The Senate duly voted 84–16 to approve a comprehensive package of economic sanctions. The EC too went ahead with a further package, agreed in June. Mrs Thatcher now had no choice but to acquiesce. Yet at a special Commonwealth Conference held in London in August she was still defiant. For the first time in the history of the Commonwealth, the London conference overrode British dissent and agreed to implement measures.
In 1987 Mrs Thatcher took her most positive step with the appointment of a new ambassador to South Africa. Robin Renwick had taken a leading part in devising the Zimbabwe settlement, and subsequently wrote a book demonstrating that economic sanctions never worked. In July 1987 Mrs Thatcher sent him back to southern Africa to pursue what he called ‘unconventional diplomacy’ in Pretoria. Publicly he was still required to echo her exaggerated faith in Buthelezi. But at the same time he was implicitly authorised to build bridges to the ANC. Over the next three years, he wrote later, he received ‘no instructions but full backing from her’ for the important part he played in helping to negotiate the release of Mandela and eventually the peaceful transition to majority rule.22
The critical opening came in 1989 when President Botha suffered a stroke and was forced – unwillingly – to step down. His successor, F. W. de Klerk, was not at first sight a great improvement. But Renwick had already identified him as a genuine reformer who had learned the lesson of Rhodesia and wanted to talk to the responsible black leaders before it was too late; Mrs Thatcher seized on him as a South African Gorbachev and was hopeful that there would now be some movement in Pretoria.
When in February 1990 de Klerk announced the immediate release of all remaining political prisoners, including Mandela, and the unbanning of all political organisations, including not only the ANC but the South African Communist Party, she regarded it as the vindication of her lonely struggle. To the Commons the day after Mandela’s release she insisted: ‘I do not think sanctions have achieved anything.’23 She immediately lifted those measures which Britain could rescind unilaterally and pressed European and Commonwealth leaders to follow suit. She was correspondingly disappointed that Mandela’s first speech before the massed cameras of the world’s press rehashed all ‘the old ritual phrases’ about socialism and nationalisation. She had hoped that he would now distance himself from the ANC; she should have realised that this was the last thing he was likely to do.24
They finally met in July when Mandela visited London and called on the Prime Minister in Number Ten. Tactfully, he recognised that Mrs Thatcher had opposed apartheid in her own way, and thanked her for her efforts to get him released. He also thanked her for her role in Zimbabwe and in improving East – West relations, but urged her again to maintain the pressure on de Klerk for a negotiated settlement. She in turn urged him to give up the armed struggle, talk to Buthelezi and abandon the ANC’s commitment to nationalisation. When a reporter asked Mandela how he could talk to someone who had once denounced him as a terrorist, he replied that he was working with South Africans who had done much worse things than that. For her part, Mrs Thatcher found Mandela dignified and impressively unbitter, but still ‘stuck in a kind of socialist time warp’; she still feared he might turn out a ‘half-baked Marxist’ like Mugabe.25
South Africa showed Mrs Thatcher at her best and worst. She was principled and courageous, but at the same time stubborn and self-righteous. She had a good case against sanctions but failed to win support for her view, preferring to lecture and thereby alienate potential allies rather than try to persuade them. Rather, she seemed to glory in her isolation, as if the fact of being isolated made her right. Her only powerful ally outside South Africa was President Reagan: but while he personally shared her Cold War perspective, South Africa was not an issue on which he wished to upset black America or pick a fight with Congress, so she got less help there than she might have hoped.
Was she right? The outcome might suggest so. But most of those who supported sanctions still believe that they were an essential part of the pressure that eventually compelled white South Africa to change. Undoubtedly she played a part in persuading de Klerk to move as far and as quickly as he did. The night before his historic speech in February 1990 he passed a message via Renwick to tell Mrs Thatcher that she would not be disappointed. But her role should not be exaggerated: there were bigger forces at play. As with Gorbachev in Russia, she was lucky that a leader came along at the right moment whom she could appear to influence.
The Middle East
By the 1980s Britain had no remaining direct responsibility in the Middle East, but it was still a part of the world in which Mrs Thatcher took a close interest. She regarded Israel – like South Africa – as essentially part of the West: the only true democracy in the region, with a prosperous and enterprising economy, ringed by hostile neighbours and threatened by Palestinian terrorism. Her instinct was to class the PLO with the IRA and the ANC as terrorist organisations which should be treated as international pariahs until they abjured the use of violence. At the same time, however, she knew that the State of Israel had itself been founded in terrorism. She could not forget that the current Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, had been the leader of the Irgun gang which bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one British soldiers, in 1946, and swore never to shake his hand – though eventually she did. She also recognised that Israel had seized Palestinian territory by force in 1967 and had occupied it ever since in defiance of the UN. She was sympathetic to the fate of the displaced Palestinians – she had visited a refugee camp in Syria when she was Leader of the Opposition in 1976 – and believed, as a friend of Israel, that the Israelis would only secure peace when they were prepared to give up some of the occupied territory to get it. Her hope – as in South Africa – was to encourage ‘moderate’ Palestinians to come forward with whom the Israelis could negotiate.
Whenever she visited the region, or received Middle Eastern leaders in London, she made a point of reporting to President Reagan her conversations and impressions. After visiting the Gulf in September 1981, for instance, she sent Reagan what his staff described as ‘a rather somber assessment of views she picked up during her recent talks with a variety of senior Arab political figures’. Richard Allen told the President he should read the whole letter, but summarised its main points for him:
• A mood of disappointment and alienation now dominates moderate Arab thinking about the US. (Arabs hesitate to express the true strength of their feeling directly to us.)
• The view prevails that we are one-sidedly committed to Israel and ignore the Palestinians.26
This message, an aide noted, ‘calls for a response’. But two more letters followed before the White House got round to drafting a reply in which the President thanked her for ‘the candid insights that you have shared with me’.
I understand the perceptions of the Arab leaders on the peace process alluded to in your letter. A comprehensive Middle East peace remains our objective, and I agree fully that one cannot be achieved unless it addresses the Palestinian problem.27
The next month Reagan assured her that Israeli withdrawal must be ‘the fundamental basis of a settlement on the West Bank and Gaza’;28 and this was the premise of proposals which he set out in September 1982. But Mrs Thatcher never felt the Americans put enough pressure on Israel. The following year she was again giving Washington ‘her read-out on meetings with King Hussein in London… She makes a powerful case that the President weigh in with the Arabs to demonstrate again that we are committed to the September 1 proposals.’29 She was critical of Israel’s bloody invasion of southern Lebanon in June 1982, but equally sceptical of the value of the multinational – predominantly American – UN peace-keeping force sent to Beirut, and restricted British participation to a token contribution of just one hundred troops. The killing of 300 American and French troops by a suicide bomber in October 1983 only confirmed her view that they were a sitting target: she urged Reagan not to retaliate but to withdraw the multinational force.30 The next year he did so. In her memoirs she described the American intervention in Lebanon as a lesson in the folly of military action without a clearly attainable objective.31
By February 1984, following the massacre of refugees in southern Lebanon, Mrs Thatcher’s patience with
