Yale - UN Oral History 
Professor Chester Crocker 
James Sutterlin, Interviewer 
July 20, 1998 
Georgetown University, Washington DC 
James Sutterlin: Professor Crocker, I would like first of all to thank you for 
agreeing to participate in this Yale oral history project on the United Nations. I would 
like to start, really, by asking you a rather general question. In your book you refer to the 
1981 decision to operate within a U N framework and Resolution 435 in pursuing 
Namibian independence. Were there wide differences among the incoming Reagan 
Administration on this? 
Chester Crocker: When you say the Reagan Administration, my colleagues and I 
were a very small group who were knowledgeable on the subject. The U N connection 
was clearly something which was not particularly attractive. There was some discussion 
of pursuing the subject outside of the U N context, but we decided that, in fact, our 
leverage would be enhanced by reliance on the plan agreed to by South Africa and 
approved by the Security Council. We always used the terminology that we were 
pursuing the independence of Namibia on the full basis of Resolution 435. There was a 
lively debate in the transition team, but the fact that we were prepared to operate that way 
gave us the ability to push for additions to 435, and to push the other side of the agenda, 
which was the presence of Cuban troops in Angola. 
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JS: When you say "additions to Resolution 435" you mean in terms of the operational 
program that was developed in that relationship? 
CC: Yes. For example, guarantees of impartiality by the U N during the 
implementation of the transition plan. 
JS: Those were two questions that I wanted to pursue. This question of impartiality 
that was somewhat difficult, i f I could say so, for the U N given the General Assembly's 
support for SWAPO and the various U N bodies established to protect Namibian interests. 
CC: It made the whole question that I just referred to a lively debate initially. 
JS: To come back to my initial question. At this particular point, the United Nations 
was not especially popular among some elements of the Administration and also within 
the Congress. Did the decision to deal with Namibia within the context of the U N spill 
over and influence these negative attitudes? 
CC: No, I think that was part of an overall distaste. I mean, people used to ask me 
"Where are you feeling the heat from?" It often was from the right as well as from the 
left, and in the early months and years I was asked how on earth could Ronald Reagan of 
all people be associating himself with leftists at the U N , and so we were sensitive to that. 
3 
JS: You mentioned leverage, and that your leverage would be increased by staying 
within the context of Resolution 435. 
CC: We wanted a fresh start, and we adopted what I have subsequently come to call 
the "fly-paper principle." When you have a recalcitrant party that holds the keys to 
movement, you have to get that party into the negotiations as they evolved in the 1980s. 
We came to understand that we had an ability maybe to get a hearing in Pretoria that they 
[in the UN] didn't have, or some of them didn't have. That began to change, actually, as 
time passed because Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher had some credibility in South 
Africa. 
JS: Continuing that, I think in the period of the contact group, the implied leverage 
was essentially economic. 
CC: I have never understood that leverage; I have never really seen it. The economic 
sanctions imposed by the US Congress on South Africa and by other people's congresses 
came much later. The key Western powers were seen as the people with the highest 
general credibility in Africa, in that part of Africa. 
JS: To what extent was the winding down of the Cold War, from your perspective an 
important element in bringing the Angolans and South Africans to negotiate seriously? 
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CC: That's a question I have given a lot of thought to and as I indicate in my book, 
progress on Namibia was well underway by the time you could say that the Cold War 
ended. In a sense I think that we were joining a moving train in May 1988. It was 
moving because Angola had become Castro's Vietnam. 
JS: You mentioned the Cubans. I want to get a little bit out of the chronology I have 
established to branch off to them for just a moment. 
JS: When the Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar visited Castro in Cuba and had a 
rather extensive three-days of unbroken conversation with him, Castro painted a rather 
different picture of his position in Angola and said that, in fact, it wasn't really costing 
them much and if there were other places he could send as many troops with no great 
problem for himself. But on the other hand, he was perfectly willing to withdraw them, 
he had no desire to keep them there. That differs from your perception. Yours is based 
on intelligence reports or on what? 
CC: Well, we are talking about different years, too. I think that mission took place in 
1983 or 1984... 
JS: It was a little later than that, it was about 1985. 
CC: I have forgotten the exact year but what I am referring to are the breakthroughs of 
1987 and 1988. We had had earlier indications that the Cubans would like to bid and to 
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be involved directly, and for them I think the key was to be an acknowledged party in this 
process. They weren't about to have Americans mediating between South Africans and 
Angolans, they would say, about issues of direct concern and interest to the Cubans, 
unless they were in the room. So, they were pushing for a seat at the table. That was the 
way we interpreted it. And it turned out that that was, in fact, important. 
Also, I think I would not necessarily put high credence in what Fidel Castro was 
saying at that point about how maybe he could do this in five other countries. If you look 
at it, this was equivalent at its peak to a larger burden on Cuban manpower than the 
American presence in Vietnam at its peak. And they were bringing home tales of woe, 
they were bringing home awful scenarios of corruption and involvement in elicit 
trafficking, they were bringing home diseases not seen since the 13th century from central 
Angola, and it was not a pretty picture. So, he may have been beating his breast a bit in 
that discussion. 
JS: Now, you mentioned the question -- or perhaps I did -- of impartiality on the part 
of the United Nations and the problems that arose from the General Assembly actions. 
You in your book I think comment very favorably on the capacity of the Secretary-
General to maintain the confidence of the South Africans as well as the other side. In 
Washington, or for that matter on your part, did you always see that distinction between 
what one might call the United Nations in its General Assembly mode and the Secretary-
General? 
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CC: Yes. I think that is a very important distinction. The United Nations has a series 
of institutions and procedures that do not always endear it, and certainly did not always 
endear it, to American diplomats of any administration, I might say. It was a very strange 
entity, and it is changing, of course, today. But in many ways the mood was distinctly 
anti-American, and anti- those things that we cared about too, for that matter, whether in 
the Middle East or in Africa. 
But leaving that aside, there were and there are some highly competent people in 
the U N system. There are also some fools and some inept people as there are probably in 
many systems -- and some corrupt people, I might add. But we found the Secretary-
General and two or three others to be very, very helpful as, if you will, sounding boards, 
as partners, as people that you felt you could take into your confidence, provided they 
understood that we didn't want an army of others in the room at the time -- because we 
knew that there were agents inside that building, unhelpful people who would just pass 
every conversation back to their favorite East German lawyers for transmission to 
Rwanda or wherever. 
So, we took them, those we thought were interested in getting the job done, we 
took them very seriously. We visited with them quite regularly, we listened to what we 
had to say and I think they listened to what we had to say. They became part of a 
network, i f you will, an informal network. I went out of my way to stay in touch with 
them. I think there probably were times when people would say, in Washington, "Why 
are you going to the U N again?" Well, I was putting money in the bank, quite frankly. I 
was putting money in the bank. I knew that this was appreciated in New York. We took 
Perez de Cuellar seriously. Equally important, Jeane Kirkpatrick took him seriously, and 
7 
she was running our U N mission up there at the time. She thought it was worthwhile, and 
I think her successors did, so... 
JS: Jeanne Kirkpatrick did? 
CC: Yes. Because of Perez de Cuellar. Not because of "the U N . " I mean, there is no 
such thing as "the U N " when you stop and think about it. It is like saying "There's a 
telephone call: it's 'The White House.'" You know? Who in the White House? It's the 
same in the U N . 
JS: This is a particularly interesting point, again because this was all happening at the 
same time that other things were happening. The Falklands was over by that time, but I 
think it's true that Jeanne Kirkpatrick maintained full respect for the Secretary-General at 
that time, too. But in the case of Central America, there were some very severe problems 
that reached right up to the top of the White House. In that connection, I did have a 
question here. Then-Vice President Bush called the Secretary-General several times in 
connection with Namibia, more frequently in connection with Central America, but I'm 
talking about Namibia now. Was he involved in your team, so to speak? Did he have a 
special role? 
CC: I wouldn't say he had a special role, but he was very much au courrant. We 
briefed him regularly and he would give us his views. He did take a couple trips to Africa 
during my watch and he did a lot of helpful effort to get our case across at the highest 
8 
level or very near the highest level. He believed in what we were doing, and I think he 
liked to think he could help along here and there. He met a lot of visiting Africans, 
hosted them in his home as well as in the White House, and as you say he would reach 
out to people in the U N system as well -- which was basically helpful to us. I think it was 
important for people not to have the illusion that no one above my pay grade cared about 
these issues. We were working as an administration on a lot of issues, as you said, and 
these African issues were not always front-and-center, so it was helpful to us. I recall 
times when we were trying to bring parties into Washington who were very skittish about 
dealing with us, and we would take them right over to the Vice President's office. So, it's 
an example. 
JS: Could you be a little bit more expansive on the value that you found in keeping in 
pretty close contact on a confidential basis with the Secretary-General throughout this 
rather long period? 
CC: It was part of the information exchange. 
JS: You did get information from the U N -- from him? 
CC: From him. But also from others. I don't want to make this sound only like it was 
about him, because it clearly wasn't. There were a couple of world-class people circling 
around this issue in the U N system for some very substantial period of time. 
9 
JS: I think you mentioned Omayad for one. 
CC: Yes. And another of course there is the current president of Finland, who is an 
outstanding public servant, Martti Ahtisaari. And there were others. I mean, initially it 
was... I am losing my memory here... Martti's predecessor -- you know whom I mean, the 
British chap. 
JS: Brian Urquhart. 
CC: Brian Urquhart -- who actually taught me a good bit of what I knew about the U N 
plan when I first came. And Brian would listen to us, and then after he'd had enough of 
listening to us he would tell us what he thought. Brian was very helpful, especially in the 
first Reagan term. After that, when he retired, he was less in the picture. 
JS: Yes. And then it was somebody else. And his successor, in fact, paid a visit to 
Angola, just before April 1st, and was told by Nuj oma at that point that SWAPO had 
bases in Namibia, which the United Nations did not believe. What was your impression 
on this, I mean on his claims as far as the presence of SWAPO troops in Namibia? 
CC: It was fantasy -- it was the sheerest fantasy. SWAPO never liberated a square 
centimeter of Namibian territory. That whole April 1 fiasco was an effort, ex post facto, 
to rewrite the history books, to rewrite the diplomatic history, and to use diplomacy as a 
means to achieve something on the ground that had never been achieved in the war. It 
10 
was just a pack of lies, is what it was. And there are an awful lot of people out there 
prepared, because of their distaste for South Africa or their political correctness or 
whatever, to try and find some way to interpret April 1 on the basis of misunderstandings. 
Well, there was an agreement reached in 1982 which covered all this, and SWAPO was 
in the room and was party to it with its front-line state brothers and sisters, and it was a 
done deal. SWAPO may have thought better of it afterwards, or have found difficulty 
selling it. Maybe people inside the movement were not fully informed by their U N 
people of what they had agreed to. Any number of explanations are possible; they all 
involve essentially violating agreements. 
JS: Right. And as you say, there were differing interpretations of this, which 
extended into the United Nations. Were you aware that there was considerable criticism 
within the U N Secretariat of the actions of Ahtisaari at the time of this breakthrough 
because of his agreement that released the South African troops? 
CC: Well, it is totally predictable that there would be, because competent people of 
integrity are always going to have enemies in any system. And you had this gaggle, this 
solidarity-rally of people, who were always taking the side of SWAPO, and some of them 
were in effect inside the system. Some of them were simply in the diplomatic networks. 
But this all eventually passed, and once Ahtisaari was able to rely on the splendid 
diplomatic talents of Joe Legwaila to reach out to the African constituency first-hand, 
from the position of deputy, that this passed. 
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JS: And you welcomed Legwaila's appointment? 
CC: Oh, Joe was superb, absolutely superb. Yes, that was a good idea, although to 
have it imposed on you because of people nattering behind your back in New York, 
probably wasn't very pleasant for Martti, but Martti and Joe were quite capable of 
working it out. 
JS: That's true. Going now to the question of sanctions. In the United Nations, of 
course, there was constant pressure for ever-increasing sanctions against South Africa, 
partly because of Namibia, partly, of course, because of apartheid. What was the effect of 
this, these campaigns? They resulted, at least in the earlier period, in one or two US 
vetoes. What was the reaction, though, in Washington to this constant chorus in the U N 
calling for sanctions? 
CC: It was seen pretty largely as exactly that, a chorus, an orchestrated chorus, and part 
of an understandable historical lobby effort, part of the effort of the A N C and its network 
and its friends, to isolate South Africa diplomatically and to keep the heat on through 
boycotts of all sorts, some of which had more impact, I think, on white South Africans 
than others. And of course this chorus was also well-subsidized by the European left, and 
by churches of various kinds, and by the Soviets -- by the Communist Party of the Soviet 
Union to call it very specifically what it was. And, you know, we saw it as kind of a 
phalanx coming down the road, and we would deal with it as we felt we had to. I suppose 
you could say that it had a residual value as pointing out to the South Africans that they 
12 
were in fact in the global dog-house, in case they needed reminding of that fact. And that 
only cooperation with the Reagan administration could get them out of that dog-house. 
So it did have that backdrop quality to it, you know: "There's the dog-house, OK?" 
JS: And they had nothing to expect from the UN? 
CC: Right, yes. 
JS: You could say... In your book, I think you indicate that in the final phase you 
favored an even earlier date than April 1st as the date of the cease-fire coming into effect, 
of 435. Actually, the date proved to be very dangerous because the U N wasn't quite 
prepared -- and that was party because of disputes over the cost, in which the United 
States played its usual role. Did you see, at the time, the problem that this could cause, 
that is of an ever-decreasing time-span? 
CC: Yes, it is hard to say what's the chicken and the egg, here. I was uneasy about all 
the efforts at the last minute to sort-of rewrite the plan, and the compromise that was 
come up with -- you know, "we'll use 4800 [peacekeepers] but we'll have more if we 
need them" -- was a classic diplomatic finesse, I guess you could say. What did concern 
me was not letting the thing drag on such that U N would not be able to deploy, and that's 
of course what ultimately happened. You can say it was the fault of the West, or certain 
members of the Western community, for raising the issue, but since the West pays for 
virtually everything that the rest of the world lives off of, and free-rides on, I suppose the 
13 
West has a right -- and I will say this with emphasis for your record -- to raise questions 
of cost: It is our tax-payers, our money. We don't owe it to anybody. We do it because 
we are citizens of the world. I don't like being in arrears, but let's face it, we are the ones 
paying the freight, and others are the ones coasting. So, I think we had a right to raise 
those questions. 
The delays were occasioned in part by activities in the General Assembly, as you 
know, as well as the Security Council. I don't think we covered ourselves in glory, or 
anybody else either. The net result for Perez de Cuellar was he was stuck with this, and 
with a date, and he didn't want to violate the date. It was agreed to go forward. None of 
us could have foreseen the depth of the strategic stupidity of SWAPO's move on April 1, 
or for that matter the ability to be looking the other way of the Angolan government, 
which could hardly have been unaware of what was being planned, or for that matter the 
Cubans and the Soviets. 
We called them all on it at that meeting in Mount Etjo, Namibia, in April 1989, 
and said, "Where were you guys? What were you doing?" And we were told, and this 
was fascinating, that Fidel Castro was angrier than we were, that he was throwing things 
at his subordinates, saying "What are you doing to my peace plan?" He was furious. He 
saw the whole thing going up in smoke, and he didn't want that to happen because he 
wanted the deal done. 
JS: Mount Etjo raises the question which actually goes back to before Mount Etjo: the 
implementation of 435 and other aspects were really dependent on the United Nations, for 
better or worse. But the U N role was usually that of observer in the meetings that took 
14 
place. A Secretary-General other than Perez de Cuellar might well have objected to that, 
and I wondered what was the reason for that? Why was the U N kept off to the side, so to 
speak? 
CC: We are talking about the very end of the process, or all the way along? 
JS: A l l the way along, really. 
CC: Well, the U N , as such, doesn't exist, as I mentioned, except through its 
representatives, and it would have been very difficult I think, for us, to include the U N in 
bilateral conversations with the two separate sides in the period before we got to direct 
talks. I wouldn't have wanted it, I would not have been confident -- I'm not sure they 
would have wanted it because we were dealing mostly with the issue of getting the 
parallel movement on the Cuban issue... 
JS: Which the U N could not acknowledge. 
CC: ... and the U N could not acknowledge it or at least it appeared that way. So, how 
would you do this? How would you have the U N involved? Very tricky. The U N --1 
mean, I have ferried in my plane U N people to meetings, they were there. We talked to 
them as often as we talked to the Russians, which was often at 2 in the morning or even 
later. Everybody was networking with everybody. People learned a lot -- because the U N 
people who really counted on this issue were masters of the game, they knew the 
15 
diplomacy, they knew not just the diplomacy in the abstract sense, but the personalities. 
They knew not just that you should call Tanzania if you want help on X , or Mozambique 
if you want help on Y , but who in Tanzania to call. That kind of expertise is rare, partly 
because some of these folks have been in their jobs a long time, whereas diplomats in 
Western governments tend to turn over every two, three, four years. So, they were 
involved, but as you say they were not involved officially. 
Mount Etjo ... I have forgotten which of the parties, maybe it is in somebody's 
memoir... asked that they be brought in, and the U N was helicoptered in to the Mount 
Etjo meetings kind of toward the end of those discussions. But i f it makes anybody feel 
good, we weren't involved in those discussions much either. We were there to make sure 
they came out right, but we and the Russians had a good time off in the corner by 
ourselves. The three parties -- Cuba, Angola, South Africa -- were the ones who worked 
out the Mount Etjo understandings. 
JS: The one I had in particular in mind, besides Mount Etjo, was the meeting in 
Brazzaville, where I think Martti Ahtisaari was present. 
CC: Very much so. I have got a picture of him on the plane with me, so I know he 
was. 
JS: But at that meeting I think the plans for U N A V A M were developed, right? In the 
end, those plans didn't work very well, and I wondered to what extent was Martti able to 
participate as you were developing the ideas for U N A V A M there at Brazzaville? 
16 
CC: In what respect did U N A V A M not work very well? 
JS: Well, it worked very well during the withdrawal of the Cubans but later when its 
functions changed to allegedly monitoring, Angolan monitors of the encampments of 
UNITA and government forces, didn't work very well at all. 
CC: But that was a completely different process, as you know. U N A V A M II had a 
different mandate. 
JS: Right, it did. 
CC: And that whole different set of agreements was poorly handled from the get-go. 
Half the agreements were never implemented; they went ahead and held the election 
anyway. I can give you chapter and verse on that. It's really a different diplomacy: 
U N A V A M I worked well enough that the Cubans left ahead of schedule. I think it was a 
modest confidence-building measure essentially, which internationalized, for Castro's 
benefit, the dignity of a Cuban-approved withdrawal schedule, and internationalized, for 
South Africa's benefit, the parallelism of the two tracks. It got the job done. Just to 
make sure it would, we had our own national technical means watching. 
JS: You didn't fully trust the U N monitors? 
17 
CC: We wanted to make sure we could figure out who is counting whom. 
JS: Initially I believe there was a Spanish commander. He was not happy at first 
because he felt he had not been given sufficient ability to monitor directly under the 
agreements that had been signed. 
CC: No, there was some concern about that. He is standing at the gate there, you 
know, counting Cubans as they get on the boat -- but what about nighttime? Are they 
coming back at night? I think there was a bit of a problem there. So, the only way you 
could really be sure was by watching the baseball fields get grown over with grass. 
JS: As you say, going back now to this question of the SWAPO encampments before 
April 1st: It was your understanding on the American side that they were being 
monitored by the Angolans? 
CC: Yes. That there was a requirement that they be monitored by the Angolans. Yes. 
Not the Zambians, because they had left Zambia by then, pretty much. But by the 
Angolans, yes. 
JS: And did you have any doubts about that? That they were doing it? 
CC: Well, the proof is in the eating in something like this. We didn't want to go into it 
presuming bad faith. The Angolans have a very special quality of efficiency, I guess is 
18 
the way I would put it, and so we had maybe some skepticism that it would work the way 
it might have worked had it been conducted in Holland. But they had an obligation and 
they had a lot at stake: getting the South Africans out of their hair. 
JS: Going now to the OAU. The O A U was extremely unhappy at times with Martti 
Ahtisaari and because of that with the actions of the United Nations in the end phase. Did 
the O A U cause problems for you? 
CC: No. I would say not. There was a network within the OAU. The O A U as such, 
again, is sort of like the U N . It depends who. There were various voices inside the OAU, 
but the one that was most strident was the one that you would hear from maybe the 
Zimbabweans, who were on this one maybe fronting for somebody else. You wouldn't 
necessarily hear from the Senegalese, who were amazed at watching Africa shoot itself in 
the foot in this manner. The real concern we had was with the front-line states as a group 
because they were the ones on the ground in the region. The O A U didn't bring any 
additional troops or diplomats, really, to bear. So, I'd look at it as part of the chorus, 
again -- the term you used earlier. 
JS: And you give in your book rather full profiles of the front-line state leaders. I 
wondered if you would expand a little bit, though, on Dos Santos? The impression which 
Perez de Cuellar has of him was that he was not a very effectual person, that he had a 
very hard time making decisions and when he did make decisions he didn't necessarily 
19 
carry them out -- although they had a good relationship because they could speak together 
in Portuguese. Would you agree with that? How would you characterize him? 
CC: Well, he is a survivor, that's for sure. He was a compromise candidate when he 
came in. You know when Nettu died unexpectedly, at the hands of Soviet medicine, Dos 
Santos was a young fellow, a Soviet-trained petroleum engineer and nobody thought he 
had a power base. He probably didn't have much of one initially, but throughout that 
long period -- I am talking now, twenty years -- he has moved amongst the different 
camps and factions, the dynasties, the clans as they call them, within his party, and 
established his authority and done pretty well for himself. But there were times that I 
totally agree with the characterization that you mentioned, where I would just shake my 
head and wonder if there was any there. He just wouldn't make up his mind. Maybe 
that's partly because no decision is itself a decision. Maybe it's partly because he was 
unable, literally unable, to do what he would have liked to have done. He may have been 
prevented from doing what he would have liked to have done by hard-liners or by Cubans 
or by Russians, who knows. It was a very obscure system, to us, very hard to read, and 
there were very definitely different views within it. 
JS: To what extent did the South Africans come to you and complain about the UN? 
About various acts... again I realize I am talking genetically now, but about "The U N is 
causing us problems...." In fact, Pik Botha wrote extremely, extremely critical letters to 
the Secretary-General, so... Well, did they bring their complaints to you? 
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CC: Sure they did. More in some years than in others. It would depend on whether 
they saw the prospect of something imminent happening that was important. It also 
depended on the nature of politics inside the National Party. A lot of this was domestic, 
and a lot of it was the Namibian wing of the National Party stirring up the South African 
wing of the National Party. What they were looking for was, you know, to score some 
points for essentially domestic reasons. Quite often the abrupt letters that would flow 
into U N headquarters were a part of Pik Botha, the Foreign Minister, his effort to 
demonstrate at home that he was being tough on the U N , which was a whipping boy. But 
they would quite often bring their concerns to us. And vice versa -- we also heard a lot 
from the U N system about rumors that the South Africans were about to do A, B, and C, 
and "What are you going to do about it?" kind of thing. 
JS: Well, that brings me to the next question -- what, i f anything, did you try to do to 
control the South Africans in that period, immediately following the SWAPO incursion, 
when the SWAPO were taking fairly aggressive actions, to put it mildly. 
CC: Oh, you are talking about 1989? 
JS: Yes. Did you try to, as the Secretary-General was trying to do, did you try to 
restrain them at all, or not? 
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CC: Well, we pointed out to them that they were right on the edge, you know. I think 
it's fair to say that Margaret Thatcher, at that point, probably had more stroke with the 
South Africans than we did. She was there on April 1. 
JS: She was in Windhoek, right? 
CC: Yes. She was in Windhoek, and she made a terrific difference in the way this 
whole thing played out, both because she didn't want the whole thing to go down the 
drain, and she was very tough on that point with the South Africans. And because she 
was quite clear in her commentary to the Secretary-General and to Martti Ahtisaari. 
These people had broken the agreement, therefore she was very direct. 
JS: She was very direct and very supportive of the release of the South African troops. 
But there was in that following weeks and even months, there was the problem of the so-
called Koevoet people, who allegedly had been disbanded but who were there. Did you 
have conversations, as the Secretary-General did, with the South Africans about this 
particular problem? 
CC: Yes -- we said "Follow the agreements." We pushed them to follow the 
agreements, and that in fact it served their interest not to be seen as the people that 
everybody was complaining about but rather the party that was going along with their 
commitments under the plan. I have to say to you that I left public office on April 20, 
22 
1989, so a lot of the history after that I was not directly involved in. I tracked it closely 
but I wasn't in office. 
JS: I know, that's why I am not including any questions about the actual performance 
of U N T A G , because that was after you had left. 
CC: Although, on balance, it was not a bad show, not a bad show at all, one of the best 
U N performances overall. 
[end of tape 1, side 1] 
JS: Moving now to the different but related problem of the internal situation in 
Angola, Perez de Cuellar felt that reconciliation of the Government and UNITA was 
essential i f there was to be peace in Angola. He pushed this thought in various 
conversations with Dos Santos and with several front-line state leaders. Did the United 
States, with its considerable influence on Savimbi, try to bring the two sides together? 
CC: We tried very hard to move the issue of reconciliation and see if it couldn't 
become an African issue, recognizing that to have a Western super-power demanding 
something of the Angolans might not be as easy for them to swallow, but i f Africans step 
forward and say "We will oversee a process of national reconciliation between African 
brothers in Angola" maybe it could get somewhere. There were some efforts made in that 
direction in the early 1990s and 1989, but it didn't really get anywhere. But the sequence 
23 
of these things was to get foreigners out of these countries first, and then let the countries 
deal with their internal problems. That was the sequence which we had as a premise from 
the very beginning in 1981. You don't push the apartheid issue first; apartheid cannot be 
the number one issue, sequentially. Now, who am I quoting when I say that? I am 
quoting Julius Neyere and Kenneth Kaunda. On my first orientation trip to the region as 
Assistant Secretary, they said, "Mr. Crocker, do Namibia first, and then we'll talk about 
rhow we are going to cope with the issues of racism and apartheid." And that was the 
sequence we did. But we did it our way. We said we have got to solve the regional 
issues, cross-border warfare, South Africans in Angola, Cubans in Angola, and so on. 
And once you do that, then there is no more excuses. And that was the sequence that was 
followed in Angola and then it was followed again in Mozambique, and of course in 
South Africa itself. 
JS: And from that point of view, the U N connection again was useful because the U N 
could be useful in connection with Namibia. As far as the internal situation in South 
Africa: more difficult. Right? 
CC: More difficult. Because of Article 2, paragraph 7. 
JS: A final question. And I really would appreciate a very frank answer. What 
problems did you have with the U N in connection with Namibia? 
24 
CC: The U N was a stage in which -- in addition to the people we have talked about -¬
but it was a stage in which a drama was being played out, a drama of what you might call 
'non-aligned diplomacy.' As well as cold war diplomacy -- both together. And the 
problems we faced were to win our battles. And we won some and we lost some; we had 
a mixed record in terms of the way debates would unfold and resolutions would be 
recorded. But I look back at the summer of 1982 when we were able to go up to New 
York, we camped out for six weeks, we got front-line states' governments to send their 
best people to New York for a similar amount of time, and SWAPO and the South 
Africans, and we in fact negotiated all those 82 understandings informally in the corridors 
of the U N or in various U N missions in New York. People would say at the time that I 
was nuts to spend all that time up there, but we got things done because we were 
associating ourselves with the aura of legitimacy, i f you will, that the U N represents. And 
that's a price I was prepared to pay. 
JS: Do you think that has potential carry-over effect to other crises around the world? 
CC: Well, these days, we are ten years later, it is so much so that maybe it's overkill. 
Because there may be times when the U N could become an obstacle to getting something 
done if you can't get unanimity on it. For example, should N A T O be able to act in 
Kosovo? That is an interesting question to consider. I would never want to be the 
American official who said that other members of the Security Council have a veto power 
over American foreign policy. So, that's a tough issue. 
25 
JS: And yet there is the question of legitimacy, which you just raised. 
CC: That's right; that's right. When you are who we are, you will probably want to 
have the best of both worlds. 
JS: My final question relates to that: the enabling resolution was sponsored by the five 
Permanent Members. How was this stage-managed? Was this an American idea, that the 
five should in fact be the ones that did it, to get them all involved? 
CC: Yes -- you may have to ask somebody else that question. It may have had to do a 
bit with the Russians pushing themselves in as co-equal godfathers on this one. I don't 
know who would have opposed it apart from non-Permanent Members. It's one of those 
things that the big powers are fond of asserting their prerogatives. But as to exactly how 
the conversations unfolded and who resisted and so on, I really don't have the detail in 
my head. 
JS: Do you have any other general comments or specific comments that you would 
like to record for history here that relate to your experience in connection with Namibia 
and the U N that we haven't covered? 
CC: I think we have covered a lot. I didn't maybe mention as much as I might the fact 
that often other countries assigned their very, very best people to New York and that was 
where the action was, rather than London or Washington, and so that was an additional 
26 
reason to be up there. When I would go up there and pay courtesy calls on the Secretary-
General or others in the U N system I also usually touched based with some of those key 
permanent reps from other countries, because they were serious people worth talking to. 
And maybe those same countries did not have serious people in Washington, not worth 
talking to. So, it's a question of different countries' decision-making systems. The 
repository of real expertise on Namibia might in other governments often be in New 
York, whereas in our government it was in the African bureau. But it's just a function of 
history and circumstance, really. 
JS: But it is an interesting point, and it's true in other cases as well. 
CC: Oh, I'm sure. Yes. 
JS: Thank you very, very much. 
CC: You are most welcome.