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 Africa, Oliver Tambo responded on behalf of the African National Congress (ANC) 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”. 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 15 March 1989, speaking to reporters in London, following his meeting with the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, apartheid South African Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, referred to the great significance of the shift in Soviet Policy. “The season of employing violence is over, it’s gone”, he averred, since in the new international climate “terrorism is not going to be used any more to achieve political objectives, and the organisations that embark on this might as well pack up. They are in
