Dirty War

badda bing badda boom war war war

## History

### Geneva Conference

News of Lusaka's capitulation was broken in Cape Town at 11:45am on May 7th, in time to be picked up by the lunchtime news in Russia and the morning news in the western hemisphere. It was acknowledged in Geneva sometime later, only a few hours before the conference was due to start debating the fate of South Africa. British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, making the announcement, paid implausible tribute to the Preservation Junta's 'civilising role' in South Africa, and spoke of 'this conflict that was forced upon us'. Yet in the subsequent months an extraordinary result would emerge from the conference tables - plural because Shulgin refused to sit at a common board with the IWAF delegates: despite the size of their victory and of British humiliation, the ANC would eventually be obliged to return with only half a loaf. How so?

The conference opened on April 24th 1954 with the arrival of the 200-strong delegation representing the nations of the IWAF. The team was led by John Strachey, a 53-year-old scion of a noble family and foreign minister for the Union of Britain. Strachey bore for years the respect of the international community, seen as an urbane, dilligent and sensible counterpart to the raving extremism of Grand Protector Oswald Mosley, despite serving for two decades as Mosley's principle instrument of mass murder as head of Britain's secret police the MDF. Only two years earlier, in fact, he had spearheaded the brutal Bloody Week purge of British political opponents. Alongside Strachey and the Totalist British was an American contingent who brought with them large consignments of caviar, with which to enrich their hospitality in the multilateral feasts they intended to host - none eventually took place. Vasily Shulgin extended his usual standard of diplomatic courtesy, bluntly turning his back on Strachey when the totalist extended a hand. The East Germans, who played the unofficial host to the talks, were far more concerned about Shulgin than the syndicalists, worrying quite reasonably that the old statesman's rancour would cause him to sabotage the conference. The obvious dominance displayed by Totalist Britain and America in the talks reinforced the Russian conviction that the ANC were little more than pawns of the west; at Geneva the delegations of Strachey and the American State Secretary Paul Ricca were seen everywhere: that of the ANC only in conference sessions, partly a symptom of western racial prejudice.

It became apparent very quickly that the only party anxious to continue the war in South Africa was Shulgin's. The minister of foreign affairs expressed disgust at having been invited to attend what he saw as a sellout to the syndicalists comparable to the Providence Summit. Veteran socialist columnist Max Saviliev observed:

> The Russian position at Geneva is an impossible one, so long as the leading VPP senators have no terms of peace except unconditional surrender of the enemy and no terms for entering the war except as a collective action in which now nobody is willing to engage.
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Yet Shulgin's obduracy actually played a key role in denying the ANC a settlement as favourable to them as their victory would have made likely. In 1972 President Andrei Gromyko failed to convince the Azanians that he was reckless enough to commit any excess of troops to the South African War - the 'Madman Theory'. Yet in 1954, all syndicalist delegations at the conference dreaded the idea of a Russian intervention in South Africa. The IWAF had enjoyed the Swedish War even less than the ETO had. They read newspapers and were acutely aware of the conservative forces who held sway in the Russian Republic. The Semyonov administration needed scant further provocation to commit Russian forces to South Africa, perhaps even conceivably nuclear weapons. What was more, though many hailed the ANC for possessing an infinite capacity for sacrifice, the truth was that by 1954 nearly a decade of war was beginning to take its toll. South Africa's 'liberated zones' groaned under the strain of waging a war whilst attempting to push through revolution at the same time.

The word 'partition' crossed the lips of the American delegation before anyone else. The ANC dominated the north of the country yet still possessed very little influence in the south. Sweden's division at the 59th Parallel, arbitrarily laid out by Nikolay Petlin in 1945, had set a precedent. On May 3rd, before the formal South Africa sessions had opened, D. F. Malan's pantomine government threatened to boycott the entire conference unless the British Government-in-Exile could guarantee that partition would not be considered. That same day, Shulgin excused himself from the summit, apparently taken ill but more likely desiring to distance himself from whatever verdict was reached. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko took his place, and the summit heaved a sigh of relief because 'Grim Grom' was rational where Shulgin was not. A flurry of bilateral conversations followed, involving all delegations, before the conference formally began on May 8th, beneath the shadow of Lusaka's fall.

For the first week, the IWAF's delegates were almost mute; the only two foreign ministers who seemed to display any impatience were Konrad Adenauer and Ricca. On May 10th, the ANC's deputy prime minister Bram Fischer delivered an opening statement on behalf of the ANC, proclaiming their commitment to securing the independence of all Southern African states, and promising that those South Africans who had fought against A. B. Xuma would be 'free from repression'. Then, to the amazement of the assembled parties, he expressed a willingness to consider partition: it seems without a doubt that the ANC had been heavily pressured into proposing this by Strachey and the Americans.

Now the option had been tabled by the syndicalists, this outcome became all but certain, though weeks of haggling would follow over where the border between a new Azania and South Africa should be drawn. The British Gov-in-Exile favoured a 'leopard-skin' distribution of territory, carefully selecting regions to be ceded to the ANC with the special objective of retaining Salisbury and Livingstone. On May 12th Malan's delegation again protested its rejection of any sort of divide - yet bilateral meetings between British and ANC officials over the ways and means began, encouraged by the Germans.

Away in the Russian Republic, Shulgin made clear his alienation from the proceedings, and conservative media began to whip up a frenzy. *Izvestia* opined that Germany 'looks remarkably like appeasers'. Andrei Gromyko held a press conference in which he made clear that partition was unacceptable, and in private began to feel increasingly irked by what he felt was a willingess on Adenauer's part to accede to syndicalist demands. In secret talks the Russians attempted to stiffen the resolve of the British to continue the fight, but it had long since evaporated: Gromyko was told bluntly that only immediate military action on Russia's part could dissuade them from cutting a deal. For that reason, Semyonov and Shulgin once again looked into forming a coalition for South African intervention, this time devoid of East Germany. Yet neither China nor Australasia would agree to participate, snuffing out the final spark of Russian enthusiasm for war. *Der Spiegel* bemoaned the early talks at Geneva as 'an appalling mess' and none of the participants disagreed.

Of course the war would not stop just because politicians had begun to ineffectively debate its end: as the delegates to-and-throed, the fighting and dying continued all across South Africa. Everywhere British forces were on the backfoot, and the flow of desertions from their locally-recruited forces became a flood. On June 4th James Cassels was persuaded to resign as commander-in-chief - after the scale of the disaster at Lusaka he had to go one way or the other, and this saved Montgomery from having to dismiss him, which would blot the other man's record, however tarnished it arguably already was. Taking his place was General Miles Dempsey, one of Montgomery's most trusted adjutants who proved no more imaginative than his predeccesor. The string of defeats continued; in one disaster the 2nd Armoured Brigade, whilst conducting a withdrawal from Gwelo, fell victim to a devastating succession of ambushes on June 24th. They lost half their men and 80% of their vehicles, and the Scots Guards, one of the oldest and finest regiments still in British service, was utterly wiped out carrying out a rearguard defence of the survivors. On July 12th a setback of similar magnitude befell the 30th Armoured Brigade. All the while, signs pointed towards Mbeki planning a new offensive into Southern Rhodesia: an IWAF rail-link to the northern border of the 'liberated zone' from Zaire was known to be delivering 4,000 tons of munitions and supplies a month to the ANC.

Against the backdrop of these continuing military setbacks, the talks continued, sluggish as ever. That the conference could stagnate amidst so much bloodshed provoked dismay and anger from a global audience; it was the subject of a hugely popular sketch by Spike Milligan on the British Department of Television at a time when censorship was still dominant after the Bloody Week, suggesting the extent of public mood. Yet increasingly a light began to shine through at the end of the tunnel - in Moscow, awareness was dawning that partition wouldn't be the worst outcome compared to the entirety of South Africa falling to the syndicalists, as was seeming more and more likely with every battle the British lost. Andrei Gromyko accepted the need to take a deal. On the other side of the table, on June 15th a secret strategy session was convened, where Strachey pressed the ANC to accept a compromise and become more realistic, notably by abandoning the big lie that they had no forces in Angola and Mozambique. Ricca seconded his European counterpart.

On June 18th the conference was interruped by another dramatic development: Winston Churchill announced his resignation before a hastily convened press conference on the steps of the British Embassy in Cape Town. His voice solemn and emotional, the veteran great statesman of Britain expressed his sorrow at having been unable to deliver the country out of its crises through to 'greener pastures'. He signed off with a final farewell to the British people and to the world:

> The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.
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Since the disaster at Lusaka there had been speculation in the press that the old bulldog might finally relinquish the post he had held for twelve years, but it still came as a shock - not least to his cabinet, the majority of whom were thousands of miles away in Geneva. For one fevered moment it looked as though there might be a leadership election right there in the conference. Yet circling ministers eventually fell in line to back Anthony Eden, who had long been the de facto heir to Churchill, for the post. The Foreign Secretary thus abandoned his place at the negotiating table in Geneva to embark on an exhausting 30-hour round-trip to South Africa and back to be confirmed by the king. Upon touching down again in Switzerland, he emerged haggard but in surprisingly good spirits, and gave another bombshell announcement that he too would resign unless a South Africa ceasefire had been negotiated within 30 days.

A deadline was thus imposed on the conference, a characteristically bold move from Eden who no doubt believed that if he couldn't end the deadlock now, his Premiership would be dead before it had even gotten started. Luckily for him, the other delegates at Geneva seemed to welcome this new limit; Strachey told Adenauer and others that he was keen to see the deadline met, and on June 23rd the Union of Britain's foreign minister met with the new Prime Minister, the highest ranking summit between the two rival Britains in history. The two men got on unlikely well. Strachey did not dance around the objective of his meeting: keeping Russian troops out of South Africa. Eden for his part disdained the Russians as an aloof and arrogant bunch, and still nestled some quiet hope that against the odds the Commonwealth could continue to go it alone. Thus, he agreed with Strachey that there was only one way to achieve this: partition.

The Preservation Junta's representatives, left pretty much to their own devices whilst the Government-in-Exile took charge, now protested bitterly against partition of any kind. They were led by Marshal Montgomery himself, who had scrambled onto the first plane to Switzerland upon being informed of the newest option on the table. Yet for all their squalling, there was only one opinion which mattered anymore: that of the Kremlin's, and whether they would impose a veto. Adenauer wrote to Semyonov making his case: "I think Eden has made up his mind to clear out on the best terms available. If that is so, I think he is right." On June 24th, the President delivered a speech to the Russian Federal Assembly where he declared that Russia would adopt a new policy; defending lower South Africa, Mozambique and Angola from syndicalist takeovers - "Hold this area, and fight subversion with all the strength we have." His statement implicitly acknowledged loss of Rhodesia.

The syndicalists meanwhile reviewed their own positions in preparation of what would be a crucial next round in Geneva, meeting at Luluabourg in Beneluxian Zaire over the 3rd-5th of July. There, John Strachey recalled the Nordic War of 1950 to A. B. Xuma and the ANC delegation:

> The key to the issue of Sweden lay in Russian intervention […] None of us expected that [Wrangel’s] reinforcements would arrive so quickly […] If it hadn’t have been for Russian intervention, the Nordic Revolutionary Army would have been able to drive Konrad Hallgren’s forces into the sea.
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This was a fear mirrored by the Americans - the IWAF was apprehensive that if the ANC overplayed their hand, as Vidkun Quisling's Norden had done, then a geostrategic disaster could unfold.

In 1954, the Bosporus Crisis was only five years in the past - France was still burying the bodies from *L'incertitude*, and Britain had just emerged from Mosley's vicious Bloody Week purge. Some Russian conservatives still nursed quiet hopes, however ludicrous, that totalism could be forced out of Europe kicking and screaming in a second greater triumph. For the IWAF, and especially Britain, security was the foremost priority - their intervention in the Nordic War had been driven by the feeling that Wrangel's victorious army could not be allowed to reach the North Sea. Mosley felt far less secure at the time of Geneva than his regime's subsequent longevity would suggest; his primary instruction to Strachey was to secure Britain's security, and for both of them this seemed to entail appeasing Russia's sensitivities. A non-syndicalist South Africa was fine if it calmed Shulgin and Semyonov.

So Strachey laid out his case at Luluabourg. The Dirty War could not be allowed to continue - as well as it might if things carried on the way they were, with the British Exiles still committing some 470,000 troops against 310,000 ANC. If, on top of this, East-West tensions worsened, then Moscow may well lash out, potentially destroying a decade's struggle's gains. Mbeki was pushed to concede that without a political settlement the war could be dragged on for two to five more years, an opinion shared by his IWAF advisors. And so just like that the focus turned to negotiating; the Exiles were then proposing a far northern boundary at the 18th Parallel, only just south of Salisbury. The ANC countered with an equally untenable offer for the 30th Parallel, running deep into the Northern Cape and Free State. Strachey then stepped in, proposing a compromise near the 25th Parallel which A. B. Xuma did not seem to object to. On July 7th the foreign minister reported to Mosley, and his master accepted the need for concessions and a swift settlement. The Americans concurred, for similar geopolitical reasons.

The final stage of the Geneva Conference began on July 10th, with one notable missing member - Shulgin, who petulantly refused to attend. In his eyes, the deal under discussion was comparable in shame to that of Russia's surrender to the German Empire at the end of the First Weltkrieg, and merely a vehicle towards syndicalist takeover of all Southern Africa. And this, after the Republic had poured ₽25 billion on funding the anti-syndicalist war effort, more than even Poland had received in post-Second Weltkrieg economic aid. Another complication came in the happy apathy of Eden to bother keeping Montgomery in the loop on the progress of negotiations. From a grand Swiss chalet outside Geneva the old Marshal continued to resist partition, even after urgings from the Russian ambassador that half a country was better than nothing. Like a medieval lord he dictated orders from his isolated castle to his delegates in the conference to pursue at all costs the fantasy of keeping Salisbury and Livingstone under British control - here was a foretaste of his later rejections of unwelcome realities. He insisted upon placing on record the Preservation Junta’s view, that partition ignored 'the unanimous desire of the South African people for national unity'.

Eventually on July 16th, the Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko arrived back to lend a reluctant Russian presence. Under strict orders he remained aloof however from the horse-trading now being conducted in a tense round of bilateral and ad-hoc meetings. Two days later on the 18th the assembled diplomats agreed that the proposed ceasefire would be monitored by an international control commission comprised of the Chinese, Poles and Italians. On July 20th a partition was finally reached between the British and the ANC on the 24th Parallel, which gave the two new states a long and snaking border. This border 'would be provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary'. All South Africans were granted a 300-day grace period to decide under which regime they would henceforth live, with guaranteed freedom of movement north or south. General elections would be held in both states within two years - until then, both nations would join Portugal as ‘avowed neutral states’.

The British would have to go, but where? Certainly not home, that land had long since been lost. The clearest option - indeed the only one really - was Australasia. Yet the Ark Royal Accords continued to cast a grey pall over relations between the British Government-in-Exile and their Oceanian subject - when the Australasian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was eventually persuaded to be dragged to Geneva, he made it crystal clear that if they were to play host to the Royal Family, it would in no way be under similar circumstances to South Africa's Preservation Junta. Indeed the Australasian parallel, Governor William Slim's Emergency Government, had been dismantled five years earlier. The Federation had grown proud of its self-sufficiency from their disgraced masters, and Eden was quick to recognise that his was the weaker hand. Ultimately, the British took what little they could get; Australasia would welcome the Royal Family and the Exiled government, but both would be firmly sidelined out of the nation's politics. For many, this seemed firmly the end of any last claim the Exiled British had to maintaining their old honour.

The agreements at Geneva were at last finalised in two main documents. The Agreement On the Cessation of Hostilities was signed on July 21st 1954 by the British Exiles and the Azanians. The Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference was verbally endorsed by the British Exiles, the Germans, the British Totalists and the Americans. Shulgin issued a vain statement that emphasised his nation’s special interest in the fate of the newborn twins, and warned that any violation of the deal’s terms would be 'a matter of grave concern and seriously threaten international peace and security.' Everyone involved - save of course the Russians - gave credit to Anthony Eden for his performance as unofficial host, through many weeks when the talks seemed doomed to fail. An eyewitness wrote of his 'almost inhuman good humour and patience': this was the finest hour of the career as a statesman of the brilliant, unstable, handsome long-suffering British foreign secretary and Prime Minister.

The Geneva Accords, as the agreement ultimately became known, merely represented a formalisation of the terms of truce between the bloodied British and the syndicalists due to assume control of Azania: that fact later became the basis by which Moscow and Cape Town later maintained that their refusal to conduct national elections within the agreed two-year-timeframe was no breach of anything they had consented to. Global observers quickly concluded that the deal that had been salvaged out of Geneva, although unpalatable, was the best outcome they could have realistically hoped for.

Semyonov and Shulgin wasted no time in throwing their support behind the hobbled successor-state to South Africa, lauding the new government with an air of legitimacy and importance intended to restore the administration's self-esteem and respect in the eyes of their VPP constituents after failing to save the north. Remarkably, as things turned out it became Bernard Montgomery that Moscow embraced as the poster-boy of the post-Colonial South Africa, a ridiculous proposition given his legacy in the country. The Russian foreign minister, speaking at a dinner with the old Marshal days after the Accords were signed, said ridiculously that the new South Africa might yet prosper "free of the taint of British colonialism", whilst toasting the very man who had presided over the country's subjugation for close-on a decade. Yet in Montgomery the Russians saw a man they could rely on to protect their interests, who they believed they could control, and who already pulled all the strings in the South African government; ultimately convenience trumped any idealistic notions for a fresh start.

The ANC left Geneva convinced that John Strachey had sold them out, but A. B. Xuma convinced himself that hegemony over all South Africa could be deferred for a year or two, confident that north-south elections would see unification follow. For now he and his comrades addressed themselves with ruthless single-mindedness to building the socialist state of which they had dreamed for so long, into which the south would soon be subsumed. For their part nobody in the East saw Geneva as a success story, only an exercise in damage-limitation. The achievement had been to extract an exhausted colonial power from an unwinnable war.

What was extraordinary about the Accords was that the new Cape Town government got so much, the triumphant ANC so little. This was because the Americans and IWAF were far less interested in the fate of Southern Africa, and explicitly of Azania, than Moscow’s Cold Warriors supposed. Oswald Mosley had no wish to see an over-mighty syndicalist ANC lauding over potentially millions of white Europeans, and appears to have been anxious to draw neighbouring African nations into the Union of Britain's sphere of influence and not A. B. Xuma’s.

#### The British withdraw

A general ceasefire took effect on July 27th - for the first time in a decade, a tentative peace held across South Africa. After years living at COSA’s secret headquarters in the Orange River delta, COSA secretary Nelson Mandela emerged to start his travels across the south on a hand-pumped railway trolley. In Azania, the syndicalists assumed control. The British Army left Salisbury, soon to be renamed Harare, on October 9th. The occasion was marked by an itinerary of defiant and vainglorious military parades that prompted one Russian reporter to think of Don Quixote. Amid a roll of drums, blare of brass and clash of cymbals, Gen. Richard Hull, the ringmaster of Lusaka, saluted the flags of regiments which had fought and died - commandos, legionnaires, marines, Caribbean, Canadian, together with armoured columns that chewed the soft tarmac of Salisbury's streets. Britain's exit was not a noble and generous departure, upper-lip stiffened, but a spiteful policy of scorched earth; the colonials removed or destroyed everything that could be of value to the victors.

One ten year old South African thought the trumpets of the British quitting Salisbury ‘so sad they seemed to be sobbing’. Their flag was lowered for the last time over the citadel on a cold, blustery, wet afternoon. Two NCOs folded the sodden Union Jack, then presented it to the presiding general, who in turn passed it to the garrison commander. Rain masked the tears of many officers and men as the band played *God Save the King*. Then the garrison boarded its trucks and drove away towards the coast, leaving that outpost of British imperialism forever. It was just sixty-four years since the colonial power had founded the city.

The departing British, tails between their legs, were first replaced by representatives of the International Control Commission; "Chinese Army officers with ancient weapons and tired, furtive looks, pale-faced Poles with their odd triangular caps, and wine-drinking Italians in a permanent state of exhaustion," to quote an ANC cadre. They were followed by the victors, the first elements of Mbeki's army. In one writer's words:

> They came forward in two files, one on each side of the street, small men in drab uniforms wearing grass-woven cloth-covered helmets fitted with camouflage nets. Loaded down with weapons and equipment, the tribesmen of the 308th Division were entering an environment totally unfamiliar to them. Their approach was heralded by the soft shuffle of hundreds of feet in soft tennis shoes: the ANC entry into Salisbury thus proved one of the most silent victory marches in history.
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Peasant soldiers gawked in wonder at the grand buildings and broad avenues, booty of their struggle. They were watched by crowds who displayed an enthusiasm that was not entirely spontaneous: cadres had toured the city for days persuading its hesitant citizens that it would be in their interests to cheer the victors.

An elderly peasant who lived beside Route 1 said: ‘The happiest day in my whole life was when I saw two truckloads of British soldiers leaving Pretoria for the last time. They drove by my house, and looked so sad.’ The Exiles left behind the graves of 93,000 of its soldiers who had died since 1945, casualties in the continued death-throes of the world's once-mightiest empire as it clung onto South Africa, a sinking man clawing at sand. Those men had no poet to weave for them shrouds of romance.

A decade later in Cape Town, however, a legend was spun that the fallen of the Scots Guards, killed in the withdrawal from Gwelo, had been buried besides Route 2 in Natal where they perished. With so many bodies, and little time if they wished to continue their pursuit of the 2nd Armoured Brigade, the ANC soldiers buried the dead standing upright in the stiffness of death. As the story goes, the dead were entombed facing north, grey mottled faces staring 6000 miles, unseeing. Facing Britain.

Facing home.

*Article continues in the South African Interbellum.*