Raid on Gaborone

The Raid on Gaborone (called Operation Plecksy by the South African Defence Force) occurred on 14 June 1985 when South African Defence Force troops, under the order of General Constand Viljoen, crossed into Botswana and attacked the offices of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress, in Gaborone. The raid, the fifth South African attack on a neighbouring country since 1981, killed 12 people including women and children; only 5 of the victims were members of the African National Congress.

South Africa will not hesitate to take whatever action may be appropriate for the defence of its own people and for the elimination of terrorist elements intent on sowing death and destruction in our country and our region.

[The SADF]'d attack some houses, kill people then create a fiction around who these people were and what they were doing.

In the 1980s, relations between Botswana and South Africa were strained. Anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress (ANC) used Botswana and other countries in Southern Africa as refuge. The ANC set up bases in Gaborone that issued crash courses for terrorist attacks; under the guise of weekend tourists, new recruits would receive training on grenade handling and a list of targets to attack. Despite Botswana's non-alignment policy, the South African Defence Force conducted several cross-border raids to stop the groups.

In 1981, the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) purchased Soviet weaponry. President Quett Masire justified the deal as a way to allow BDF to better prevent groups like the ANC from crossing into South Africa. Shots were fired across the Botswana-South African border in April 1982. Grenade attacks earlier in the week outside Cape Town that killed two South Africa members of Parliament and news of an expected attack on Pretoria in July 1985 pushed General Constand Viljoen to launch the attack.