A Voice of Reason

"Discrimination based solely on the color of a man's skin cannot be defended," said the burly, mustachioed Ambassador to the United Nations. That truism would probably have passed unnoticed except for the identity of the speaker. He was Roelofse F. ("Pik") Botha, permanent representative for South Africa. Botha's concession came too late to block a Black African resolution calling for South Africa's expulsion from the U.N. The motion failed, however, when the three Western members of the Security Council--the U.S., Britain and France--cast a veto against it.

Botha's remarkably open-minded speech was an indication of South Africa's worries about its future among Africa's increasingly nationalistic black states. The day before the ambassador made his hour-long speech at the U.N., Prime Minister John Vorster told the South African Senate that the price of racial confrontation was "too high for southern Africa to pay." He appealed for cooperation among countries of the area, and offered financial as well as technical aid to any African nation that requested it. Vorster's proposal evoked a favorable response from Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, who welcomed the speech as "the voice of reason for which Africa and the rest of the world have been waiting."

During the Security Council debate last week, South Africa gave several indications that it is indeed willing to bend on three specific issues that bother the black nations. Botha's mission issued a press release announcing that the Pretoria government will cut back the South African police contingent that has been propping up the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia's Premier Ian Smith against attacks from Zambia-based black nationalist guerrillas.

Botha also announced a slight change of policy on the issue of South-West Africa. South Africa has administered the area under a League of Nations mandate since 1920, but the U.N. revoked the mandate in 1966, renamed the area Namibia, and is training nationals in exile for eventual independence. Until last week Vorster had maintained that self-determination for the region would take another ten years. Now Botha concedes that "this stage may be reached considerably sooner."

U.S. Veto. The most significant of the policy reversals was Botha's promise that South Africa will "do everything in our power to move away from discrimination based on race or color." That may be a difficult promise to fulfill. It seems unlikely that the ingrained traditions of apartheid can be altered quickly and dramatically enough to assuage Black Africa's decades of accumulated rage.

Had it not been for the vetoes, South Africa would have been a victim of the U.N.'s peculiar double standard--racism practiced by white regimes is bad, but the racism of black governments is somehow permissible. In his address, Botha suggested that some morally righteous U.N. countries might profit from closer scrutiny of their own recent histories. Explaining the U.S. veto, Ambassador John Scali argued that the expulsion of South Africa would create "a shattering precedent" that might be invoked against any U.N. nation out of political step with majority sentiment. According to diplomatic sources, the possibility of an Afro-Arab resolution against Israel figured significantly in the U.S. mission's voting strategy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.