Nine Days of War : Namibia – before, during and after

The author describes in chilling detail regarding the years of dispute between South Africa and the United Nations, after 23 years of bush warfare between the Marxist-oriented South West Africa People’s organization(SWAPO), and South African forces. Supposedly, peace had been agreed to, but SWAPO’s leader was preparing for even more war. This is the story of a continued nine-day fight betweeen these 2 factions. This is Peter Stiff’s story of the fighting that occured in Nambia;

On 1 April, 1989, after an agreement had been reached between South Africa and the U.N. to hold “free and fair elections” in Namibia, a large force of heavily-armed SWAPO guerrillas flooded across the Angola/Namibian border in an attempt to seize control of the country before elections could be held.

One of the conditions of the agreement had been that South Africa would withdraw most of its troops and demobilise the SWATF (South West Africa Territorial Force). This had been almost completed and SWAPO believed that they would encounter no resistance in their takeover of the country. Standing in the way of their success was a thin blue line of 1200 SWATF policemen, many of them former members of the elite counter-insurgency unit, Koevoet. For nine days they fought SWAPO to a standstill and prevented the planned invasion.

pp. 316 illusts, maps First Edition #0119