Against the Last White Strongholds

For the first time, Morocco's Ahmed Benhima presided over the Security Council. Turning to the chairman, Ghana's fiery Ambassador Alex Quaison-Sackey cried in an inverted echo of Churchill: "He has been called upon by destiny to preside over the liquidation of the Portuguese Empire."

The statement proved somewhat exaggerated. But if Lisbon's sprawling, 500-year-old African outback wasn't being liquidated last week, it was certainly under siege--together with its neighbor and partner, South Africa. Having called the Security Council into session, the 32-nation African bloc demanded that 1) Portugal get out of her colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, and 2) the world help throttle South Africa's apartheid regime. Behind both demands lay a deeper motive: to eliminate the last strongholds of white rule on the Dark Continent.

Favored Countries. For ten days, the green-and-gold Council chamber rang with debate over Mother Portugal's Africa--the largest European empire still intact, one which is plagued by poverty, rebellion, and (in the words of nationalists) "totalitarianism tempered by inefficiency." In a fascinating train of logic, the Africans argued that because they themselves are threatening to "liberate" the territories, Portugal's continued presence in them endangers the peace.

In rebuttal, Portuguese Foreign Minister Alberto Franco Nogueira bitterly recalled that 1) his country saw its Asian enclave of Goa overrun by India in 1961, and 2) the Congo officially established military training camps against Angola, both without U.N. protest. Said he: "We have two sets of countries. Some are allowed anything they please with any justification which may occur to them; others are not."

The Africans wanted the Council to order an embargo on arms to Portugal that could be used for "repression of the peoples." Although Washington has already curtailed such arms, the U.S.'s Adlai Stevenson balked, pleaded that the U.N. should stick to persuasion. A watered-down resolution, which passed 8 to 0, "requests" the arms embargo and "urgently calls upon" Lisbon to free its colonies. The U.S. still abstained.

Although Stevenson had agreed to the final draft, he was abruptly overruled by Washington, possibly because the U.S. is renegotiating a lease with Portugal for use of the Azores. Leaving the way open for future action, the resolution directs Secretary-General U Thant to report by Oct. 31 on Portugal's response. In Lisbon, a Foreign Ministry official said: "We've been stubborn for centuries and aren't going to change now."

Next Case. The Council then took up South Africa, where 3,000,000 whites rule 11 million blacks under a system the government once termed apartheid but now prefers to call "separate development." Pressing the charge that white supremacy is "intolerable," External Affairs Minister John Karefa-Smart of Sierra Leone claimed that the U.N. has every right to intervene--"National barriers cannot legitimately shrink universal human rights."

This time the U.S. had more to offer the Africans. Branding apartheid "abhorrent," Stevenson announced that the U.S., expanding a partial embargo on arms to South Africa already in force, will halt the sale of "all military equipment" to South Africa by year's end. The purpose: "To indicate the deep concern which the United States feels at the failure of South Africa to abandon its policy of apartheid." Yet Stevenson also argued that sanctions against South Africa would be both "bad law and bad policy," and would only stiffen the country's intransigence. Said he: "We cannot accept that the only alternative to apartheid is bloodshed." Unlike Portugal, South Africa refused even to debate its case.

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