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# Interview with Henry Kissinger

By Ivan Fallon

Henry Kissinger, once the most brilliant and best-known diplomat on the planet, now its most seasoned diplomatic observer, consultant and sage, was in South Africa this week, the first time he had been back since those fateful days of international mediation just before the 1994 election. Now 72, he looks much as he did when he was the second most powerful man in the world as President Nixon's secretary of state, developing his famous shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East or brokering an end to the Vietnam war (which won him the Nobel Peace Prize). The voice is as distinctive and gravelly as ever, the eyes, behind the thick spectacles, as alert, the pronouncements as considered. Kissinger doesn't change.

I met him at Brenthurst, the Johannesburg home of the Oppenheumers, to talk about American policy on South Africa and Africa and his impressions of the place since he was last here. Kissinger does not pretend to be an expert on either, simply because in his day in the State department Africa did not feature high on the priority list. "When I was in government we were so preoccupied with Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the Middle East that we never got around to a consistent policy on Africa," he says. He really only focussed on it when he started an initiative to resolve the situation in Rhodesia in 1975, but he was out of government a year later. His comments on the present situation therefore he offers up as those of the layman: an expert and professional observer, but a layman nonetheless.

He is still astonished at the ignorance in America of African affairs and of South Africa in particular. "There is not sufficient distinction made between South Africa and the rest of Africa," he says. "Americans tend to jump it all together as the same messy place. For instance. I have a security man with me who is astonished at how developed Johannesburg is. Americans coming here are amazed at how advanced it is."

This is one of the reasons why South Africa has not received the expected flood of foreign investment so heavily mooted since the election. "Capital is short and people don't fully understand the potential here," says Kissinger. "There are so many other countries they can invest in. In my consultancy, I get to see a lot of companies who want to invest abroad. I've never yet had a client who has asked could he invest in South Africa."

That, he adds, could change rapidly if the right circumstances can be created - there are plenty of precedents. "China was not very important 10 years ago, and look at it now. And if you look at Malaysia 15 years ago, people didn't believe it could overcome its ethnic problems, with the Chinese population said to be too dominant and the Bumiputra with nothing. Yet they seem to have worked it out."

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He doesn't underestimate the scale of the problems here, yet after a week he was already taking a different perspective. "Before I came I saw it as possibly sliding gradually into the condition associated with so many African countries. I now see as more similar to some of the successfully developing countries."

On this trip Kissinger, besides meeting a broad section of politicians and leading businessmen, was exposed to the new generation of black South African businessmen for the first time - one of the factors which made him more optimistic about the country's future. Blacks in America, he reckoned, still had problems fitting into the modern business world, but the blacks he had met here were remarkably self-confident and assured. completely at home in their new environment. "The bigger black businessmen will soon learn what international business means, and there is great potential there," he says.

The contrast between his two most recent visits could not be sharper. When he was last here in 1994, there was little time to meet anyone other than political leaders and fellow mediators. He and the former British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington arrived in Johannesburg with a powerful team of international mediators in an eleventh hour attempt to find a way around the constitutional impasse between the ANC and the IFP which threatened not only the whole election process but also threatened civil war in KwaZulu Natal. Half the world's press, in South Africa to cover the election, watched them come and leave just 36 hours later, their mission apparently unaccomplished, with Kissinger remarking in his heavy German accent that their arrival had been based on an "honest misunderstanding".

"We were brought down to find some terms of reference which would get the IFP to join the election process," he explains now. "We had said in advance that all three parties had to ask us, and when we arrived we found there were different agendas between the different parties and it was quickly apparent to us this was not going to work."

If they had been dealing with the Middle East, he says, they might have hung around, but here that would have been the wrong thing to do. "If we had stayed, we would have become the problem. Both Carrington and I were veterans of negotiation and we thought they were not all that far apart, so there was a reasonable chance of them getting there on their own - which is what they did once we had gone."

That was not widely understood at the time however and their departure was seen by many as the prelude to a complete breakdown of negotiation and the beginning of physical struggle. As they boarded their planes, the headlines were universally gloomy: "Mediators take with them probably the last real chance of bringing the IFP into the election process," wrote The Star, adding that "Henry Kissinger must have drawn on every minute

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of his years of diplomatic experience to restrain himself when the high-powered team of mediators... was sent packing by the intransigence of the Republic's politicians."

He did draw on his experience, but not in the way the newspapers expected. Kissinger had seen it all before a thousand times, and was fairly unperturbed, smiling his way through his last hours in Johannesburg, insisting that no one was to blame and that the parties had made an honest attempt to bridge the gap between them. He never took the gloomy view of the press.

From the moment of their departure, the parties had to find an African solution to a very African situation - and, spurred on by the international concern surrounding the mediation failure, they did. One of the mediation team, and a former student of Kissinger's, Professor Washington Jalango Okumu, was to emerge over the next few days as the unlikely hero of the hour as he persuaded Chief Buthelezi back into the election process.

"In a way," he says now, "our failure achieved success. Our role was symbolic all along."

On his latest visit Kissinger had a chance to review the scene with some of the principles, including Cyril Ramaphosa who he describes as very smart. Does he expect Ramaphosa to go back into politics? "It's usually a disease that doesn't let you go," he remarks.

And the inevitable post-Mandela question: what will he say back in the US when he gets asked that, as he will? "I have the impression that they have the succession well in hand. Of course Mbeki is different to Mandela, but then he wasn't in jail for 27 years and he hasn't had to go through what Mandela went through," For Kissinger the more important question is the direction the country will take over the next crucial few years and particularly after 1999, and that he finds hard to read.

"But I'm fairly optimistic. There will be a lot of ups and downs, but I'm leaving on a high note."

At which point he rises, says goodbye to his hosts, and climbs in his car for an hour-long session with Archbishop Tutu at the airport before flying to Frankfurt, then Paris - and on and on. Henry Kissinger is as peripatetic as ever.

Add:

but I think he will do an
outstanding job."

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