Johannesburg
South Africa’s mysterious military mission into the Central African Republic seems to be blowing up in our faces, quite literally.
News agencies reported on Sunday that as at least six SA National Defence Force troops had been killed by rebels as they seized the capital, Bangui, from President Francois Bozize.
SANDF spokesman Brigadier-General Xolani Mabanga confirmed that some soldiers were killed and some captured when their base outside Bangui came under attack on Saturday, although our soldiers had eventually beaten off the rebels.
He said the SANDF had been unable to confirm numbers.
However, it’s pretty clear that the South Africans were unable to stop the rebels overrunning Bangui and evidently forcing Bozize to flee the country.
Mabanga also announced that the SANDF had sent more troops to protect and perhaps extricate the troops and equipment already there.
With Bangui already overrun, it does sound ominously as if the rest of our soldiers are essentially surrounded, and that whether the reinforced contingent stands or runs, it will have a nasty fight on its hands because it evidently lacks heavy weapons and heavily armoured vehicles.
Why the government has exposed our troops to this danger has never been properly explained.
In January, when Zuma announced he was dispatching 400 more soldiers, he explained that they were essentially necessary to protect the soldiers and equipment already there.
And so the Presidency and the Department of International Relations and Co-operation (Dirco) have consistently taken no questions on this mission, referring all queries to the SANDF in line with their insistence that it is a purely technical military operation and not a political one.
That has always been hard to believe.
The first South African reinforcements arrived in the first week of January, just as the Seleka rebels were halting a new offensive against the capital. They then negotiated a peace and power-sharing deal with Bozize.
Some South African official boasted off the record then that the arrival of the South African troops had cowed Seleka into suing for peace.
In other words, these officials privately presented the operation as a very political foreign policy initiative, rather than the purely technical military one they were presenting it as publicly.
It also emerged, unofficially, that the military generals and Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula had advised Zuma in January to evacuate the 26 SANDF troops on the ground and to abandon their equipment, which wasn’t much anyway, as the SANDF didn’t have the aircraft to get it out.
But Zuma dismissed their advice, saying it would look bad if South Africa cut and ran, so he sent in the first batch of 200-odd reinforcements.
Then, last week, the Seleka-Bozize peace deal fell apart.
Seleka claimed Bozize was reneging on his side of the bargain, and so renewed their assault on Bangui.
Now the SANDF and South Africa are in a very difficult, dangerous position, facing a Hobson’s choice.
Do we extricate our troops and just get out, now that Bozize has been toppled and the country lost?
That would be both humiliating for South Africa and devastating for Africa’s efforts to discourage coups.
Or do we stay and fight Seleka to try to restore Bozize to power?
Which could cost more lives and make us look like we’re propping up an unsavoury leader.
That’s the way it has looked all along to the Seleka rebels and most others.
If the hidden Dirco spin doctors are honest that Zuma’s real purpose was in fact to stop Seleka seizing the country – probably replacing one bad government with another equally bad – to enable negotiations to take place for a better government, then that purpose should have been explicit and should have been part of a broader political strategy.
That would have included putting pressure on Bozize to keep his promises under the peace deal, if indeed he did renege on them.
It’s hard to avoid concluding that this has been an ill-conceived mission.
Independent Foreign Service