South Africa: A Black-and-White Future

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Apartheid always was an unworkable as well as immoral system whose breakdown was inevitable. But the trade and financial sanctions imposed by the U.S., the European Community, the Commonwealth and other groups of nations hammered home to South African whites, as probably nothing else could have, the fact that their country had become a global outlaw, judged unfit for membership in the world community of nations. Their dismay at that knowledge accelerated the process of dismantling apartheid at least a bit, and perhaps with somewhat less violence than would have been the case without sanctions. Now that the process seems irreversible, sanctions have done their job and can mostly be lifted.

Though dissenters are both numerous and vehement, the consensus of analysts, South African and foreign, is that enough progress has been made to speed the embargo on its way to oblivion, as President George Bush did last week. As a positive incentive to keep reform going, he rescinded the bans on most trade with South Africa and on new investment in the country, enacted in 1986 over Ronald Reagan's veto.

As Vice President, Bush opposed the sanctions -- though he conceded last week that they had had some effect -- and made no secret of his determination to scrap them as soon as he legally could. When he finally did so, he maintained that he did not have much choice, since South Africa had fulfilled all the conditions required by Congress. There is room for argument about at least one of those conditions: the release of all political prisoners. The African National Congress (A.N.C.) says some 850 remain in jail, while the government in Pretoria insists only criminals remain.

Others have also been rushing to reopen the door of the global community to South Africa ever since last spring, when President F.W. de Klerk asked parliament to repeal the last major apartheid laws; lawmakers did so before the end of June. The 12-nation E.C. voted in April to remove its ban on imports of certain products, though Denmark has been holding up implementation, and London will try to talk Commonwealth countries into doing the same at their annual conference in October. The International Olympic Committee last week decided to let South African athletes compete in future games, ending a 21-year ban that was especially devastating to the sports-mad country. For its part, Pretoria signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, a significant move since it is thought to have developed the ability to make atom bombs.

Some American blacks and liberals nonetheless denounced Bush's action as premature, an opinion also voiced by A.N.C. leader Nelson Mandela. The opponents contend, correctly, that South Africa is still far from multiracial democracy. Substantive negotiations on a new constitution that would permit blacks to vote and share in governing the country have not even begun. The critics argue that without the continued pressure of international sanctions, full equality will never come.

On the other hand, a fair number of sanctions do remain. In the U.S., federal restrictions imposed before 1986 are still in force, including the virtual American veto against loans to Pretoria by such bodies as the International Monetary Fund. No fewer than 133 laws restricting or penalizing companies that do business with South Africa are still on the books in 26 states, 22 counties and 85 cities.

How effective is such pressure? It certainly gives the world community a ) peaceful way to express its opprobrium. But it seems obvious that apartheid was a doomed policy from the start. South Africa built a huge, sophisticated economy but did not have enough whites to run it. Business needed skilled black technicians and middle managers, and it could not get them while government policy confined blacks to hardscrabble shantytowns and limited their education. Moreover, repression of the black majority could eventually be maintained only at the price of more violence than most whites would tolerate. As long ago as 1979, President P.W. Botha proclaimed that South Africa must "adapt or die," and such major apartheid legislation as the "pass" laws, which forced blacks to carry identity documents, began to fall even before the main wave of sanctions. Botha, however, could never face up to the necessity for truly radical change; his successor, De Klerk, has done so.

The trade restrictions seem to have had little economic impact. The U.S. and other nations continued to import vital raw materials, such as chromium and platinum, for which South Africa is the major world source. The products that the West would not buy, chiefly coal and fruit, found new markets in Asia, the Middle East and, of all places, black Africa. Nearly every African country south of the Sahara trades with Pretoria.

But limitations on loans and investments did hurt. About half the American companies that once operated in South Africa have pulled out, and the value of their holdings has shrunk from $2.5 billion to $1 billion. South Africa currently suffers a net capital outflow of about $2 billion a year; money needed to build up the country's industry has to be sent abroad instead to repay foreign loans. Partly in consequence, the once booming economy has stagnated. By some estimates, output of goods and services over the past 10 years has grown on average only around 1% a year (with an actual decline in 1990), vs. perhaps 4% that might have been registered without sanctions. Predictions that the sanctions would hurt black workers most have come true. Black unemployment is estimated at 40% to 45%, vs. a 10% jobless rate for whites. Another prediction made by opponents of sanctions, however, has proved quite wrong. It had been widely forecast that the embargo would provoke a laager (circling the wagons) mentality among whites, a nose-thumbing determination to defy world opinion. That happened in Rhodesia in the late 1960s, but exactly the opposite seems to have occurred in South Africa: the | shock of finding themselves moral outcasts stung many of the nation's whites so deeply that they went along with a faster and more thorough dismantling of apartheid than they might have countenanced otherwise. "It was the feeling that the country had become a global pariah rather than the economic pressures, however substantial, which seems to have given De Klerk the green light for reforms," says a British official. Laurence Besserman, a Cape Town importer-exporter, puts it in more personal terms: "Even when dealing with old and loyal friends abroad, I always had a sort of Phantom of the Opera feeling. Now we can all come out of the shadows."

The very factor that made sanctions a modest success against South Africa, though, may make that success unrepeatable. Sanctions have been instituted 115 times since World War I, but usually without much effect. Gary Hufbauer, professor of international finance at Georgetown University, calculates that only 30% of the restrictions imposed during the past decade have had even a marginal effect in changing a target nation's policies.

Generally, either nations have been unwilling to impose sanctions severe enough to cripple the economy of an offending country, or the restrictions have been widely evaded. The moral obloquy that proved so galling to white South Africans means nothing to dictators such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Deng Xiaoping of China, who are determined to maintain their power and to hell with world opinion. Some analysts suspect that even in South Africa, sanctions that devastated rather than only damaged the economy might have produced a laager backlash. For once, the U.S. and other nations imposed sanctions just strict enough to have the desired effect -- but there is no guarantee they will get the calculation right next time.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town, Bruce W. Nelan/New York and Christopher Ogden/Washington