Why the Rush to Give Up on Sanctions?

In the wake of the rightward tilt in last month’s whites-only elections in South Africa, some people are declaring that economic sanctions are a failure--that they’ve accomplished little more than hardening the government’s determination to keep apartheid in force.

The growing popularity of this assessment (which I believe is wrong) is encouraged by certain attitudes that must be fully transcended if the United States is to have an effective policy toward southern Africa.

First, and most obvious, is the tendency toward impatience in foreign-policy matters. It would be astonishing indeed if the immediate reaction of the South African government--or any other--to increased internal and external pressure were anything other than defensiveness. Second, and more subtle, is the ambivalence that arises at those exceptional moments when Americans are asked to support, in the national interest, sanctions against a country not considered as falling within the Soviet orbit. Finally, and most disturbing, given our own tragic history of racial conflict and paternalism, is the appearance at times of a racial double standard in American foreign policy.

Together, in varying proportions, these attitudes help explain why there can be early and vocal skepticism of sanctions against South Africa with no comparable skepticism voiced about the immediate effects of sanctions against, say, Libya or Poland.

Impatience, unconscious racial attitudes and reflexive anti-communism make it possible for there to be expressions of deep concern that sanctions against Pretoria “will hurt the black majority we seek to help” (disregarding the pro-sanctions sentiments of popular black political organizations and unions) when there are no similar cries of conscience about the fate of Polish or Libyan workers. So, too, they help explain why blacks leading an armed struggle against apartheid can be labeled “terrorists” while other insurgents, such as those in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, are hailed as “freedom fighters” deserving of U.S. moral and material support.

By passing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, Congress recognized, on a bipartisan basis, that our traditional foreign policy toward South Africa compromised not only our values but our political and strategic interests as well. It acknowledged that apartheid harms America’s long-term relationship with all of Africa, and that continued escalation of violence threatens to degenerate into a blood bath and provoke a superpower conflict. By adopting economic sanctions, Congress put into place a medium- to long-range strategy designed to worsen the economic burden that a regime confronting formidable internal opposition must already bear, to send a signal that the regime will continue to be denied economic and diplomatic support internationally, and to encourage legitimate opposition forces.

Beneath their bravado, South African whites are gradually becoming concerned about the accumulating costs of internal resistance and external sanctions. South African economic analysts admit that, even under the most optimistic assumptions, per-capita economic growth will stagnate unless sanctions are lifted. In November, the economic adviser to the South African Reserve Bank pointedly noted that “the upswing in the economy is being inhibited by the effect of trade, and more especially, capital sanctions.”

Of greater long-term significance than the “law and order” appeals featured in the last election are recent South African opinion polls, which demonstrate that three times as many whites prefer to accelerate the pace of “reform” as to slow it down. The white Dutch Reformed Church has renounced its previous support for apartheid; the Broederbond has circulated a working document implying that any new constitution would have to be acceptable to the African National Congress; more than 300 faculty members at Stellenbosch University (the intellectual citadel of Afrikanerdom) have called on the government to scrap all remaining discriminatory legislation and make a commitment to share power with blacks; and three credible independent candidates for parliament have shown that there is a new, reformist Afrikaner opposition that approaches 25% of the Afrikaner vote in key urban and white-collar districts.

Other signs of declining white morale, reminiscent of those that appeared gradually in Rhodesia, include rising emigration (13,711 whites left in 1986, a 67% increase over 1983), rampant draft evasion (more than 25% defied the 1985 call-up, with the government subsequently refusing to publish updated statistics), and swelling suicide figures (453 members of the South African Defense Forces attempted suicide in 1986, a 500% increase over the previous year).

Weakening sanctions in the face of South African intransigence will only encourage the Afrikaner minority in its fantasy that it can hold onto monopoly power indefinitely, free of mounting economic costs or deepening international isolation.

Worse still, to reinforce such delusions is to invite greater repression and delay the onset of negotiations.

Instead, what is urgently needed is a steady policy aimed at tightening those sanctions already in place, while substantially increasing diplomatic and economic pressure on the South African government to abandon apartheid, and to negotiate--with the black majority--a new and genuinely democratic political order.