POLITICS
A spell-binding performance by the Great She-Bomoh
NOEL MALCOLM
Storm Breaks over Rival Witch- Doctors,' said a headline in Monday's Times over a story from Kuala Lumpur. The heavy rain which fell on the Common- wealth prime ministers at their weekend retreat was the consequence, apparently, of a row between two bomohs or medicine men, who had both been hired by the local government to ward off the monsoons:
When each found that the other had been engaged, professional jealousy intervened to the extent that neither could properly per- form the necessary rituals, which involve incantations, the burning of incense, and an obscure process involving chilli powder.
While we were reading about this story in our newspapers, the two worthy bomohs may have been sitting at home reading in their local papers about the bust-up be- tween Mrs Thatcher and the other heads of government — in which case, they were probably the only two people in the world to be completely unpuzzled by the affair.
They would have understood exactly what was going on. There were the 'neces- sary rituals' of banquets and photo-calls, the burning of midnight oil in the committee-rooms and in Mrs Thatcher's hotel suite, and above all the incantations: 'Heads of Government reaffirmed that the total eradication of apartheid remained their shared responsibility' (the ministers' communiqué); 'Britain is fully at one with the rest of the Commonwealth in utterly condemning apartheid and wishing to see its total eradication' (the British state- ment). With two competing spells as powerful as these in the offing, what could one expect other than political heavy weather?
The one oddity about these arrange- ments was that the great She-bomoh and her novice assistant had not only prepared a spell of their own, they had also partici- pated in the spell-casting of their rivals. It was this apparent duplicity which led Mr Robert Mugabe to describe their conduct as 'despicable'. In these circumstances, Mrs Thatcher's claim that her statement to the press was merely 'building on the C6mmonwealth communiqué' must have seemed the most preposterous thing of all. And yet it was true. Her statement was building, to be precise, on four phrases contained in the Kuala Lumpur communi- qué: 'other than Britain', 'with the excep- tion of Britain', 'with the exception of Britain' and 'with the exception of Britain'. The main accusations against Mrs Thatcher this week are that she has been diplomatically clumsy, unprecedentedly negative and damagingly at variance with her own Foreign Secretary. None of these three charges is really correct. Noting British disagreement in the body of a Commonwealth communiqué is not unpre- cedented; it follows the use of five similar excepting clauses in the Vancouver state- ment of 1987. The difference this time is that the Prime Minister has tried to remedy the purely negative impression this creates: most of the controversial press release was an attempt to explain that Britain does have a positive policy for promoting change in South Africa, and to describe the aid programmes on which Britain will spend more money (instead of helping to fund the new watchdog agency which the Commonwealth wants to set up).
As an attempt to remedy negative im- pressions, of course, this British statement was a cure worse than the disease. It was clumsy and cack-handed. But the clumsi- ness was really a matter of poor news- management and presentation, rather than poor diplomacy. The real diplomacy took place while the wording of the Common- wealth communique was being thrashed out among the foreign ministers, and here Mr Major seems to have played a hard game, denouncing what he called 'the stench of hypocrisy' and describing one Australian proposal as 'loopy'. The final text was a watered-down version of earlier proposals (excluding, for example, any imposition of a timetable for change on South Africa). If you manage both to water down your opponents' arguments and to pep up your own, that looks like rather successful diplomacy — except to those who subscribe to the feeble-minded idea that 'diplomacy' is just a euphemism for not offending anybody.
As for the impression that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were out of step, this derives from a radio interview with Mr Major on Sunday, in which he said he thought Mrs Thatcher was satisfied with the Commonwealth state- ment, and was then informed that she had said she 'didn't much like it'. But since the statement contains four implicit condem- nations of itself by Britain, it is possible for British ministers both to condemn it and to say that they approve of its wording. This, as any good bomoh would recognise, is
powerful magic — even though it may perhaps be a little confusing for the recent initiate.
But of course as a public relations exercise — which is what it was intended to be — the supplementary British statement w..;s a disaster. It has allowed the debate to be dominated by shriller than ever accusa- tions that Britain is 'supporting apartheid', and has obscured the real argument, which is about the effects of sanctions. And this is a pity, because it is here that the resem- blances between the debate about South Africa and the theory of witchcraft are most striking. Witchcraft is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable: whenever a spell fails or a prediction goes unfulfilled, the witches' lore will supply a further explana- tion to account for the apparent failure. It is the same with sanctions lore: nothing will ever be allowed to prove that sanctions do not work.
Anyone interested in the psychology of these closed systems of belief should study The Sanctions Report, recently published (in Penguin) by the committee of foreign ministers set up by the Commonwealth at Vancouver. Even by the standards of committee reports, this is an extraordinary farrago of mutual contradictions. To the claim that we should protect the standard of living of black South Africans, it replies that Pretoria's policy is to enrich the blacks in order to defuse their discontents. To the claim that sanctions will make blacks poor- er, it replies that Pretoria's own policy is to impoverish them. It argues that the South African economy is declining anyway, while also arguing that any decline is the direct consequence of the sanctions already imposed.
In one sense, the witches are right. Hypothetical claims about what would have happened if sanctions had not been used can never be falsified or verified. But there are simpler arguments we can use to make up our minds on this subject, of which the simplest is this: that to anyone not blinded by cant about the unique evils of racism, it is obvious that South Africa is no more diabolical than a dozen other oppressive and undemocratic regimes around the world with which we all con- tinue to trade, Mr Major may have caught his first whiff of gunsmoke at Kuala Lum- pur; but he correctly observed that the strongest smell in the air was that of plain hypocrisy.
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