South African aggression against the front line and neighbouring states since the beginning of 1983 has been particularly concentrated against Lesotho, in an apparent attempt by Pretoria to consolidate the strategic gains of its 9 December 1982 commando raid on Maseru.
In February, following a sabotage attack and bombing raid on two fuel depots and a steel factory in Maseru, the Lesotho government warned that South Africa was now concentrating its destabilization efforts on economic targets inside Lesotho, as was already the pattern in Angola and Mozambique. Like the Maseru raid in December, this later attack appears to have been carried out directly by South African military units.
An important meeting in Maseru at the end of January of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) was also marked by an attack on an economically significant installation just inside the capital. The SADCC meeting, attended by representatives of a number of Western countries, strongly condemned South Africa's destabilization policy.
In February, the South African government formally rejected the UN Security Council's request for it to make reparations to Lesotho for the damage caused by the Maseru raid. The South African Foreign Minister told the UN Secretary General in a letter that Lesotho must bear the financial responsibility for such attacks in view of the Lesotho government's alleged harbouring of African National Congress guerillas.
Lesotho has also noted the use of false information by South Africa. In February, political refugees resident in Lesotho were alerted by the government to a campaign of mistrust apparently being sowed by the South African security police, involving the sending of defamatory letters calculated to give the impression that particular refugees were really South African agents. In March the Lesotho government protested to the BBC for uncritically repeating a false report emanating from South Africa that Chief Peete Peete, the Lesotho Minister of Agriculture, had been attacked on 18 March by the Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA) and his bodyguard killed.
