Business Amid Protest : Life Goes On at S. Africa Consulate

It’s very exciting to be a South African diplomat.

--Los Angeles Consul General

Les Labuschagne

At the front desk of the South African Consulate in Beverly Hills, security guard Mark Lattin sat behind the thick glass shield that separates him from the public.

The reception area on the other side of the shield, where anti-apartheid demonstrators occasionally line up and pretend to request visa applications, contained no furniture. The doors leading from it to consular offices were locked.

Months of violence in South Africa, international pressure on the country to change its apartheid system and local protests against its racial policies have made the South African Consulate the best-known and most controversial of the 74 consulates in the Los Angeles area.

Business as Usual

One recent day was quiet and, according to Consul General Les Labuschagne, typical. In his fourth-floor office, he read telegrams from Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa; spoke to the embassy in Washington, as well as three American businessmen, and then prepared for an interview on the Jewish Television Network.

In another office, Vice Consul Reinette Liebenberg reviewed visa applications. The 24-year-old former South African army captain also took calls from one traveler wanting to take his parrot along on a trip to South Africa, from another wishing to take guns into the country for hunting, and from the coroner’s office, regarding a visiting South African citizen who committed suicide.

Despite protests and demonstrations, action by the Los Angeles City Council on divestiture and a drumbeat of criticism of apartheid by local political leaders, the work of the 28 staff members, all of them white, at the consulate goes on as usual, the 43-year-old Labuschagne said.

“We have never experienced any problems,” said Labuschagne, a well-dressed, bespectacled man who spoke with aplomb while chain-smoking Dunhill cigarettes. There are, in fact, problems--some dating to 1980 when the office moved here--shared by no other local consulate.

Council Action

When the South African government decided to relocate its consulate from San Francisco to Los Angeles five years ago, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution requesting the U.S. State Department, which credentials foreign government representatives, that the “South African government not be permitted to open any consulate . . . in the greater Los Angeles area.”

Labuschagne would not say the council action was a factor in the consulate’s choice of location, but the Beverly Hills location was selected, although other consulates are located downtown or in the mid-Wilshire area.

“I think we were looking at buildings,” he said. The consulate is in the Gibraltar Savings Bank building on Wilshire Boulevard.

More recently, several area cities have taken anti-apartheid actions critical of the South African regime.

Early this month, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a divestiture plan to withdraw city deposits from banks doing business in South Africa and eliminate over a five-year period city pension fund stocks from companies with South African connections. Since then, all three city pension boards have considered the council action, and two have adopted a divestment plan. The Los Angeles Board of Education also voted not to do business with any companies owned or located in South Africa.

Demonstrators have been a persistent, though sporadic, fact of life at the South African offices since 1980, and particularly since last Thanksgiving.

Impending Hanging Protested

Some two dozen had been outside the night before a reporter visited the consulate. They were protesting the impending hanging in South Africa of Benjamin Moloisi, an anti-government activist accused of killing a black policeman. (Moloisi later received a three-week reprieve.)

Labuschagne called the demonstrations “irritating” but “part and parcel of the American way of life.” Generally he spoke much the way a career diplomat could be expected to speak, cautiously and with little emotion one way or the other.

In his office, a photograph of the consul general shaking hands with President Reagan was on a table, not far from a signed picture of Gov. George Deukmejian.

“I must say I sometimes find it difficult to make appointments,” he noted, with some local politicians to whom he has tried to pay “courtesy calls” since arriving at his post in mid-1983. Mayor Tom Bradley received him, for example, but Supervisor Kenneth Hahn did not.

“We follow the same policy as the U.S. government,” Ali Webb, Bradley’s press secretary said. “As long as the South African government is recognized by our government, we’ll continue to treat the South African consul as a member of the consular corps.”

Hahn, the supervisor who proposed a county divestiture policy that was defeated by the board last week, said he could not recall why he had never met Labuschagne. “I presume at that particular time I was not available,” he said.

The traditional role of a consulate is to process visas, assist citizens of the home country as needed, and to promote trade and tourism. As the dean of the Los Angeles consular corps, Consul General Francisco Aguirre of Ecuador, put it, the goal is to “promote the image of the country.”

Labuschagne admitted he has not spent much time promoting business or tourism.

Activities ‘Not Typical’

“If we weren’t in the news every day . . . I would have more time to venture into the quieter pastures of consular activities,” he said, “such as flying the flag, business lunches. I think the South African Consulate’s activities are not typical.”

When delegations sponsored by the South African government come to this country, Labuschagne seeks ways for them to express their views when they visit the 12 Western states for which his consulate is responsible.

This summer, for example, six South African black leaders from black-inhabited, self-governing states visited. But, Labuschagne said, he was unable to make local appointments for them with the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Sentinel, or with “some” politicians in City Hall. Eventually, a local black minister he knew from church had the South Africans to a dinner party, Labuschagne said, and Councilmen Robert Farrell and David Cunningham dropped by.

“I did not attend,” Labuschagne said.

Farrell, who originally proposed the 1980 resolution urging that the consulate not relocate to Los Angeles, explained, “I would not welcome a representative of the South African government in City Hall or in council chambers, but I would meet them, as people, to talk. That’s part of the essence of politics.”

Spokesman for Regime

As local representatives of South Africa, the consulate staff sometimes functions as spokesman and defender of the South African regime.

Occasionally their words can be biting. Although Labuschagne said, “One doesn’t have much to do with local politics,” one of his staff members, Consul Manus Le Roux, had a trenchant reply when asked by a local newspaper to respond to the Los Angeles City Council divestiture vote.

Noting that a local Human Relations Commission report had found Watts not much improved since 1965, Le Roux said: “The city obviously has a lot of work here locally, and they should do it, instead of trying to improve--within quotation marks--the condition of blacks in our country.”

Labuschagne said, even-voiced, that his country does not get “equal time” in the press. An Afrikaner who trained as a lawyer before entering the foreign service, Labuschagne showed his emotions only inadvertently, either by smoking more and more rapidly, or bouncing one foot repeatedly while using words such as whipping boy, scapegoat or convenient lightning conductor to describe the prevailing attitude toward South Africa.

‘It Does Anger Me’

Vice Consul Liebenberg said, “I’m not here to give my personal feelings. . . . Yes, it does anger me to see what type of things the newspapers are publishing.”

“I feel badly so many Americans say the things they do,” said security guard Lattin, the only American on the staff. Recalling one demonstration a few months back, he added:

“One guy called me a murderer. I said, ‘How so?’ He said, ‘You work for an organization that murders people indiscriminately.’ I said, ‘That’s not so.’ . . . A man came up to me and said, ‘Do you think it’s right that such and such people were killed in a skirmish with the police?’ I said, ‘Of course not.’ He was trying to say if I work for South Africa, I have no feeling for people.”

Aside from politics, the usual social events associated with consular life--dinners and receptions--continue, Labuschagne said. Walter Danielson, the retired consul general of Sweden, agreed there would be no ostracism of any one representative of an accredited government because consuls “are not involved in discussing international relations.”

“In fact, people have almost been more supportive,” Labuschagne said. “There’s no sense of isolation.”

Taking a puff of his cigarette, Labuschagne noted, “It’s not a boring job. The media hype makes sure I can’t spend my afternoons on the golf course.”