It was the first time ANC hard-liners had gone for broke in a current drive to remove homeland leaders who support the government. Radicals like Kasrils have been itching to mount such a “mass action” operation since June, when the congress suspended talks with President F. W. de Klerk, accusing his security forces of complicity in a massacre in the black township of Boipatong. Half the leaders of the 10 ethnic enclaves created under apartheid support the government, but Ciskei’s Brig. Oupa Gqozo became the ANC hard-liners’ prime target. A former South African Army soldier, he rules a government-funded fiefdom in the ANC’s Eastern Cape heartland–the ethnic power base that will be crucial to the ANC’s fortunes whenever the country holds its first nonracial elections. Although clearly bent on confrontation, Kasrils said ANC strategists didn’t think Gqozo’s troops would fire on a crowd in full view of the press.
The tragic miscalculation discredited the hard-liners–and opened the way for a fresh round of negotiations. South Africans normally sympathetic to the congress accused its strategists of callously gambling their followers’ lives. So did the Bush administration and European governments, which also condemned Brigadier Gqozo’s trigger-happy army and the white-minority government in Pretoria that created, armed and trained it. Said one European diplomat: “There is a growing impatience overseas and a feeling that if the main parties go on with the posturing, they are doing so at the expense of South Africa.”
True to form, the government and the ANC at first simply blamed each other. The day after the slaughter, Kasrils told reporters that the killings had put the whole future of negotiations in doubt, adding that “the question of armed struggle has to be looked at again.” But his support was evaporating. The ANC later cleared the way for a meeting between de Klerk and ANC leader Nelson Mandela; it would be only the second such session this year. Meanwhile, the government abandoned its longstanding rejection of United Nations mediation. With a cycle of reprisals in Ciskei gaining momentum, both sides realize that the kind of wholesale violence so far limited to Natal province and the townships around Johannesburg might engulf yet another region. That’s a prospect both want desperately to avert.
