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dam-l Letter to Editor on Lesotho Conflict/LS
The following is a letter to the editor of the Mail & Guardian (South
Africa weekly newspaper) on the recent military intervention by SA into
Lesotho. The author is Graeme Addison of the South African Rivers
Association (SARA). It appeared in the Oct. 2-9 issue.
>Sir
>Howard Barrell has some serious explaining to do about why he temporises
>with nonsense in his review of South Africa's invasion of Lesotho.
>Barrell, in common with a host of shallow commentators in local media,
>repeats the line that we went into Lesotho to kick arse for symbolic
>reasons because we were miffed by Zimbabwe's role in Congo.
>
>Barrell has no-one Over a Barrel when when he suggests that Lesotho's
>politics is inexplicable and their politicians are used to weak
>political institutions. They are weak because South Africa has made them
>so over generations of exploitative political relations with a vassal
>state. They are not inexplicable at all, but represent the politics of
>survival in an environment where Lesotho has traded its manpower and
>natural resources for the crumbs off South Africa's table.
>
>The attack was more than symbolic. Like the United States in Kuwait, we
>had a strategic interest in a precious natural commodity. The Lesotho
>Highlands Water Scheme and in particular Katse dam are the key to South
>African thinking (if you can call it that) about Lesotho. Under the two
>nationalisms, white and black, our policy towards this impoverished
>region has been to bantustanise it. Initially we needed Lesotho's cheap
>migrant labour. Now we need their water at a price we can afford, and
>indeed we need to set that price. Further extraction of wealth takes the
>form of bleeding the country of the one remaining precious resource that
>it has in abundance.
>
>There has been a groundswell of popular opposition to Katse since its
>inception. People are not fools, even if they are peasants and
>construction workers isolated from the world. There have been broken
>promises, strikes, killings and contractual verneukery aplenty. PW Botha
>started the dams; the ANC is proceeding with them for the very same
>reasons: that South Africa's industrial progress would be strangled
>without water from our poor neighbour.
>Barrell should ask his inside sources in government (those whom he
>delicately avoids quoting) whether they care one way or the other about
>the condition of Maseru, or the rest of Lesotho, so long as the water
>continues to flow north to the Vaal. Of course they will put hand on
>heart and say it's all for regional development. Get in there and shoot
>the people. That's development. Subjugating the capital militarily was a
>nice way of saying that water is thicker than blood.
>
>Graeme Addison
>graemea@intekom.co.za
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Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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