APARTHEIDIN CRISIS
tions against everyone of its neighbors. In addition, the South African
armed forces continued to occupy Namibia, and South Africa intervened
substantially in both of the former Portuguese territories. It cooperated
with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA),
which was also supplied with arms by the United States, in its civil war
against the government of Angola; and it provided arms and financial and
technical assistance to the Mozambique National Resistance (M.N.R. or
RENAMO), a motley collection of ex-Portuguese colonials and local chiefs
and peasants who were wreaking widespread havoc in Mozambique. So
destructive was this activity that in 1984, in the Nkomati Accord (an
agreement signed on the banks of the Komati River), Mozambique under-
took not to assist the ANC, while South Africa promised to stop aiding
RENAMO. In the same year, South Africa promised to remove its troops
from Angola. But South Africa did not honor those commitments; it con-
tinued to aid both UNITA and RENAMO. 26
The Botha government was fortunate in the shifts in domestic politics in
London and Washington. Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of
Britain in 1979, and although her government then presided over the