POLITICS
Manners makyth mandatory sanctions against South Africa
FERDINAND MOUNT
How pale everyone else looks beside Mr Denis Healey. How fine to see him as monstrous-browed and ruddy-wattled as ever, as full of beans and vitriol as in the dear dead days. In this business, to quote the unintentionally frank maxim he lets slip, 'manner is almost as important as matter.' And you cannot beat him for manner: 'weasel words . . . monstrous egoism . . . imperious vanity . . . indiffer- ence to suffering'. This is not, as one might suppose, one of those exercises in self- analysis prescribed by some modern ther- apy, but Mr Healey's description of Mrs Thatcher's refusal to go along with all-out economic sanctions against South Africa. If she goes along with sanctions against Poland and Argentina and Iran and Rhodesia, why not against Mr Botha's foul regime? How he roars, and how the Labour Party loves it all.
Who cares if sanctions against Poland and Argentina and Iran were counter- productive and in Rhodesia they took not Lord Wilson's 'weeks rather than months' to bite but 15 years and 20,000 dead before the whites surrendered? Manner is all. Mr Francis Pym tells us that the argument against comprehensive economic sanctions is 'intellectually strong'. Previous experi- ence with sanctions is not encouraging. On the other hand, inaction has not worked either and in any case feels immoral. Mr Pym calls this 'a Catch-22 situation' — not quite how I remember Mr Heller's re- morseless novel — and bounds cheefully to the conclusion that 'the sooner the first measures are put in place, the better'. Superbly visceral logic for doing anything a little wacky (bomb the men's room in the Kremlin — intellectual case weak, pre- vious experience in Dresden not encourag- ing, but status quo intolerable). Yet Mr Pym in the course of all this — as he often does — hit upon the perfect adjective to describe the general atmosphere. To go on doing nothing is 'too uncomfortable'. We wish to see ourselves in a comfortable moral posture. Hence the importance of keeping the Commonwealth together, since the Commonwealth is the embodi- ment of moral posture, a very Turveydrop for deportment.
Even Dr David Owen's fluent speech falls partial victim to this obsession with posture at the expense of substance. Like Sir Geoffrey Howe, he points out that, despite the brutal silence of the state of emergency, there have been changes in South Africa. Sir Geoffrey lists the soften- ing of the 'petty apartheid' laws — the Immorality Act, the pass laws and so on. Dr Owen points to cracks in the previously solid façade of the central Afrikaner in- stitutions, such as the Dutch Reformed Church and the National Party, as well as the major cracks in commercial confi- dence, largely brought on by the refusal of credit by some American banks.
But then he rather misses the point of this important episode — which was a spontaneous, private piece of writing on the wall, not a government-driven boycott which might unite Afrikaners against the outside world. So Dr Owen too maunders on about imposing government bans on investment and fruit and veg, when any fool knows you cannot be sure of identify- ing the country of origin of a loan or a grapefruit. Sir Geoffrey's amiable vague- ness ensured that the Tory revolt on Tuesday night was as modest as the mea- sures the Foreign Office seems to have in mind, such as a ban on direct flights to South Africa. These may be enough to keep the Tories more or less together and to satisfy the European Community, but not the Commonwealth prime ministers' meeting in August.
Part of the trouble with the debate was that everyone felt compelled to pay tribute to the work of the Eminent Persons Group. I am not sure whether Eminent Persons should be encouraged to go about in a Group. For group travel tends to reinforce their sense of eminence, their consciousness of destiny sitting on their shoulders. There is self-confidence as well as safety in numbers, as every coach party shows. Throughout the EPG report one derives the impression that they see apar- theid as a relatively recent aberration in South African history, the full horror of which they have only just come to realise but to which they would no doubt find the solution, if only the Boer leaders were not so infuriatingly mysterious and sly: 'The South African government's position de- fies succinct summary. It has a specialised political vocabulary which, while saying one thing, means another.'
Yet is not this just the sort of baffled complaint that British proconsuls and politicians used to make about 'Oom Paul' Kruger a hundred years ago? 'He procras- tinates in his replies. He dribbles out reforms like water from a squeezed sponge . . . . The sands are running down in the glass. The situation is too fraught with danger, it is too strained for any indefinite postponement to be tolerated.' Joe Cham- berlain on his own lawn at Highbury in 1899. The language a little too vivid for Lord Barber or Malcolm Fraser to use about President Botha but the sentiments much the same.
Apartheid is essentially not some new ideology foisted upon South Africa by Verwoerd in the 1960s or even by Malan in the 1950s. What, after all, was the Great Trek for? Not just to get away from British rule in general but from the tiresome British insistence on abolishing slavery in the Cape. How did Rhodes try to suck up to the Boers? By introducing a Ballot and Franchise Act to reduce the number of black and Coloured votes — 'equal rights for all white men below the Zambesi' (later cleaned up to read 'all civilised men'). Milner did much the same in Article Eight of the peace terms after the Boer War. Throughout the 20s and 30s, even the `good Boers' like Smuts collaborated in whittling away the rights of the blacks. This is an appallingly simple, unwavering and undeviating campaign for racial supremacy stretching over 150 years and more. It is not likely to be destroyed by a few riots, however bloody, or a few sanctions, however ingenious, or even by both together. After all, Sharpeville was 26 years ago now, the Soweto uprising ten years ago. It is false comfort to imagine that, whatever the horrors of the present situation, it must at least be the beginning of the end for apartheid.
To argue that the governments of Bri- tain, the United States and West Germany are right to proceed with almost pedantic caution is to take a rather cold-blooded view in a situation which seems to cry out for passion and commitment. The injus- tices of apartheid are so repulsive, their perpetrators seem such unattractive block- heads (though endowed with peasant cun- ning, of course) that any feeling person must want to throw himself into the strug- gle. Yet jumping in with both feet may lead (and not in the long run either) to more bloodshed than a kind of 'one-shoe' strategy which leaves the South African regime wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. That may not do much good either, but it may do less harm.
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