In order to shore up the apartheid regime, the South African government used its security and military forces to prevent majority African rule in other southern African countries such as Namibia. After Portugal agreed to decolonization in Mozambique and Angola, South Africa fomented civil war. Therefore conscripts were sent to fight in neighbouring countries, as well as there was growing resistance to conscription for either purpose, and draft resisters who went abroad also began to organize in the later 1970s.