey. “Our job has been made infinitely easier by the South Africans. They really know their stuff.”

It is feared that the flooding in Mozambique has claimed thousands of lives. About 1 million people have been forced to flee their homes. The Mozambican government estimates that it will cost $250 million to rebuild roads and bridges. Food assistance will be needed well into next year because of lost crops and ruined farmlands.

Yet for all the misery, the February rains also gave southern Africa some unlikely heroes. While most of the world was just watching, about 75 South African soldiers rescued more than 15,000 people and delivered 600 tons of food and medical supplies.

“The South Africans were the first and have stayed the longest,” said Annie Foster, the Mozambique field office director for Save the Children. “They have been amazing. My hat really goes off to them.”

South Africa is the biggest regional power in southern Africa. But it also shares a lot of bad history with Mozambique.

It was just over a decade ago that South Africa’s former white-minority regime was doing everything in its power to make life miserable for Mozambique. There is still a strong suspicion that the South African military was responsible for the 1986 plane crash that killed Mozambican President Samora Machel, a Marxist reviled by apartheid-era Pretoria for supporting the black liberation movements here.

Disaster Solidifies Fledgling Partnership

A lot has changed since the advent of black-majority rule in South Africa six years ago. South Africa is now Mozambique’s most important trading partner, and Machel’s widow, Graca, is married to former South African President Nelson Mandela. But the flood assistance of the past month has transformed the relationship like nothing before.

For nearly two weeks, the South Africans footed a daily bill of up to $200,000 for the relief operation, at a time when the northeast of their own country was being battered by floods and the government was introducing an austerity budget in Parliament. Only now, with the Americans and others arriving in large numbers, are the South Africans planning to scale back their crews. The first Americans in the new relief effort plan to arrive in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, today. Crews will then move on to Beira, where U.S. helicopters will be based.

Perhaps more important than timing and money, however, is the hue of the rescue effort. Most of the hands reaching into the murky flood waters from the South African helicopters have been white. Some of these soldiers had previously performed deadly missions across southern Africa for the white-minority government.

“Some of these have nearly drowned trying to rescue people,” said Dumisani Rasheleng, an aide to South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Zuma. “And the color of the people didn’t even come into discussion. That is a tremendous, profound change. Apartheid was based on terrorizing the whole region. Now we are forgetting our past, forgiving each other and working for the better.”

The South African military is not boasting about its assistance to Mozambique, and white officers don’t like indelicate comparisons being drawn with their old jobs.

Brig. Gen. John Church, who coordinates air support for the South African Air Force, said his crews are just doing their bit to help a needy neighbor. Like many armies in the post-Cold War world, the South Africans are stepping up peacekeeping capabilities and disaster relief.

Church’s understatement about the South African contribution is telling in itself. With rescuers growing weary, the 33-year soldier took the controls of an Oryx helicopter for five days, plucking 587 people from trees and rooftops before returning to his desk job in Pretoria on Sunday. Church never flew missions over Mozambique under apartheid, but he did participate in U.S.-backed operations against the Angolan government at the height of the Cold War.

“It never enters our mind about the past,” he said. “We are living in a new era. We only work for the future.”

The South African National Defense Force is a collection of seven military organizations, including the army of the former white-minority regime, the military wings of the liberation movements and the security forces of the former black homelands.

Some black air crews have been trained since 1994, but as a practical matter, the most skilled airmen are veterans of the former white army, which had an air force. For that reason, the rescue operation has been dominated by white soldiers.

Race Is Hot Button for S. African Military

Race has been a huge issue in integrating the new defense force. In September, a black soldier was shot and killed after he gunned down seven whites at the Tempe military base in Bloemfontein. Defense officials say a white commander had refused to listen to the soldier’s problems because the soldier would not speak in Afrikaans, the language of white South Africans of Dutch and French descent.

Earlier, the military’s top commander, who is white, was forced into early retirement after the disclosure of an outlandish intelligence report prepared under his command that claimed disgruntled blacks were plotting against Mandela’s government.

For the moment, those troubles are taking a back seat to the news from Mozambique. The South African military has posted a story on its Web site--https:/www.mil.za--titled “Friendship Knows No Borders,” along with a dozen or so of the congratulatory e-mails it has received from around the world.

One of the messages came from a group of South Africans who immigrated to England.

“Most of us have come overseas for better work opportunities and less crime,” it said. “With the coverage we have seen, we want you to know that you are all in our prayers, and for once in a very long time we are proud to be South African.”