THE UNITED STATES & SOUTHERN AFRICA

...Although .this occurred in October 1976, the territory has yet to obtain diplomatic recognition and Rs statehood should be ignored as a shallow maneuver to entrench white supremacy over the wealth of South Africa...

...In addition, massive United States economic assistance as well as stepped-up training of Portuguese pilots was offered the old fascist regime in Lisbon as it struggled to repress the guerrilla wars that broke out in Africa during the early 1960s...

...They also involve a willingness to accept a pluralistic world order in which American political and economic institutions are not the norm...

...Yet, in each case the United States has drawn back from supporting the populist forces whenever they have espoused socialist economic orders in challenging the status quo...

...Simultaneously the liberation movements were neglected...

...These movements are nevertheless essentially nationalist with egalitarian hopes...

...These industries have bolstered white power, functioning in part as the economic base for the South African military, police and surveiUance systems...

...Africans passed resolutions, dispatched delegations, petitions and moral appeals for almost half a century before turning to passive resistance in the 1950s...

...Capitalist modes of growth cannot be transplated to third world areas without producing grotesque injustices...

...Moreover, this troubled area could focus these issues with a clarity which might not only lead to a reappraisal of Southern African policy, but to a re-examination of United States and third world relations in general...

...For a brief moment, three-quarters of Johannesburg's black workers withheld their labor in solidarity with the young leaders of the black consciousness movement...

...1 April 1977:202 Prime Minister Vorster and leading members of the South African cabinet have rededicated themselves to maintaining the system...

...An example of such randomness may have been the recent shooting of seven missionaries...

...the collapse of negotiations in Geneva...

...Indeed, the investment and technical expertise of these corporations have been crucial in building up mining, atomic power, chemical, vehicle and electronics industries...

...In the long run the cold war formula will not work, either in the support for "stable" white regimes or black counterparts rooted in comparable class privilege...

...As pools of skilled administrators, research teams and innovators, these corporations could still assist third world countries--whether socialist or otherwise but on a contractual basis rather than by direct investment and controlling interests...

...This systematic racial discrimination has been built around a legal fiction that black laborers are migratory, that is temporary sojourners, in that 87 percent of South Africa which is reserved by law for white property, rights and white political power...

...In Angola Portugal withdrew amidst a civil war sponsored in part by United States intervention on behalf of ethnically based groups that appeared Commonweal: 201 less socialist in orientation...

...This will be peculiarly difficult as it involves encouraging populist national movements with socialist ideologies and, given past history, anti-American predilections...

...After sixteen years of rumbling discontent and draconian repression, black student protests erupted again in late 1976 and have spread to the major South African cities...

...It could be that he is using the United States civil rights struggle as a paradigm for Southern Africa...

...In this way a new flexibility would enter our foreign policy options and America might then avoid recurrent failures in Southern Africa, and elsewhere, as resistance mounts to racial and class exploitation...

...Rather it was a recognition of changed circumstances and an attempt to usher in a change from white control to black "moderate" government...

...To accept this challenge and work effectively against privilege, Americans must recognize that their economic history is not for export...

...If we recognize injustice, abandon the conspiracy theory of populist revolution, and realize that there is a worldwide problem of controlling the transnational corporations, then the way will have been opened to an alternative foreign policy in which radical socialist movements in the third world would not have to gravitate to the Soviet or Chinese blocs...

...On the one hand, South Africa's apartheid policies have been deplored in principle, South Africa's continuing I PETER WALSHE, is Director o/A[riean Studies and associate pro]essor o/ Govermnent and International Studies at the University o[ Notre Dame...

...Although it was presented as a new policy, this belated response to the festering Southern African scene did not involve the radical reassessment of foreign policy that is required if the United States is to assist the oppressed...

...This regional ferment is not simply the result of racial discrimination and countervailing violence...

...There are, but they require a radical reassessment of Southern African trends as well as trends throughout the third world...

...civil war and Cubans in Angola...

...The draconian repression of recent protests by the Vorster government should have been .yet another reminder of the total inappropriateness of this model...

...Thank God the Christian Institute, the Catholic bishops and the South African Council of Churches have thought otherwise...

...Commonweal: 203...

...The vast majority of South Africans are therefore impersonally used as labor units and told to focus their political aspirations on ,their "homelands" or Bantustans where they do not work and live~--the decaying overpopulated agricultural backwaters comprising 13 percent of South Africa's land mass...

...Profits are what matter and these corporations are deeply entrenched in the profit-producing system of apartheid...

...guerrillas and Kissinger in Rhodesia...

...Ambassador Andrew Young is committed to bringing Smith back to the negotiating table via South African pressure, ready to veto attempts to expel South Africa from the United Nations, and prepared, if necessary, for a United States veto of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime...

...As the country's internal security situation deteriorated, Kissinger attempted a patch-up job designed to thwart the emerging preeminence of African nationalist groups with strong socialist commitments...

...Moreover, they have shown determined resistance to the efforts of American churches to prise them loose...

...Over five hundred demonstrators have been shot, thousands arrested, hundreds held without trial and new legisla- ~ tion rushed through the white parliament to entrench still further the race and class privilege of apartheid...

...Their organizations, the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, were then banned in 1960 and forced underground...

...Alas, the evidence is in...

...More awkward issues have to be addressed and they go to the heart of United States foreign policy...

...These cold war policies, linked to a strategy for third world growth which is based on the support of privileged economic elites allied to the technical expertise of the transnationals, cannot succeed in Southern Africa...

...In the years following this repression, the United States offered verbal condemnation of apartheid while the build-up of corporate investment increased sharply...

...In essence, white financial power (controlled at first by Britain and English-speaking South Africans) and white political power (controlled by Afrikaners of Dutch and German descent) have used black labor to develop a rapidly urbanizing economy...

...At the same time our transnational corporations will have to be disciplined, that is brought effectively under the constraints of public policy and prised loose from alliances with foreign elites...

...Powerful American corporations have also been involved with a rapid build-up of private investment in Angola and the core state, South Africa...

...This is a perplexing event as the Zimbabwe Peoples Army operating out of Mozambique has been meticulous up to this point in avoiding the missions, a policy of restraint pursued in part because of the courageous stance of Bishop Donal Lamont of Umtali, now facing ten-years imprisonment for refusing to report the presence of guerrillas...

...In practice the Catholic hierarchy has now defied the regime by integrating their schools and encouraging passive resistance to the draft...

...THE UNITED STATES & SOUTHERN AFRICA PETER WALSHE What is needed is a radical reassessment Southern Africa has been in the headlines: the coup in Portugal followed by independence for Mozambique...

...Southern Africa, as an international trouble spot, is therefore a depressing area involving a series of failures and potential disasters for the United States...

...Egalitarian movements struggling to redistribute resources and to establish participatory democracies may be repressed as technically equipped dictatorships proliferate...

...South Africa has its own complex history of black and white interaction, an industrial revolution sparked by the discovery of diamonds and gold in the !ate 19th century, the rise of white Afrikaner nationalism and the reassertion of deeply rooted patterns of segregation under the more recently coined term apartheid...

...Uncontrolled transnational corporations are not the cutting edge of salvation history...

...An alternative to present policies is to stop identifying populist and socialist movements with a Communist conspiracy (even if the Communist powers do fish in troubled waters), and to recognize these movements as the local struggle for economic and political justice...

...In Namibia American firms still enjoy tax exemptions for revenue paid to the illegal South African administration...

...Are there alternative directions...

...The new leftleaning regime in Lisbon negotiated independence for Mozambique and Angola so that African forces with socialist commitments came to power in spite of the United States...

...Indeed they are collapsing with embarrassing completeness and rapidity in the aftermath of the Portuguese military coup of April 1974...

...Racial discrimination in the core state has been used to reinforce class exploitation with United States corporations increasingly a major part of the system...

...United States investment in South Africa escalated following effective political repression after Sharpville in 1960, and slowed as recent protests developed...

...In accepting such a package of warmed-up 1960s policy, Ambassador Young is very close to betraying the Biblical faith and prophetic search for justice with which he has been associated in the past...

...the ferocious repression of resurgent black protests in the Republic of South Africa...

...These changes immediately escalated guerrilla activities against Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where the Smith regime was having to extend the white draft and attract mercenaries from abroad...

...Building on past statements condemning apartheid, they have now called for full black political participation, an end to racial discrimination, and a radical redistribution of resources...

...but this is not inevitable, and the latent radical hope in America's past should be revivified to work against that dictatorial future...

...National economic orders could be encouraged or set their own priorities, we would have to limit our material greed, but America could become a major source of democratic inspiration...

...The world is more complex and potentiallyflecentralized than Moscow, Washington, the Chase Manhattan or General Motors would have us believe...

...Rather the Ambassador believes South Africa can be pressured into change by American corporations...

...Although these events appeared in the headlines, they were essentially maneuvers in buffer areas around the core state of the region, the Republic of South Africa...

...This meant a black regime prepared to cooperate with the West and the established instruments o f our economic power, the transnational corporations already ensconsced in Southern Africa...

...The Transkei was the first of these backwaters to be offered political independence...

...While concerned to limit the privileges of local elites and transnational corporations, they are not the handmaidens of Moscow or China anymore than they choose to be the blind devotees of Paris, London, or Washington...

...The USSR, China and South Africa have also fished in troubled waters...

...Just as the United States trades with the USSR and China, so economic co-operation with third world areas could continue to evolve--but not through the politically manipulative conduit of transnational corporations...

...United States policy in Southern Africa has been a classic cold war strategy: a search for regional stability, support for anti-Communist governments and the maintenance of an arena for increasing corporate investment...

...Of course, the scene has been complicated by the division within the nationalist movement, a situation perpetuated by goeernment repression which precluded the growth of well-organized black political organizations within the country...

...These protests have been ruthlessly crushed...

...Opposition to racial and economic exploitation has existed in South Africa throughout the 20th century...

...In essence, however, the Geneva Conference which the Kissinger initiative produced, has failed for two reasons---the intransigence of the Smith regime, and the determination of the United States and Britain .to exclude the guerrilla forces from a decisive say in Zimbabwe's future...

...To become the hope of the poor and oppressed, America must shift its support from entrenched and increasingly ruthless elites...

...Without such a radical reassessment of foreign policy towards Africa, Asia and Latin America, the United States will remain one of the major obstacles to the elimination of hunger, malnutrition and political repression around the globe...

...South Africa of the 1970s has not the same ambience as the United States of the 1960s...

...On the east coast power was transferred to a unified movement--the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique...

...It is in this context that the level of violence will rapidly increase, and not all of it will be tactically controlled...

...At the same time that labor has been denied civil rights in the economy it was creating...

...administration of Namibia (South West Africa) recognized as illegal, Portugal,s intransigence in attempting to hold onto Mozambique and Angola lamented, and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence from B~tain condemned...

...In the ease of Rhodesia, the United States continues to violate the United Nations economic boycott in its purchase of chrome under the Byrd amendment...

...The Carter Administration So far the Carter administration shows few signs of recognizing the full dimensions of the shift that is needed...

...It is not a situation that can be adequately analyzed in terms of dismantling color-bars and encouraging the equivalent of civil rights movements-a process with which most Americans would feel at ease...

...Southern Africa, which has within it the seeds of a devastating human tragedy of international dimensions, also has the potential to focus issues of race and class exploitation as well as the economic, po!ltical and cultural impact of transnational corporations...

...When South Africa invaded to support the factions favored by America, Cuban troops with Soviet logistical backing arrived as a countervailing force and assisted the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola to establish its ascendancy...

...Apartheid is ,therefore an efficient means for the exploitation of man by man, and the recent black uprisings give a glimpse of the suppressed tensions arising from systematic injustice...