Spectator's Journal/The Other Perestroika
Train, John
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE OTHER PERESTROIKA Johannesburg lmost nobody believed that President F. W. de Klerk would bring real democracy to South Africa, any more than most in the West initially...
...and from other constitutional experience how to achieve this balanced effect...
...For instance, the Indians and Cape "coloureds" (typically a mixture of black and Asian), each with its own chamber in parliament, have interests separate from those of the blacks and each other...
...The Afrikaners arrived in an empty land about the time the Pilgrims reached America, and developed a distinctive language and religion...
...Soweto and most of the other townships were designed so that they could be choked off by troops and armor...
...Fruit-industry profits were affected, as some citrus had to be sold as juice instead of fresh, but sales and volumes were maintained...
...These killings are not just tribal clashes...
...Our oil embargo resulted in the Sasol coal-into-oil process, which has made South Africa energy-independent...
...he could well enter into a more or less formal alliance with a white centrist party that might end up holding the balance of power...
...The danger to the new constitu- tional order comes from the extremists on either wing—black fanatics or white traditionalists...
...Now they face with anguish the prospect of being engulfed by their tribal neighbors...
...There are an estimated 2,700,000 weapons in the hands of white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners...
...Drafting committees are working overtime—just as they are in Eastern Europe—to learn from the U.S...
...If things got badenough, that's what it might come to...
...Two hundred apartheid laws have been repealed, and the rest are on the way out...
...But in consequence, South Africa has dug its way out of debt, and is now one of the world's most solvent countries—not entirely a disadvantage...
...However, the 15-year-olds brandishing their automatic weapons have little conception of the power of artillery or helicopter gunships, and could well be provoked into having a try at an uprising whose suppression could stall the country's economic and political development for decades...
...The government is thinking of a universally elected lower house, balanced by an upper chamber representing all communities but elected for longer terms and otherwise weighted to have a more conservative tilt, and whose consent would be needed to pass legislation...
...Today, opposite our troops in the desert, Iraq has deployed perhaps the world's finest self-propelled artillery piece, the gigantic 155-mm G-6 bought from South Afby John Train rica's Armscor...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE OTHER PERESTROIKA Johannesburg lmost nobody believed that President F. W. de Klerk would bring real democracy to South Africa, any more than most in the West initially believed Gorbachev, but it's happening at a gallop...
...firms working in South Africa—but started selling to the South African 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 police and military . . . not quite what we wanted...
...on the contrary, we should reward accommodation and flexibility...
...A static population of whites could not expect to dominate forever a rising tide of blacks who were rapidly organizing trade unions and political parties...
...The economic measures were indeed bothersome as a moral gesture, as have been the sports and performing arts boycotts (which, however, did not extend to omnipresent American films and TV programming...
...Not surprisingly, the new owners are less fastidious than their American predecessors...
...We're hunters," they often say, with a grim smile, "just like you Americans...
...The danger comes from extremists on either wing who think that if they hold out adamantly they can provoke an armed showdown and dominate the ruins...
...General Motors, for example, was bought out by its local managers, who thereupon not only tore up the Sullivan Principles—a code of enlightened employment practices adopted by most U.S...
...The ANC still favors sanctions because it wants to claim credit for their abolition when it achieves its political aims...
...A recent Gallup Poll showed 82 percent of South African blacks opposed to them...
...The de Klerk-Mandela entente is South Africa's first—and perhaps last—chance for profound change without bloodshed...
...And an Afrikaner farmer with no escape hatch sees the world differently from an Anglo businessman with a British passport and funds abroad...
...He is far from sure, though, that the majority of whites will join him in making that bet, and therefore will probably not submit his plan to them for a vote, but rather proceed directly to a universal referendum on a new constitution...
...Like the Mormons, they thought they had found the promised land...
...The disinvestment campaign created a billion-dollar bonanza for local businessmen, as they scooped up prime American companies at half or less of their appraised value, creating scores of instant tycoons...
...Several times I heard the boast, "We conquered this country once, and we can do it again...
...It happened that the sanctions campaign coincided with a fall in the price of gold, South Africa's principal export, and thus with a general economic downturn, so it's difficult to assess the overall impact of sanctions...
...There was a passing effect on corporate profits, but probably no more than 100,000 jobs—one percent of an economically active population of roughly 10 million—were permanently lost...
...Half of all black school-age children are out of school...
...The problem is that most blacks believe that political change will mean sudden economic change as well...
...Would the army attack a breakaway group of armed whites...
...To start with, stock divestiture—an American university selling its shares to the Japanese, for example—makes it less likely, not more, that the company will leave South Africa or act benevolently if it stays: the gadfly has been removed...
...Whatever happens, there will be a lot of disappointment...
...I doubt it...
...De Klerk and Nelson Mandela both see a window of negotiating opportunity, with each believing he can do better now than if events were to move toward a showdown...
...Zulu chief Gatsha Buthelezi, forexample, sounds like a mayor of New York, pleading for harmony instead of hate...
...De Klerk believes there is enough political diversity and good sense in the country so that no one faction will dominate...
...The notion that successJohn Train travels frequently to Africa...
...Either faction could derail the de Klerk-Mandela understanding...
...It deserves our encouragement...
...Easing sanctions, even if they never meant much, is the right signal...
...A foretaste of the breakdown in government came in the murder of most of the council members in the black "townships," which are terrorized by ruthless boys of fifteen and sixteen, whose lives are built around violence, not work...
...they are encouraged by those who oppose change (notably conservative Afrikaners), and also reflect political rivalries, as well as the tension around workers' hostels crowded with single men...
...However, the U.S., Britain, and Europe don't want all power to go to the ANC...
...Another element of this complexity is that while many black leaders are rabidly anti-white or Marxist, others are capitalists who consider the white presence essential to South Africa's prosperity...
...Governmental restrictions have eased so much in South Africa that the campaign for economic sanctions has lost its purpose...
...A one man-one vote constitution is in the works...
...The arms embargo was counterproductive: South Africa, formerly dependent on the West for its weapons, developed a highly sophisticated billion-dollar arms industry that has grown into the country's largest exporter of manufactured goods...
...Still, the country's political transformation was inevitable for profound demographic, political, and economic reasons...
...Our boycott of South African coal had an immediate impact, but the industry found new markets, opened lower-cost mines, and recovered...
...Just as a retreat under fire is the hardest military maneuver, making profound changes in a faction-riven country is a supreme test of statesmanship...
...As the township situation illustrates, there is more to South African politics than black against white...
...Servants half-expect to take over their masters' homes, manual laborers look forward to becoming vice-presidents, and millions of squatters in shantytowns dream of good jobs and comfortable housing...
...The far right claims strong support in the police and the army, and there seems little reason to challenge that view...
...Much of the army's recent experience and political indoctrination has been in fighting the ANC's foreign allies...
...ut have sanctions worked anyway...
...ful economic development will call for decades of training and toil is alien to a half-illiterate population whose average age is just over twenty...
...1.0 Those who favored them all along like to claim now that they worked, but it's hard to show how...
...The country is complex, like America...
...The financial pickle in which South Africa found itself at that time had much to do with the drying up of bank credit, although loss of access to the IMF has hurt as well...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
