A Vote on Apartheid

Since its installation in the funereal Peace Palace donated by Andrew Carnegie shortly before World War I, the World Court in The Hague has been a graveyard of political illusions. Lacking an effective executive to enforce its decisions, hamstrung by conflicting bilateral treaties, and limited to advisory opinions on issues of worldwide import, the Court of International Justice is like a traffic cop without a whistle.

Yet nations with grievances still flock to it in hopes of getting moral backing for their causes.* In 1960, Liberia and Ethiopia asked the court for a judgment on South Africa's repressive racial apartheid. Last week, after six years of painful deliberation, 6,000 pages of evidence and a legal cost to all sides of almost $18 million, the court decided not to take up apartheid at all, dismissed the case on a technicality.

No Legal Right. The case centered on a mandate conferred on South Africa by the League of Nations in 1920. South Africa was to oversee the neighboring former German territory of South West Africa, subject to the approval of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. As "interested parties" representing the 36 in dependent states of black Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia claimed that South Africa had violated its mandate by imposing racial separation on the territory's 400,000 nonwhites. A victory for Liberia and Ethiopia would have paved the way for an appeal to the United Nations and possibly sanctions against South Africa. Instead, the court ruled by an 8-7 vote last week that the two countries had no "legal right or interest" in their claim and therefore were not eligible for a judgment. Two members of the court, Nigeria and South Africa, were appointed for the case. Their votes were predictable. But the permanent judges voted without political pattern. In favor of dismissing the case were Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Greece and Australia (whose representative, as the court's president, voted twice to break a 7-7 tie). Against: the U.S., the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, Mexico, Senegal and Japan.

The verdict was a landmark decision for the whites in southern Africa. South Africa can continue to go its apartheid way in South West Africa. Rhodesia's Ian Smith can take new heart in his independence fight against Britain. And the Portuguese can rest easier about their white-minority rule in Mozambique and Angola.

For black Africans, the effect was traumatic. At the U.N., Ghana Ambassador F. S. Arkhurst, chairman (for July) of the bloc that speaks for much of black Africa, named a subcommittee to explore the group's next action. "It is evident that no reasonable accommodation is possible," Arkhurst warned. "Violence cannot be ruled out." In Kenya, President Jomo Kenyatta's party called for "militant and violent" revolution in South West Africa. In Tanzania, Political Exile Peter Nanyemba, the bearded, fiery-eyed chief of the South West Africa People's Organization, told newsmen that his country had no alternative "but to rise in arms and bring about our liberation."

Sun, Sand & Diamonds. As other African leaders warned of impending upheaval, the territory that the court decision concerned remained quiet. Covering an area roughly twice the size of California, South West Africa is a largely desolate, uninhabitable, lonely land of wind, sun, miles and miles of desert and a bleak, 600-mile "Skeleton Coast." In the capital of Windhoek (pop. 45,000), whites actually outnumber blacks, making Windhoek the only city in southern Africa with a white majority. What holds South Africa's interest is South West's deposits of lead, copper and zinc, and a fortune in diamonds that was washed up and buried on the coastline in prehistoric times.

So far, South West Africa's 73,000 whites have kept the territory's 400,000 nonwhites under control. But when South Africa's Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd begins discussing his ideas for tribal reservations (called "ethnic homelands"), the blacks register a few reservations of their own. "My people and other tribes," said one grey-haired tribal chief last week, "would never submit to such a plan. The Germans killed us like cattle, but this thing which Verwoerd says he will do seems, in this age, to be even more merciless."

Would it bring violence and revolt, as black Africans suggested? Hardly. Verwoerd's government is strong enough to cope with almost any internal challenge. It would take more than distant threats from unarmed exiles to bring him down--or change his policy.

* The U.S. has never accepted the court's authority to override national interests. In 1946, it reserved the right to withhold any U.S. case from the jurisdiction of the court by calling it a "domestic issue."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.