The Commonwealth EPG Visit: Part 2
On 21 May 1986, the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group (EPG) admitted that their Mission to Africa initiative had failed. This followed their meeting with members of the apartheid South African government’s Cabinet Constitutional Committee, which included Ministers Chris Heunis, Louis le Grange and F.W. de Klerk on 19 May 1986.
At about 06:00, in the morning before the meeting between the EPG and the apartheid government, six helicopters began circling overheard of Gaborone’s Mogoditshane suburb, with one dropping pamphlets addressed to the Botswana Defence Force soldiers. The message was, “We have no fight with you. For your own safety, please do not interfere. Our only objective is to eliminate the ANC (African National Congress) gangsters”. Five of the helicopters landed, two of them about 500 metres from a complex of houses. A number of heavily armed troops disembarked and marched to a compound, which they sprayed with bullets before retreating to the helicopters.
Later in the same day, the Inter-Press Service announced that the attack in Botswana by armed men in helicopters was accompanied by other similar attacks in Zimbabwe and Zambia. In Harare, an ANC office was bombed and the house of a refugee was razed to the ground. An apartheid government statement claimed that a property belonging to the ANC’s Department of Information and Publicity in Makeni, some 15 kilometres south-west of Lusaka was also hit.
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