Was just reading the Scotsman when i stumbled on this....
One of the most controversial military figures in the final years of apartheid
General Magnus Malan, former South African defence minister.
Born: 30 January, 1930, in Pretoria, South Africa.
Died: 18 July, 2011, in Cape Town, aged 81.
MAGNUS Malan, who has died aged 81, was one of the most controversial
military generals in South Africa's final apartheid years. As South African army chief and then chief of the defence force from 1973 to 1980, and subsequently as defence minister between 1980 and 1991, he devised and implemented a "total strategy" against what he termed the "total onslaught" against the white-ruled state.
Under Malan's command, soldiers were used to crack down on rising discontent in black townships and on the campuses of black universities.
Urged on covertly by governments and intelligence establishments in Washington, London, Paris and some black African states, notably Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia, he also sent the South African army, air force, navy and special forces into Angola, endowed with huge natural resources, to fight a long and historically contentious war against Soviet-supported Cuban and East German forces.
The controversies that swirled around him were illustrated by the different reactions to his death of South Africa's ruling black-dominated African National Congress and of FW de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, who negotiated with Nelson Mandela a transition to multiracial democracy.
ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said Malan's death "marks the end of an era in South Africa's transition from the tyranny of apartheid to constitutional democracy, with Malan having ultimately accepted the need for change in the country".
Former president de Klerk, in a statement issued by his foundation for constitutional development, said: "General Malan played a leading role in developing the South African defence force into the most formidable military force in Africa. Under his leadership the defence force played an indispensable role in defending South Africa and our region until the collapse of Soviet communism facilitated the commencement of the negotiations that led to the establishment of our non-racial constitutional democracy."
Magnus Andre De Merindol Malan was born in Pretoria. His father was a biochemistry professor who became a member of parliament for the Afrikaner-dominated National Party and later speaker of the whites-only parliament.
Malan tried to join the army when he was aged just 13, returning after he was rejected to complete his secondary education in one of Pretoria's top Afrikaans-language high schools. He joined the navy on graduation from the University of Pretoria with a degree in military science. He transferred to the army and rose to become chief of the army in 1973 at the age of 43 after training at the United States Army's general staff college at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
President PW Botha relied heavily on Malan, making him defence minister, in which role he exercised huge power as the head of a secretive group of military and political commanders who became known as the "securocrats". They presided over multi-billion dollar budgets and liaised closely with Israel in the development of weaponry, including planes, and South Africa's own nuclear bomb arsenal, which was dismantled in the early 1990s before the ANC came to power.
At a time when realistic National Party leaders had conceded privately that white minority rule was ultimately doomed and South Africa was becoming isolated internationally, Malan, a highly efficient and disciplined operator, developed a white national strategy to counteract what he termed the "total onslaught" against the country on all fronts – militarily and politically and in terms also of diplomacy, religion, culture, sport and propaganda.
His repression of township unrest led to the declaration of a state of emergency in 1986. He sanctioned several defence force raids against the military bases of the then-banned ANC in neighbouring countries. He approved the formation of the covert and sardonically named Civil Co-operation Bureau, which was neither civil nor co-operative nor an office bureau, staffed by some of Afrikanerdom's most thuggish policemen and soldiers and which became notorious for a series of grisly and covert assassinations.
Appearing before the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, Malan testified that his overriding consideration was white South Africans' survival, continuing: "We were fighting a war. I had more than 100,000 troops under training or busy with operations. So we were pretty much busy. We had a front approximately as far as London is from Moscow."
As defence minister Malan – in co-operation with a new chief of the defence force, General Jannie Geldenhuys – oversaw the September to October 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanavale along the banks of the Lomba and Cuito Rivers in remote south-eastern Angola. The then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had committed a billion dollars to Cuban forces, whose leader Fidel Castro had pledged that his fighters would not stop until they reached Cape Town. But Gorbachev warned Castro that if the offensive failed Soviet support for Cuba's Angolan expedition would stop.
Malan and Geldenhuys, already aware that South Africa's economic and military resources were being severely eroded and that negotiations would have to begin with the black majority, flung all resources into Cuito Cuanavale and, in the biggest land battle in Africa since the 1942 German-British battle for Tobruk, defeated the Cubans and their allies on the banks of the Lomba.
South Africa and Cuba had fought each other to exhaustion. Gorbachev withdrew finance to Castro, and by July 1989 the New York Accords, which transformed southern African history, had been signed by South Africa, Cuba and the United States. Cuba, under the treaty, withdrew from Angola, and on return home General Arnaldo Ochoa, who commanded Cuban forces at Cuito Cuanavale, was executed by Castro. South Africa withdrew from its colony of South West Africa, now independent Namibia.
ANC guerrilla fighters in Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique lay down their arms and a few months later Nelson Mandela was released from life imprisonment to begin negotiating a transition to South African majority rule.
Malan took part in the peace negotiations with the Cubans which began in secret in a cellar in Browns Luxury Hotel in the heart of London's Mayfair. There the opposing military men smoked Cuban cigars and drank South African brandy. They bantered about who had really won the battle for Cuito Cuanavale. Geldenhuys told his Cuban counterpart he did not mind Castro claiming victory as long as his forces left Africa and returned to Cuba.
With the ANC in government, Malan and 19 other top apartheid-era military officers were charged in 1995 with murder and with creating hit squads to destabilise the country, and specifically with the 1987 massacre of 13 people in the Zululand township of Kwamakutha. After a seven-month trial Malan and the others were cleared in a verdict that found that the apartheid government had paid Zulu anti-ANC vigilantes for the killings, but ruled that the prosecution had not proved a link to Malan. Nelson Mandela, by then president of South Africa, defended the court verdict without commenting on its substance.
Malan, who died in his sleep from a heart attack, is survived by his wife of 49 years, Magrietha, two sons, a daughter and nine grand-children.
Topic Author
