Oliver Tambo Addressing the OAU Ad-Hoc Committee on Southern Africa
On 22 March 1989, addressing a one-day meeting of the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) Ad-Hoc Committee on Southern, Oliver Tambo made a move on the African National Congress’s (ANC) behalf in response to Pik Botha’s and Margaret Thatcher’s utterances on Negotiations. Tambo urged the OAU to adopt “a strategy that would involve a kind of Resolution 435 for South Africa, which would enable Africa to take the initiative and not respond to strategies of those who had defended (apartheid) South Africa at every turn” (Xinhua, 22 March 1989). Tambo cited the advantage of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 435 as serving to create an apt framework for the resolution of the Namibian conflict.
What had propelled Tambo to react in this manner were the once-stable international currents that were beginning to shift and deleteriously putting pressure on the resolution of the southern African conflicts. For example, on 14 March 1989, responding to a journalist at a press briefing in Moscow, the Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Gennady Gerasimov, repudiated Soviet support for armed struggle in South Africa. “What armed struggle? How can one support something which doesn’t exist?” (Guardian, 18 March 1989).
At a Novosti Press roundtable in Moscow the following day (New York Times, 16 March 1989), Soviet Head of the Department of African Countries, Yuri Yukalov, mentioned that
