Koevoet (, Afrikaans for crowbar, also known as Operation K or SWAPOL-COIN) was the counterinsurgency branch of the South West African Police (SWAPOL). Its formations included white South African police officers, usually seconded from the South African Security Branch or Special Task Force, and black volunteers from Ovamboland. Koevoet was patterned after the Selous Scouts, a multiracial Rhodesian military unit which specialised in counter-insurgency operations. Its title was an allusion to the metaphor of "prying" insurgents from the civilian population.
Koevoet was active during the South African Border War between 1979 and 1989, during which it carried out hundreds of search and destroy operations against the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN). Koevoet's methods were controversial, and the unit was accused of committing numerous atrocities against civilians. Over the course of the war, it killed or captured 3,225 insurgents and participated in 1,615 individual engagements. Koevoet was disbanded in 1989 as part of the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 435, which effectively ended the South African Border War and ushered in South West African independence as Namibia.
History Background
Following the end of World War I, the German Empire was dismantled and its African colonies granted to Allied nations as various League of Nations mandates. The mandate system was formed as a compromise between those who advocated an Allied annexation of former German and Turkish territories, and another proposition put forward by those who wished to grant them to an international trusteeship until they could govern themselves. South Africa received the former German possession of South West Africa and was permitted to administer it until that territory's inhabitants were prepared for political self-determination. However, the South African government interpreted the mandate as a veiled annexation and took steps to integrate South West Africa as a domestic province.
South Africa's attempts to absorb South West Africa became a matter of contention during the 1960s as a result of the increasingly widespread decolonisation of the African continent. Over the next decade, low intensity conflicts broke out in many of the remaining European colonies as militant African nationalist movements emerged, often with direct backing from the Soviet Union and revolutionary left-wing governments in the Middle East. The nationalists were often encouraged to take up arms by the success of indigenous anti-colonial guerrilla movements around the world, namely in French Indochina and French Algeria, as well as the rhetoric of contemporary African statesmen such as Ahmed Ben Bella, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Julius Nyerere.
During the early 1960s, new nationalist parties such as the South West African National Union (SWANU) and South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) made determined attempts to establish indigenous political structures for an independent South West Africa. In 1962, SWAPO formed a militant wing, known as the South West African Liberation Army (SWALA), and began sending recruits to Egypt and the Soviet Union for guerrilla training. In 1966 SWALA initiated an insurgency against the South African government, sparking what would later evolve into a wider regional conflict known as the South African Border War.
As the war intensified, so did international sympathy for SWAPO's cause. The United Nations declared that South Africa had failed in its obligations to ensure the moral and material well-being of the indigenous inhabitants of South West Africa, and had thus disavowed its own mandate. On 12 June 1968, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution which proclaimed that, in accordance with the desires of its people, South West Africa be renamed Namibia. United Nations Security Council Resolution 269, adopted in August 1969, declared South Africa's continued occupation of Namibia illegal. In recognition of this landmark decision, SWALA was renamed the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN).
Formation of Koevoet
From the early to late 1970s, the brunt of counter-insurgency operations was borne by the South African Defence Force (SADF). The SADF's primary source of manpower were white national servicemen fulfilling their terms of compulsory military service under the leadership of professional career officers. The initial commitment of South African troops to the South West African theatre in 1974 was about 15,000 men. Beginning the same year, however, there was also increasingly widespread enlistment of local armed auxiliaries and semi-official militias. The most powerful armed group outside the direct command structure of the SADF emerged in Ovamboland, SWAPO's traditional political stronghold and the source of its support base. The Ovamboland civil administration employed a local militia known as the Ovambo Home Guard, established to protect local officials who were often the target of PLAN assassination attempts.
The Ovambo Home Guard was assembled, as time passed, into larger numbered units or attached to regular SADF battalions. By late 1978, the number of Ovambo Home Guard personnel stood at about 3,000. Their relative effectiveness compared to national servicemen sent out from South Africa, who were unfamiliar with the terrain and environment and had more difficulty adapting to Ovamboland, was noted by the government. This and other developments resulted in a deliberate policy of "Namibianisation", a reference to the Vietnamization programme the United States had pursued during the Vietnam War. The war effort became less likely to entail clear-cut confrontations between foreign South African troops and local PLAN insurgents, but significant numbers of Namibians fighting under South African command. The main objectives of Namibianisation were to establish a self-sufficient military infrastructure in South West Africa, reinforce the perception of a domestic civil conflict rather than an independence struggle, and reduce casualty rates among South Africa's national servicemen, to which the government was especially sensitive. Furthermore, the SADF was overstretched and if efficient local forces could be raised to take over the bulk of the defensive and local security tasks, it would be more free to pursue conventional offensive operations.
Both the SADF and South African Police (SAP) launched parallel initiatives to create Ovambo counter-insurgency units between 1976 and 1980. The SADF's programme resulted in 101 Battalion, while the SAP formed Koevoet. A senior officer with the SAP's Security Branch, Hans Dreyer, was appointed to lead the latter. Dreyer had served with the SAP in Rhodesia during the Rhodesian Bush War and drew heavily on his operational experiences there while shaping Koevoet's mandate and organisational structure. Koevoet was to be patterned directly after the Selous Scouts, a Rhodesian special forces unit which included large numbers of former insurgents. The SAP especially appreciated the small unit tactics of the Selous Scouts, which had demonstrated how a few operators, disguised as insurgents and trained to high levels of subterfuge, could have an effect utterly disproportionate to their size.
Koevoet was established in June 1979, at which time the unit consisted of six white South African policemen and 60 of the most skilled trackers from the Ovambo Home Guard. The trackers received three months of additional reconnaissance training from SADF special forces before being deployed into Ovamboland. They were also instructed in criminal investigation techniques and police procedure by the SAP. In May 1979, they captured their first insurgent.
Koevoet was formally known as "Operation K" of the SAP Security Branch's special operations division, but that title was almost never used. Its existence remained a closely guarded secret until June 1980, when church newspapers in Ovamboland began circulating rumours of a new special forces group linked to assassination of SWAPO sympathisers. The rumours had their basis in a "death list" of prominent Ovambo political figures and businessmen who were covert sympathisers of SWAPO, which was allegedly recovered from the body of a local politician killed in a motor accident. A number of individuals on the list were subsequently assassinated. While South Africa denied the report, officials did name Koevoet and praise it for its efficiency.
Koevoet's initial role was to engage in intelligence gathering for the SADF, but it soon adopted its own counter-insurgency campaign of infiltration and raids. Being a police unit, Koevoet also investigated politically motivated murders and property destruction. The unit rapidly expanded to about 3,000 personnel, about the size of the Ovambo Home Guard. At first the numbers of recruits were modest, due in part to limited training facilities and the time it would take to provide them with officers. This problem was partly solved by training Koevoet recruits at the Police Counter-Insurgency School in Maleoskop, South Africa. There, the recruits received instruction on a unique hybrid syllabus which combined specialist police skills such as anti-riot tactics, road security, and conventional counter-terrorism with basic infantry training resembling that of the SADF and counter-insurgency theory. The disbandment of the Selous Scouts in 1980 provided Koevoet with an influx of Rhodesian officers from that unit who were recruited by the SAP. White Namibians were also recruited in modest numbers as Koevoet officers, although the SAP faced stiff competition in this regard from the SADF. Most white South African policemen were transferred to Koevoet as a result of personal referrals.
The overwhelming majority of black Koevoet operators were applicants from the Ovambo Home Guard, who wanted regular employment and better pay. The only prerequisite was that they had to speak Afrikaans or English, in order to communicate with their white officers. The SAP occasionally recruited Ovambos from Angola, including unemployed former soldiers of the Portuguese colonial army and insurgents from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), who met these qualifications. Competition for employment with Koevoet was fierce due to the relatively high pay and benefits, including life insurance, offered by the SAP.
Operational service PLAN units operating in Ovamboland were kept supplied by a constant flow of insurgents and war materiel along external infiltration routes through Angola. Koevoet monitored an area adjacent to the Angolan border with screening patrols coordinated between three permanent base strongpoints at Opuwo, Rundu, and Oshakati. It was also permitted to establish its own internment facility for captured PLAN prisoners just north of Windhoek. Patrols were carried out in Casspir mine-protected vehicles and sometimes lasted for weeks on end. Koevoet operators spent most of their time following suspicious tracks in search of insurgents, sometimes for over a hundred kilometres. PLAN was forced to alter its tactics accordingly. Following raids and attacks, PLAN cadres would scatter. Many ceased wearing military boots with readily identifiable sole patterns and walked barefoot or in civilian shoes. They camouflaged their tracks, retraced their steps, and changed footwear to throw off Koevoet trackers. More commonly, the insurgents would withdraw until they had reached appropriate terrain, then ambush the Koevoet response team.