Rambo nation

Andy George in Cape Town looks at the background to South Africa's disastrous intervention in Lesotho - the first foreign deployment of troops since the demise of apartheid.

The official line on why Southern African forces had to intervene is deceptively simple. Action was taken in response to urgent appeals from the duly elected government of Lesotho for assistance in dealing with what amounted to a coup attempt by supporters of opposition parties backed by dissident elements in the Lesotho Defence Force (LDF).

But, critics object, the reason why the opposition parties in Lesotho were supported, not just by elements in the army but by large numbers of ordinary Basotho, was precisely the governing LCD's lack of legitimacy. It won an election widely thought to have been invalidated by large scale fraud. Indeed, early drafts of a report by the Langa Commission set up to examine allegations of electoral malpractice, and chaired by a senior South African judge, appeared to support many of the opposition's claims. But, when the report was published immediately before the forces marched into Lesotho, any potentially inconvenient findings had disappeared.

The military intervention's effects has had truly cataclysmic consequences for Lesotho. Damage to its commercial infrastructure has been estimated at being twice the country's annual GDP. The widespread looting and arson followed rather than preceded the military invasion. Businesses owned by South Africans, other foreigners and locals associated with the Lesotho government were targeted, suggesting that the destruction was at least in part a form of protest - albeit misdirected and self-destructive. Yet, rather than South Africa being targeted to pay, it is the Lesotho government which has already been handed an extensive bill for the military assistance in the first eight days of the intervention.

Little considered reaction to events in Lesotho has emerged from South Africa. The ANC's allies in the South African Communist Party (SACP) have endorsed the action - but only after what the government must have seen as an unconscionable delay.

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