The Wrong Method
rr LIE proposals for a United Nations blockade
of South African ports can only lead to the very violence they are ostensibly designed to avoid. No one should believe that they are simply a logical extension of policies the UN has already accepted. They are so different in kind that, if adopted, they will amount to no less than a declaration of war on the Republic. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the South African 'Government will succumb to this. Indeed, it is almost certain that it will re- spond in the same way, with a declaration of war on the UN.
The parallel with the American blockade on ship4 taking Russian missiles to Cuba is a false one, There what was happening at sea was irrelevant compared with the decisions that were being taken in Washington and Moscow. Any resistance by a Russian ship to American in- spection would have been the sign for the un- leashing of a nuclear war. But the South African situation is quite different. The naval blockade would compel South Africa to take action against the UN ships. (It is no accident that she has been building up just the kind of air force most equipped for this sort of fighting.) The UN force in turn would be compelled. to retaliate; it is hard to see how it could do this without bombing the South African mainland.
Still more unlikely is the theory that UN mili- tary action would persuade the Verwoerd Government to come out and negotiate a new constitution with the African Nationalists that would change the whole structure of the country. The UN action could hardly fail to spark off civil war. With the concentration of weapons so much in the Government's hands, it would be the Africans who would suffer, and suffer terribly.
One of the more reasonable theories behind the blockade proposals is, of course, that there is no longer any hope of peacefully persuading the South African Government to change its ways, and that the entire white population now identifies itself with the Verwoerd policies. It is true that this may happen; but it is far from being the case today, as even a cursory reading of the South African press will show, and mili- tant actions from outside States can only help to bring it about. Indeed, extremism from the outside must in the end deny South Africa the luxury of the very white opposition which we must hope to depend on to bring about a change in South. Africa's ways.
And there are other methods. Passive resistance from the inside is clearly one, and an under- standing on the part of the world of how many South African whites find apartheid quite as abhorrent as do the African nationalists. Events in the rest of Africa too must have some in- fluence. A flourishing multi-racial Northern Rhodesia must in the end attract much of the capital that is now going to South Africa. As the economic boom lessens so must the South Africans come to realise themselves the need for political change. Events in Southern Rhodesia also must have a decisive effect in what happens in South Africa. Indeed it may be that the real battle over white supremacy in Africa will be fought here and not in the Republic at all. Jf, as is still possible, there is an orderly transfer of power to the Africans, accepted by a large num- ber of the whites, then in South Africa, too, change can still come peacefully----if outside governments help and not hinder it.
Those defeatists who believe that reform can come only through outside intervention should ask themselves the following questions: who, even just a year before it came, foresaw destalin- isation in Russia? Who, even just a few years ago, imagined that the Eastern European countries would soon be not only asserting their independence of Moscow, but liberalising their regimes as well? Politics are neither so rigid nor so black and white as the South African block- aders like to believe.
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