MmegiNews: Merafhe threatened to bomb Lesotho The author of - TopicsExpress



          

MmegiNews: Merafhe threatened to bomb Lesotho The author of the trending, Madam Speaker Sir memoirs, Margaret Nasha recalls how, as a technocrat, she was among those thrown in the boiling... She recalls how President Ketumile Masire summoned her and the Foreign Minister, Gaositwe Chiepe, and instructed them to facilitate a peace mission in the mountain kingdom. “Ladies, I have called you here because I would like to send you on a very important mission. As you have heard, things have taken a turn for the worse in Lesotho. The army has surrounded the airport, and no planes are allowed to take off or land in Maseru,” Masire briefed them. He also informed them that he and former president of South Africa the late Nelson Mandela had been talking and had decided to dispatch a team to Maseru to calm the situation. “I simply didn’t know what to make of this, better still how to react. Dr Chiepe and I, and at one point the BDF commander Lieutenant General Seretse Ian Khama, had been sent on missions before, mostly to secret locations in Pretoria to discuss the Lesotho situation and advise our governments accordingly,” says Nasha in her biography released last Thursday. She tried to enquire from Masire about the importance of the mission but the response was, “Well, there is an aircraft waiting for you at the airport here in Gaborone as we speak. You need to go home and pick up your overnight bags and leave immediately”. A military aircraft was on call. “Inside the aircraft, we found two well-built white men, the pilots, who were obviously Afrikaners judging by their English accent. I do not know about my minister but I was downright frightened. The cabin temperature was properly controlled but I was sweating profusely”. So frightened was ‘Madam Speaker Sir’ that she did not hear the answer to her question of the duration of the flight to Maseru. The fear for what awaited them in Maseru was compounded by her fear of flying. “Then I started to look around and survey the inside of the aircraft. Big mistake. I shouldn’t have. Next to each of the pilots were guns! And those were not just old guns. They looked like some kind of AK47s or some such powerful, high velocity guns. There were rounds upon rounds of ammunition as well”. The four descended on Maseru and indeed found that soldiers in uniform surrounded the airport. There were soldiers everywhere, she says. “I had never felt so vulnerable before. We landed safely and thankfully, there was no sound of gunfire anywhere, although a sizeable number of the soldiers came rushing towards the aircraft as it taxied. We were shown to a car and under heavy military escort, driven to the hotel where peace talks were to be held”. The peace talks commenced under a tense atmosphere between the warring factions who were at each other’s throats. For more than 18 hours the talks did not yield any fruit. Nasha speaks of how she admired former president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki’s negotiating skills. “The man had the patience of a hawk. And I might add that he was a diplomat at heart. He was so different from Lt General Mompati Merafhe who at one point could not hide his impatience with Lesotho soldiers and said to them: “Look here guys. If it is war you want, it is war you will get. I am now talking to you as a soldier. “If you think you are secure on that mountain, you are fooling yourselves. We will bomb you out of there, and we shall not stop bombing until the mountain is flattened out. You think these are the days of Moshoeshoe of old?” Nasha remembers Merafhe’s threat that left complete silence in the hall. Although she did not have a good sleep following the threat, Nasha believes that Merafhe’s threat worked well for the talks, as the rebels started behaving afterwards.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 04:47:26 +0000

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