Railing Against Racism

By George Russell

As Pretoria continues a crackdown, Reagan denounces apartheid

According to Ronald Reagan, it was a matter of conscience. Administration critics suspected that he had political considerations in mind. Whatever the reason, the President last week felt a need to retreat, at least briefly, from one of his Administration's most staunchly held foreign strategies. In an International Human Rights Day address, Reagan paused in a litany of familiar themes (the Soviets' "barbaric war" in Afghanistan, Iran's persecution of the Baha'i religious minority) to broach a surprise topic. "The U.S. has said on many occasions that we view racism with repugnance," he asserted. He then confessed "our grief over the human and spiritual cost of apartheid in South Africa."

Specifically, Reagan called for an end to two South African policies: 1) the forced relocation of several million of the country's 23 million blacks, most of them to remote, impoverished "homelands," and 2) the detention without trial of black leaders. The practices, said the President, "can comfort only those whose vision of South Africa's future is one of polarization, violence and the final extinction of any hope for a peaceful democratic government." Reagan asked the government in Pretoria to broaden "the constructive changes of recent years ... to address the aspirations of all South Africans."

The President's unusual public utterance was his first lengthy and specific statement on the subject of apartheid, South Africa's policy of racial separation, since he took office. The move was seen by many of Reagan's critics and supporters alike as a sharp change within the Administration's longstanding policy of "constructive engagement," in which open criticism of South Africa is deliberately suppressed in favor of behind-the-scenes encouragement of improvements in race relations. U.S. officials, however, quickly denied that anything had changed. The President's remarks, said State Department Spokesman Alan Romberg, were "fully consistent with what we have been saying, and will continue to say, both publicly and privately to the South African government. We are not changing the policy at all."

In fact, there was widespread suspicion in Washington that Reagan was bowing to a wave of anti-apartheid protest that continued to grow last week in the capital and at least 13 other U.S. cities. Two miles from the Old Executive Office Building, where the President spoke, a steady trickle of luminaries continued to join the picket line that sprang up in front of the South African embassy three weeks ago. In all, more than 50 people, including 13 members of Congress, have been arrested in the protest. Among those charged with trespassing or crossing a police line last week were Democratic Representatives Louis Stokes of Ohio and Mickey Leland of Texas, along with various civil rights leaders.

As the anti-apartheid protest swelled, the black South African churchman who helped inspire it took possession of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Clad in a red cassock and wearing a gold pectoral cross, South African Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu accepted the Nobel committee's $181,000 cash award and 7.2-oz. gold medal in Norway's University of Oslo Aula. Shortly before the ceremony, Tutu, who a week earlier had declared in Washington that U.S. policy toward South Africa was "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian," was forced along with other dignitaries to evacuate the Oslo hall for 65 minutes after police received a bomb threat. No explosives were found. At the traditional Nobel laureate's lecture the next day, Tutu lashed out at his government's racial policies, noting that "blacks are systematically stripped of their South African citizenship and are being turned into aliens in the land of their birth." Said he: "This is apartheid's final solution, like the solution the Nazis had for the Jews in Hitler's Aryan madness."

While the Reagan Administration may have yielded a bit in the face of growing opposition to "constructive engagement," South Africa has not moved an inch. In Pretoria, Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha restated his government's defiance of outside pressure. "South Africa will not allow itself to be dictated to by foreign elements, especially protesters and radical actions of pressure groups overseas," he declared. Said Executive President P.W. Botha: "South Africa will make its own decisions."

In what appeared to be a minor concession, the Pretoria government last week released five of eleven black leaders who were detained without charges in the past three months. The remaining six, however, are expected to be charged under the country's Internal Security Act with subversion, treason or promotion of an unlawful organization. The maximum penalty: a life sentence or death. In a further indication of its tough mood, the government last week arrested two of three anti-apartheid activists as they left the British consulate in Durban after seeking sanctuary in the building for 91 days. They are expected to be charged in the same fashion.

The latest crackdown comes during South Africa's most violent civil unrest in eight years. The upheaval began with August's elections for a new tricameral Parliament, which for the first time gives a limited voice in the central government to the country's 2.8 million people of mixed race and 850,000 Indians. The 4.7 million whites still have the final say on all important matters and, of course, blacks remain totally unrepresented. Riots later swept the economically depressed black townships to the south and east of Johannesburg. Then came a Transvaal labor stoppage: 800,000 black workers took part; 6,000 of them were fired. In the past 14 weeks, as a result of the unrest, 163 people have been killed and hundreds injured, most by security forces. So far this year, 1,093 people have been detained in South Africa, vs. 453 in 1983, and only eleven have been convicted of any crime. The latest round of repression has led to an uneasy calm, broken occasionally by isolated bombing and rock-throwing incidents.

The unrest comes, ironically, at a time when the regime can point to some measurable improvement in the lot of its black majority. The Botha government has loosened a number of minor racial restrictions and, more important, reformed the country's segregationist labor laws. One effect of that change, according to a leading South African labor and industrial consulting firm, Andrew Levy and Associates Ltd., is that the trade union movement is likely to be come "a major vehicle for black political aspirations."

Black membership in trade unions more than tripled between 1980 and 1983, to 670,000. Blacks now make up 43.4% of total union strength, whites just under 34%, and Indians and people of mixed race not quite 23%. Whites on average still earn more than four times as much as blacks. Yet real income for whites has declined slightly during the past decade, while average black income has climbed by more than 50%, to $1,560 a year. By the year 2000, the black population is expected to account for more than half of South Africa's consumer purchasing power.

The increase in blacks' economic clout has not yet made any significant difference in their li ving conditions or in the tremendous onesidedness of government spending on education ($87 per pupil for blacks, $659 for whites). Blacks are typically crowded into dreary suburban town ships like Soweto (pop. about 1.5 million), where electricity is only now being introduced, almost no stores are permitted, and few homes are privately owned. Blacks cannot live, work or even walk where they want to without permission, and are forbidden to marry across the col or line. Despite the reduction in social or "petty" apartheid, they are still denied equal rights on buses and trains, and in restaurants and hotels in many places.

Some of those conditions may change after the new tricameral Parliament begins its inaugural session in January. President Botha is expected to introduce a substantial agenda of reform legislation, if only to give the limited power-sharing arrangement some badly needed credibility. Informed South African sources expect that laws against mixed marriages and interracial sex will be repealed in the next year. Parliament may also consider legislation to ease current restrictions on nonwhite, especially black, ownership of homes.

An additional prospect for change in South Africa appeared last week in faraway Manhattan. A group of executives representing 120 U.S. corporations, whose firms last year accounted for much of the $2.3 billion in U.S. direct investment in South Africa, unanimously endorsed a new anti-apartheid strategy prepared under the auspices of the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, who has long been a civil rights activist. The latest version of the "Sullivan principles" commits the companies to support freedom of mobility for black workers, the unrestricted right of black businesses to locate in South African urban areas, and the eventual end of all apartheid laws. The methods of pursuing those goals, said Sullivan, "will be determined as we go."

None of these factors, however, will soon affect the main pillars of apartheid: residential and educational segregation and forced relocation to the homelands. Nor are those pillars likely to fall soon. For one thing, the fear of retaliatory action by blacks in the event of majority rule is so pervasive among whites that even minor moves against apartheid provoke a fearful political backlash. Yet so long as those barriers remain, the potential for upheaval will persist. Says Helen Suzman, a Liberal Member of Parliament and longtime foe of apartheid: "I see an ongoing situation of unrest that will have flash points."

That means, among other things, that the Reagan Administration could continue to have problems convincing Americans that constructive engagement is the proper way to deal with South Africa. The Administration may be right that Western hopes and expectations for reform in South Africa are unrealistic and that even drastic punitive action, such as pulling all U.S. investment out of South Africa, would be unlikely to change that unpalatable fact. The U.S. can in fact claim some success for helping persuade South Africa to sign recent agreements with its black neighbors.

Beyond that, the reforms that have taken place inside South Africa are more significant than many critics care to admit. As U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Herman Nickel put it, "Evolutionary change, almost by definition, is incremental change, and it is only natural that each increment will be viewed as inadequate by those who feel aggrieved by the present system." The problem is that the same point of view could be used as an apology for whatever cosmetic changes the South African government chooses to make. The Administration is likely to feel increasing pressure to prove that its policy means something more substantial.

--By George Russell.

Reported by Marsh Clark/Johannesburg and Barrett Seaman/Washington

With reporting by Marsh Clark, Barrett Seaman