17-10-2008, 11:35 AM
Paul Rigby Wrote:The context for Lockerbie and the assassination of Bernt Carlsson by plane bomb
Carlsson’s murder removed a potentially formidable obstacle to the panoply of dirty tricks deployed by Washington, London and Pretoria, to minimise SWAPO’s electoral victory. He was a protégé of Olaf Palme, and his career embodied Swedish social democracy’s commitment to the Third World democratization (4).
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...es/Namibia
Christopher Wren, “Afrikaner Says Army Subverted Namibia Vote,” NYT, 1 July 1991
In the year that preceded Namibia's independence in March 1990, Nico Basson was known around Windhoek, the Namibian capital, as an unobtrusive public relations man who helped the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, a multi-racial coalition of centrist political parties.
As Mr. Basson now tells it, he was actually an army reserve major employed in an elaborate plot by the South African military to manipulate Namibia's transition to independence. Mr. Basson said his role in the conspiracy, which he contended had Cabinet authorization, was to devise a press campaign that camouflaged a murkier intelligence operation aimed at subverting the South-West Africa People's Organization, the black liberation movement popularly called Swapo.
Reducing Victory Margin
The strategy, he said, reduced Swapo's margin of victory to 57 percent of the vote in the United Nations-supervised elections in Namibia in November 1989. This fell well short of the two-thirds majority that Swapo needed to impose the socialist-oriented constitution it preferred. The Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, which Mr. Basson served as a spokesman, emerged with 28 percent and sits as the official opposition in Parliament.
"I think they've been very successful," Mr. Basson said of the South African military. "They used Namibia as a dress rehearsal for what's happening in South Africa."
Interviewed in his luxurious house in an affluent northern suburb of Johannesburg, Mr. Basson contended that the South African Defense Force was using the same methods to influence the outcome of the power struggle now under way in this country, where the Inkatha Freedom Party, a black faction that is more willing to cooperate with the white Government, is challenging the country's leading anti-apartheid group, the African National Congress. The Congress has repeatedly accused the Government of aiding Inkatha in factional clashes that have killed 7,000 people in the last three years. 'A Strong, Credible Alternative'
"They say the only way to break the A.N.C. is to create a strong, credible alternative," Mr. Basson said.
In remarks in early June, Mr. Basson said the military bought AK-47 assault rifles for distribution to some Inkatha members and was helping them set up cells in areas where Inkatha has little influence.
AK-47's have been used in recent factional fighting between supporters of Inkatha and the African National Congress, but Mr. Basson offered no evidence to support his assertions of Government involvement. Inkatha and the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance have both denied receiving any support from the South African military.
A spokesman for the South African Defense Force, Commandant Riaan Louw, dismissed Mr. Basson's allegations as "unsubstantiated" and "ridiculous." He confirmed that Mr. Basson served in the army from 1982 to 1986 but said "he has no intelligence background whatsoever." But at the same time, Commandant Louw said that Mr. Basson was being sued under the Protection of Information Act on charges that he disclosed details of his 1989 contract with the Defense Force, which precluded more detailed rebuttal.
Mr. Basson talked of how the military pumped money into the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance. To fuel fears of Swapo, he said, the plotters exploited reports that the organization had imprisoned dissident members in Angola and disseminated disinformation through local radio broadcasts. Intelligence agents infiltrated Swapo's ranks, he said, and placed an informer in the office of Martti Ahtisaari, the United Nations' special representative in Namibia. Plans for Sabotage
Mr. Basson asserted that a notorious army unit, the Civil Cooperation Bureau, had plans to bomb Swapo meetings, put cholera germs in the water at two camps for returning exiles, firebomb vehicles of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group and kill prominent Swapo sympathizers.
No cholera outbreak occurred, and only one attack on United Nations property was reported. But Anton Lubowski, a lawyer who was the only white in Swapo's leadership, was gunned down in front of his home on Sept. 11, 1989, and Mr. Basson said that though he had no evidence, he thought that agents of the Civil Cooperation Bureau could have been responsible.
Mr. Basson said he befriended Mr. Lubowski in Windhoek, and they agreed to compile a dossier on the military's clandestine activities.
"It never came out because he was assassinated," Mr. Basson said.
After the killing Defense Minister Magnus Malan announced that Mr. Lubowski had spied on Swapo for the military, an allegation that Mr. Basson said he could not confirm.
For his undercover services, Mr. Basson said, the military paid about $400,000 to his public relations company. Why, he was asked, would he betray the white Afrikaner establishment to which he belongs?
"I'm a concerned citizen," Mr. Basson replied. "My problem is, if you don't stop destabilization, you will never get peace in South Africa."
He said his assignment in Namibia in 1989 exposed him to a world beyond white South Africa, and that he was upset by the zeal with which the security forces, with tacit United Nations consent, hunted down Swapo guerrillas trying to infiltrate back from Angola.
"I think it's wrong to use state resources for partisan political ends," Mr. Basson said. He said that 8 percent of South Africa's military budget went for secret purposes.
Mr. Basson said he wrote President de Klerk in April, offering to share what he had discovered. He said Mr. de Klerk's office told him to put it in a memorandum or testify before a commission.
"I refused to do it because then they will know what I know," Mr. Basson said, referring to the military, and would use it to mount a cover-up. "It's a handful of people conspiring, but they are very clever, well structured, well funded."