The Scandal of Sanctions

...Gray and Mr...

...The answer is no...

...Its chosen instrument was the imposition of sanctions that would excommunicate South Africa from the world's economy until the apartheid state was brought to its senses, if not to its knees...

...For some—the high-minded rather than the ruthless—excommunication was the only way to convince Pretoria of the error of its ways...

...In a country in which history has bred a strong strand of isolationism, he could hardly go wrong...

...Those who wielded bell, book, and candle blithely ignored the fact that sanctions without the threat of direct military intervention have had a dismal record in the conduct of international affairs...

...multinationals have done just that, inducing profound second thoughts about the strategy among some of South Africa's black leaders...

...The NUM leadership, like that of other radical black unions in South Africa, believes that capitalism is the ultimate enemy of the socialist state it seeks to install and is willing to sacrifice its membership to destroy it...

...A few departing U.S...

...Senators Simon and Lugar and Co...

...Those who felt a little queasy about inflicting further penury and deprivation on South Africa's black citizens were silenced with the answer that this is what South Africa's black leaders themselves demanded...

...So much for sanctions securing American influence in a post-apartheid society...

...Of the nearly 170 U.S...

...From November 1986 until November 1987 the number of signatories dropped by half, as U.S...

...Years of sacrifice for an uncertain goal may not disturb congressmen and senators, but they are not at the sharp end...

...The main aim was not to liberate South African blacks, but to free the U.S...

...those black radicals beginning to make a painful and sobering cost-benefit analysis, are...

...After years of stagnation brought about not by external action but internal mismanagement, the South African economy is beginning to grow again, however slowly...

...The belief—fostered by savants of the left on Western campuses and played back to South Africa's embattled townships—that the battle was all but won was enough to persuade some, but by no means all, black South Africans to accept temporary deprivation to secure the final victory...

...Moreover, for the first time in history black workers will join management on the board of a South African company...

...But it was a gloomy Christmas for thousands of black workers whose jobs will be imperiled, and it offers an even more dismal prospect for those South Africans who cling to the belief that American influence is a force for good...

...But surely all is not lost...

...Botha, however, miscalculated in one important respect...

...How have the promises survived more than a year of practice...

...These results were reflected again in a recent German poll that went over the heads of the radical National Union of Mineworkers to put the question directly to workers in South Africa's coal industry...

...But South Africa is not unique...

...His own attempts at reform—however despised by the rest of the world—had weakened his image among his more conservative followers...

...Another has been the swing to import substitution and the growth of a new sanctions-busting industry as businessmen seek to replace lost markets...

...It should come as no surprise that South Africa's external trade showed a net increase in the past year, with Japan becoming South Africa's top trading partner...

...And again, isn't this what black South Africans themselves have demanded...

...A withering of a diseased and isolated economy until blacks would rise up against the government, if whites didn't do it first...

...that it is racist to deprive black men of their jobs and condemn their families to penury, to strengthen South Africa's white rulers in their intransigence, and to deprive the United States of any means to persuade them otherwise...

...But the code—which in its heyday made a significant contribution to the welfare of black communities—is not the only victim of the sanctioneers' zeal...

...The rise of the independent movement, the emergence of a few dissident nationalists on the left, and the over-sold meeting between some sixty white South Africans and the ANC leadership in Dakar proved, they claimed, that sanctions were working, albeit a bit more slowly than they had hoped...

...President Botha is not about to hand over the keys to the castle...

...but attempts to use the dissidents as proof that sanctions were effective were the surest way to send most of them scurrying for cover—which they have...

...But if this addiction has too frequently made United States foreign policy the diligent pursuit of folly, seldom has it been more diligently or more blatantly pursued than by those who believed that the only way to bring South Africa into the family of civilized nations was to remove all traces of American influence...

...For others revolution was the solution, not the problem...

...Of the 600,000 who enter the labor market each year few, if any, will gain full-time employment...

...Undisturbed by moral considerations, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea have also rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the United States while there is no doubt—and a great deal of evidence—that East bloc countries have not allowed their support for the African National Congress to outweigh their need for hard currency...

...Their overriding interest is influencing the American voter, who has been convinced, largely through their efforts as transmitted by an applauding press, that opposition to sanctions is analogous to racism...

...companies still operating in South Africa...

...It was indeed a savage sanction, but savage for whom...

...Other histories have—or should have—instructed us that a people who believe their security is threatened will put that security above material considerations...

...Influence entails presence and there will, through Rangel's cunning contrivance, shortly be no American presence in South Africa...

...Most companies, however, have followed the pattern of General Motors, which sold out to local managementwhich in turn promptly fired 500 black workers, removed itself from the Sullivan code enforcing social responsibility programs and integrationist work practices among American companies, and began selling its products to the South African government...

...white South Africans would feel the pinch and, putting wealth above racism, would force their government to change, thus effectively preventing the expected bloodbath...

...Figures on the number of job losses as a result of sanctions and disinvestment are imprecise at best...

...As liberal South African businessman Tony Bloom commented recently: "South African companies have been able to acquire technology, management skills, brand names and market share that would have taken years to build...

...companies that have quit South Africa in the last few years, more than half have sold out—at firesale prices—to South African companies or local managements, thus creating some 100 new instant millionaires, all of them white...

...Sanctions, they calculated, would so impoverish black South Africa that, with nothing left to lose, it would rise up against its fatally weakened white oppressors and thus usher in the Utopia where all men were equal in poverty and which would nolonger make any claim on America's conscience (only on its purse...

...But isn't this precisely what the sanctioneers wanted...

...In a case that should be familiar in the United States—courtesy of Congressmen Wolpe and Gray—Ford Motor Company engineered an unusually graceful pull-out from South Africa after threatened boycotts of its products by U.S...

...The first answer was not long in coming...

...Wolpe woke up and, studiously ignoring the wishes of the very unions they have so assiduously cultivated in the past, tried to block the transfer under the sanctions ban on new investment in South Africa...

...T hus far, then, the only losers in the 1 sanctions game have been black South Africans themselves...

...It is a proud record for those who believed, or said they believed, that sanctions could change stubborn hearts and closed minds...

...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 It was futile to point out that liberal Afrikaner disgruntlement had been growing since the 1970s...

...Not for South African business, to whom Rep...

...Above and beyond all these considerations was the conviction that a successful transfer of power to the black majority was inevitable, if not imminent, and that it was important for America's long-term interests in a resource-rich region to "get on the right side of history...

...In one opinion survey after another, irrespective of who has framed the question, the response has remained constant: only 25 percent are in favor of sanctions and disinvestment if this means that they will suffer personal hardship...

...But the people who might begin to say such things are poor and far away...

...It was then that Mr...

...Increased polarization of South Africa's fractured communities should at least please those who believed sanctions would hasten the revolution...

...Other unions, however, have proved a little more willing to temper their ideology in the interests of their members...

...Moral outrage and an instinct for meddling in areas that few politicians visit and even fewer understand are American qualities the rest of the world has come to dread, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 13...

...But other motives were confused and contradictory...

...Indeed, the effect of disinvestment on the Sullivan code—and by extension on the welfare of South Africa's black labor force—has been startling, if predictable...

...President Botha cashed in quickly, using this unexpected American bonus to call and win an election in early May, calculating correctly that external threat would induce the white electorate to rally round the flag...

...As each wage earner supports approximately six dependents, the scope and scale of the suffering is immense...

...companies sold out to South Africans who believed they had no obligation in a depressed economy to set aside a considerable part of their profits on expensive social programs...

...There are few spectacles on earth more alarming than American legislators in search of a quick fix of other people's problems...

...Botha got the message, even if Congress did not...

...Indeed, the question of whether or not sanctions would achieve the abolition of apartheid and the transfer of power to the black majority was, one suspects, always secondary...

...Their efforts, however, pale into insignificance beside the work of Congressman Charles Rangel who, while the Administration slept, quietly slipped the most savage sanction yet into the Budget Reconciliation Act, imposing double taxation on the 100 or so U.S...

...having saddled the sanctions horse, are determined to ride it all the way to this year's elections...

...Far from making white South Africa more conciliatory, sanctions had merely fueled its intransigence...

...Of course, the congressman and his fellow believers are not and never have been interested in influencing events in South Africa...

...Faced with a bill of $57 million most, if not all, will eventually decide to pack up and go home...

...It does not require too much insight to discover why...

...The result was substantial gains by the far right-wing parties and the unseating of the liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP) as the official opposition...

...Rangel gave the best present in years: a golden opportunity to snap up another rich harvest of American bargains at giveaway prices...

...But before one examines their failure to win anything, except possibly the approval of Jesse Jackson, it is important to reflect on just what they thought they would achieve in the heady days of October 1986 when Congress overrode a White House veto to secure the first humiliating defeat of a hitherto all-conquering President...

...Moral outrage and an instinct for meddling in areas that few politicians visit and even fewer understand are American qualities the rest of the world has come to dread...

...Now, eighteen months since the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, the full extent of that folly should be apparent to all—except those congressmen and senators who, Fleur de Villiers, a former associate editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Times, is a visiting fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London...

...What is known is that in four sectors of the South African economy alone, a quarter of a million South Africans have lost their jobs in the last three years through sanctions and economic recession...

...Once again, the practice has defeated the promise...

...One painful discovery is that South Africa's whites, however politically uncertain they may feel, may have also been substantially enriched by measures that set out to impoverish them...

...Congress from the frustration of doing nothing...

...Meanwhile reform has ground to a halt, the far-right has grown in strength, and the only truly liberal voice in South African politics—the PFP—has been fatally weakened...

...There are those who would argue that it is racist to take from the black and poor and give to the rich and white...

...To keep its former plant open, however, Ford agreed to transfer $64 million to discharge the company's debts...

...Faced with the option of sacrificing 4,500 jobs with the close-down of Ford's South African plant, or modifying its stance on capitalism, the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa agreed to a deal whereby 18 percent of Ford's 42-percent South African holding went to Ford's partner, the Anglo American Corporation, and the remaining 24 percent went to the workers themselves in a unique share offer, the dividends of which would be plowed into black community welfare projects...

...In the fall of 1986, fueled by moral outrage and high moral purpose, the United States Congress set out to punish South Africa and express solidarity with its black oppressed masses...

...that it is racist to ignore the wishes of black workers...

...state and city governments had made the choice inevitable...

...This unintended consequence predictably enraged anti-apartheid lobbyists who would have preferred a scorched-earth policy that would have turned thousands of black South Africans out of their jobs...

...In any case, it was suggested, sanctions would be felt more keenly by wealthy whites than by blacks who had little enough anyway—a proposition that ignores the integration of the South African economy and the simple fact that if you take food away from a fat man he will suffer, but if you take it away from a thin man he dies...

...The discrepancy between the opinion of the union executive and its members is not difficult to explain...

...And they do not vote in the United States...

...Today, they, the ANC, and even Moscow accept that this calculation was at least a few decades out...

...That belief was shared not merely by sanctioneers in Congress—Senators Kennedy, Simon, Lugar, and Cranston and Congressmen Wolpe, Solarz, Gray, Rangel, and Leland—but by state and municipal governmentsacross the United States which, through boycott and threat of boycott, have at the latest count sent 170 American companies in South Africa stampeding for the exit...

...It is perhaps not too cynical to suggest that that was part of the attraction...

...One reason has been the low exchange rate of the South African rand—induced by the flight of American banking capital—which has made South African exports more competitive on world markets...

...If South Africa was under threat they wanted an even stronger man...

...Billions of South African government funds, which could be more creatively employed on building hospitals and schools and generally improving the quality of black life, have been spent on oil storage and an expensive home-grown arms industry—both legacies of earlier sanctions...

...failure to do so would hand the area over to Moscow and its surrogates...

...tried hard to conceal their dismay...

...B just how effective has the whole L P sanctions package been—disinvestment included...