Special Hearings — Caprivi Hearings — 1997-08-06

WITNESS:   His - his definition of it is most probably the most pithy, because he looks at the five principles that underpin counter revolutionary warfare.  He says the first principle is for that country or that state or that organisation waging counter revolutionary warfare is what he called you must preserve yourself and you must annihilate the enemy.  You've got to preserve your own power base.  This accords with your general principles of war.  It's pointless going on to the offensive if your own power base is not secure, because if your own power base is going to be undermined, well, then you can't wage war, logically and self-evidently.  So he says you've got to preserve your own power base;  ensure that your own social and political support base and your infrastructure support base is intact and then at the same time one must obviously continue waging war against the enemy, but that's not sufficient.  He goes on to outline the second principle and he calls that the consolidation

MR MACADAM: /of

MR MACADAM: 2A of strategic bases.  He says in order to win this political war, you can't lapse into sort of a false sense of confidence.  You've got to out and win political support amongst critical sections of the population.  They may not people who traditionally supported you, but at the end of the day they are the people who are going to ensure the success of your counter revolutionary campaign, hence such statements as the war is 80%, political 20%, military - so you've got to make sure you win over support in the political and the social sectors of your population.  The third principle he outlines is he says you've got to do this by mobilising the masses and you've got to mobilise the masses politically.  You've got to mobilise the masses militarily, indeed the two of those are indistinguishable, in order to accomplish this.  You've got have a variety of political organisations capable of doing that and you've got to ensure that they have the military means of protecting themselves.  He says the fourth principle is you've got to try and secure outside support for your struggle, because without that you will be deprived of legitimacy and it's essential to have that international recognition and the fifth point he maintains is that in order to do that you've got to have unity of effort.  That once again is a military term, is you've got to make sure that all the different agencies and departments and individuals involved in this counter revolutionary struggle work as one and don't start pulling in different directions and those basically are your principles of counter revolutionary warfare.

MR MACADAM: Sorry, Dr Williams, could you just repeat your fourth one?  I didn't catch you.  You were talking quite

MR MACADAM: /quickly

MR MACADAM: 2A quickly and I didn't catch it entirely.  If you wouldn't mind, please?

WITNESS:   The fourth one is called securing international support.  It acknowledges that any struggle waged by guerillas or waged by government forces requires levels of international support.  Clearly your guerillas will be supported by international opinion, in some case they'll be supported by countries who provide them with rear(?) bases.  Similarly, counter revolutionaries acknowledge and recognise the importance of international support for the effort, both morally but also practically, financially, because one's own resource base is quite limited.

MR MACADAM: And lastly the concept the unity of effort, between whom would there be unity?

WITNESS:   The unity of effort works at a number of different levels.  It's got to work all the way down from national literally to village level or local level, be it rural or urban and it's got to be between such critical actors as the political authorities, the political elite.  It's got to be between the civilian administration and it's got to be between the armed forces.  It can't become a purely military exercise and it can't become a purely political or civilian exercise.  All these - it's a difficult thing to achieve.  It's more difficult for the State to achieve that than a revolutionary organisation.  The State has a whole lot of judicial, juridical, legal and political constraints that hamper that unity of effort, but a high level of unity effort is required in order to accomplish those objectives.

MR MACADAM: And you said that this was one authority in this field.  Were there any other authorities that you feel

MR MACADAM: /were

MR MACADAM: 2A were significant and ... (intervention)?

WITNESS:   There was, at a more general strategic level and a person who also had considerable influence over the formulation of strategy in this country in the seventies and eighties was a General Boufre(?) who was a general in the Algerian Armed Forces and he wrote a book called "On Strategy".  He was the person who really outlined the concept of total strategy, which had considerable influence in the sixties and the seventies in many developing countries.  There's a Frenchman called David Kaloula(?) who also wrote on this, on the art of counter revolutionary warfare.  There was a person, I can't remember his initials now, but quite authoritive called Thompson, who wrote about the British experience in the Malaysian.  In this country the former General Pops Fraser in the 1960s wrote on the application of these principles in the South African environment, so there are a number of different authorities.  Those are the major ones, but if one goes into any military library, into the archives, you'll find that there's a wide range of books, both of an academic and of a doctrinal nature that are written on this.

MR MACADAM: And in the South African context, in the early 1960s a conflict arose between various groups who now are known as the Liberation Struggle and the then government of the day.  What type of conflict would you classify that struggle?

WITNESS:   Well, clearly according to the definition that we're using now and the doctrine we're using now, that would have been defined as one of the earlier stages of a revolutionary struggle.  The organisation had committed itself to armed conflict;  was involved in the initial political preparation, the Stage 1

MR MACADAM: /and

MR MACADAM: 2A and Stage 2 of classic revolutionary organisation and so that would be the initial stages of the organisation of a liberation struggle.

MR MACADAM: And what was the response by the government of the day to that revolutionary ... (incomplete)?

WITNESS:   I suppose that's a question of historical record, because in 1960/1961 in some senses the State was responding reactively, but doctrinally one finds in the 1960s the State and particularly the armed forces beginning to do a lot of work on the strategic and the doctrinal ramifications of counter revolutionary strategy.  They do this both at a doctrinal level.  You'll find in the late sixties the then South African Defence Force organising a number of manoeuvres and exercises up in the then far Northern Transvaal with the intention of organising various counter insurgency manoeuvres.  This is reflected in a lot of the thinking in the former SADF;  it's reflected in the doctrinal development in the staff colleges and within the defence force as a whole, so I mean there were a series of practical and doctrinal preparations that were initiated then and received full expression as the South African Defence Force is deployed in the then South West Africa and actually begins to gain a practical experience of counter insurgency warfare.

MR MACADAM: And could you sort of in broad terms sketch for us how this experience in South African forces developed and what it actually entailed?

WITNESS:   It's difficult to do it in a brief period of time, but I suppose one can refer to a number of salient moments.

MR MACADAM: Yes, if you could do that, please?