S. Africa Has All but Cut Ties With Washington, U.S. Official Says

The white minority South African government, angry about congressionally imposed economic sanctions, has virtually severed contact with the Reagan Administration and no longer is inhibited by “the American factor” in its treatment of the black majority, a senior U.S. official says.

The official said that President Pieter W. Botha’s government, in its new attitude toward Washington, makes no distinction between President Reagan, who vetoed the sanctions legislation, and the Congress that overrode that veto.

His comments, made to a small group of reporters this week, were a virtual obituary for the Administration’s “constructive engagement” policy. He said that Washington will continue its efforts to use influence to improve the status of blacks, but he conceded that no one in Pretoria is paying much attention.

‘To Listen or Not Listen’

“Their tendency to listen or not listen to our diplomacy is affected by their perception that, through this action of the Congress, we have made a decision” to punish South Africa, said the official, who declined to be identified.

” . . . We’re seeing the return of the bulldozer to urban planning,” he said. “We are seeing forced removals (of black squatters) again--it wouldn’t have happened a year ago.”

The official’s assessment was challenged by Dr. Michael G. Schatzberg, an associate professor of African Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who said, “I don’t think they (South African officials) ever really cared about what the United States thinks.

“All of their noises toward Washington were just that--noise--to lead the United States on a merry chase,” Schatzberg said.

Use of Diplomacy

Under the constructive engagement policy, the Administration sought to influence South Africa and its black-ruled neighbors through diplomacy instead of confrontation. Chester A. Crocker, assistant secretary of state for Africa, formulated the policy as an alternative to former President Jimmy Carter’s frequent moralistic condemnations of apartheid.

In the first five years of the Reagan Administration, senior officials regularly visited South Africa. But that policy seems to be changing in the wake of congressional sanctions that bar all new U.S. investment in South Africa except in black-owned businesses and ban U.S. imports of many South African goods.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz is scheduled to visit six African countries next month but will not come close to South Africa.

Armacost in Africa

Under Secretary of State Michael H. Armacost, the department’s third-ranking official, is currently visiting the black-ruled states of southern Africa, but he, too, plans to skip South Africa.

Nevertheless, the Administration official, a strong supporter of constructive engagement from the start, said that the policy enjoyed five years of success “in what we tried to accomplish.”

“The first half of the 1980s saw more change in South Africa than at any time since the Second World War,” he said, although conceding that the impetus for the reforms went far beyond U.S. influence. The changes included permission for blacks to form labor unions and elimination of a law that banned interracial sex or marriage.

‘Dribble Out Change’

“The government didn’t address the key issues of political power,” the official said. “You can’t just dribble out change. But for a period there, I think things worked.”

He said that President Botha probably would have cracked down on black dissent regardless of anything Washington might have done. The reforms had produced rising black expectations that led to demands for more change than the government was prepared to tolerate, the official said.

The official said that some American critics of apartheid may be “lusting for more” severe sanctions but that he hopes the experience with sanctions would change the focus of the debate in this country.

“We may have had to go through this experience before we learned basic things about how to communicate (with the South African government) and about the limits on our power (to influence events in Pretoria),” the official said.