Herbert W Armstrong

South African President P.W. Botha today dashed hopes of fundamental changes in apartheid, and warned that he would consider sterner measures to end the racial unrest. In a speech lasting more than an hour, in which he at times sounded combative, Botha said he was committed to negotiations with South Africa's black majority but proposed no specific reforms. "Destroy white South Africa and our influence in this subcontinent of southern Africa, and this country will drift into factions, strife, chaos and poverty," he said....

Botha condemned what he called barbaric communist agitators for fomenting rioting in black townships which has killed over 600 people in the past 19 months. In the speech in Durban for a provincial congress of his ruling National Party, Botha gave no new details of any reform plans, quenching feverish speculation at home and abroad about possible reforms. He said he and other "reasonable" South Africans would not accept the principle of one-man, one-vote in a unified state which "would lead to domination of one group over another." He also ruled out establishing a black fourth chamber in parliament. Indians and mixed race people were admitted to their own segregated chambers under constitutional reforms last year.

"I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on road to abdication and suicide," he said in the speech, which was transmitted live by some foreign broadcasting organizations. Botha, who clamped a state of emergency on many of the tensest zones in late July, said he had been "lenient" in the face of widespread unrest and racial violence, but said: "Don't push us too hard. Don't push us too hard."

Botha's speech was certain to disappoint South Africa's Western allies, who under increasing pressure to apply sanctions against Pretoria and who were hoping for liberal, fundamental reforms to apartheid, the system of strict racial segregation that permeates South African life.... Botha reaffirmed that he would not consider releasing African National Congress [ANC] leader Nelson Mandela from prison unless he renounces the use of violence. Mandela, who has become a living symbol of black frustration and of black hope, was jailed more than 20 years ago.

The speech was more of a declaration of intent, rather than a blueprint or timetable. The President said that negotiations (no time frame was mentioned) with "elected black officials" (meaning homeland and national state officials, not the ANC or other radical groups) would determine the country's future. Here are key excerpts of what else the President said:

The overriding common denominator [in such open-ended negotiations] is our mutual interest in each other's freedoms and well­ being. Our peace and prosperity are indivisible. Therefore the only way forward is through cooperation and coresponsibility. If we ignore the existence of minorities...In favor of a simplistic winner-take-all system, then we will diminish and not increase the freedoms of our peoples....

The alternative is bloodshed, the alternative is turmoil, the alternative is a clique who wants to get control of power in South Africa.... Peaceful negotiation is their enemy because it will lead to joint responsibility.... They wish to seek and monopolize all power.... Their actions speak louder than their words. Their words offer ready panaceas such as one-man, one­ vote; freedom and justice for all. Their actions leave no doubt that the freedoms that we already have...are the true targets of their violence.

Mr. Botha's speech was perhaps primarily intended to calm the fears of South African whites that the government was caving in to Western pressure. American news analyst Robert Novak said on CNN that the President rewrote the speech several times between the time a top American official met with Foreign Minister R.F. Botha in Vienna and the actual delivery. The rewritings, to accommodate the conservative power base of his party, thus altered what U.S. officials had hoped would be major moves or some kind of a blueprint "away from apartheid," which seems to be America's only concern.

Ultra-rightist Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht said, a day before the address, that any serious move away from separate development would "awaken the tiger in the whites" and that Mr. Botha underestimated the extent of white backlash. From their point of view, Conservative Party members (who split off from the Nationalist Party) felt the speech was full of ambiguities and potential dangers. The easing of "influx control" laws restricting where blacks may work and live could, in their view, lead to chaos and third-world-like slum areas. Mr. Botha's discussion of a common citizenship for all whites and non-whites living outside the nominally independent homelands, seemed, to them, inconsistent with his demand that there not be one-man, one-vote. What is citizenship without the vote? (Some say there should be a qualified — property ownership or net worth minimum, for example — rather than universal suffrage.)

On ABC's Nightline, Conservative Party member Counie Mulder (a former Nationalist Party cabinet official) bluntly said that Mr. Botha has painted himself into a corner and that the ruling Nationalist Party has no choice but to inexorably move in the direction of one-man, one-vote. The Conservatives claim the only solution is that of partitioning the country into its constituent parts, with every group running its own affairs. This would have been easier to accomplish years ago, before millions of blacks left their traditional homelands to find work in the industrial complexes of white South Africa.

What a human dilemma! And that's just the beginning. It is into this crucible that communist-backed forces have moved, hoping to capitalize on what they see is their opportunity to effect a revolution.

Leaders of the radical groups (the ANC and United Democratic Front) had already dismissed ahead of time any concessions the President might have made. For them, gaining power through total abdication by the government is the only issue. Zulu Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, on the other hand, while also expressing disappointment, said he advocates some form of power sharing, adding that South Africa "is a completely different kettle of fish from other places where the armed struggle has worked, such as Zimbabwe. We don't have settlers. We have an indigenous white population which is as indigenous as Americans in America. They have got nowhere else to go and if you put them against the wall they will scorch the earth....

"If you ask me, black disunity is the biggest problem," added Buthelezi, while on a visit to Israel. "Most of the deaths happening now, the burning of people that we have seen, is not being done by the government, but by black people to other black people. You have got an incipient civil war going on already. My brothers and sisters in the UDF state that they would like to make the country 'ungovernable' and they syncronize their moves with the ANC. I think it is nonsensical to regard the killing of blacks by blacks as a 'liberation struggle.'"

Mr. Botha's speech almost certainly guarantees that the U.S. Senate will approve a first-rung-of-the-ladder sanctions bill in September. Senator Edward Kennedy said the speech "dashed all real hopes that the South African government is ready to change its racist ways. " Congress, he said, must act quickly to pass the sanctions bill. Even if President Reagan vetoes it, there will probably be enough strength to override it. Then, in another year "unless there is significant progress away from apartheid," the sanctions will be strengthened.

A few days ago, one of the leading advocates of sanctions, Representative Stephen J. Solarz of New York, met with President Botha in Pretoria. He said afterward that what Mr. Botha told him showed no change "that could be seen...as significant by the blacks in this country or by the world." Mr. Solarz was stunned when President Botha compared ANC leader Nelson Mandela, serving a life sentence for sabotage, to convicted Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess, who is still held in Berlin's Spandau prison. American liberals and civil rights leaders tend to look on Mandela as sort of a Martin Luther King, and the ANC as a mirror image of, say, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After his trip to Pretoria, Solarz went to Lusaka, Zambia, to embrace (literally) the leaders of the ANC at their headquarters in exile.

The August 23 NATIONAL REVIEW emphasized the flaw in viewing what's happening in South Africa in terms of the U.S. experience, as opposed to what is happening elsewhere in Africa:

The South Africans are not dealing with lunch-counter sit-ins. On May 6, the African National Congress broadcast the following message to South Africa, in English, from Communist-held Ethiopia: "Ambushes must be prepared for policemen and soldiers...with the aim of capturing weapons from them. Our people must also manufacture homemade bombs and petrol bombs.... Our people must begin to identify collaborators and enemy agents and deal with them. Those collaborators who are serving in the community councils must be dealt with. Informers, policemen, special-branch police, and army personnel living and working among our people must be eliminated."

This is precisely what has been happening! The single-minded aim of those seeking power was openly expressed by Thabo Mbeki, the director of information and publicity for the ANC, which is supported by the South African Communist Party. He wrote the following in a column in the August 13 NEW YORK TIMES:

It will not do to argue that our struggle inside South Africa is permissible only if it is peaceful.... We will emerge victorious in this struggle — however many people we lose in the process.

The July 30, 1985, AFRICAN INTELLIGENCE DIGEST reports that a "proto­revolution" is under way in South Africa, but that liberal Western politicians and news media are deluded as to what is occurring:

What the all-powerful media is either ignoring or simply lying to us about is the role of Soviet-sponsored terrorism in South Africa. Indeed, South Africa has a proto-revolution on its hands which has escalated to the terrorism phase. Terror is used in the early stages and throughout a revolution to force the masses to go along with the revolution's campaign.

And, to be sure, terrorists are encouraged when the media focuses on their acts and reports sympathetically about their cause. Indeed, it may be argued that not Pretoria, but the U.S. media and the U.S. Congress, are to blame for so much recent bloodshed in South Africa. International interference by do-gooders in western governments and churches have incited increased violence and encouraged rebellion. These liberals know nothing of South Africa nor of the complexity of the apartheid question. South Africa is not Alabama and apartheid cannot be "dismantled" tomorrow or in twelve months. Recent liberal action and pronouncements calling for the "end of apartheid" only serve to heighten tension and encourage the radical terrorist element....

[The] fact of Soviet imperial aggression in South Africa should be the central focus of western concern in the matter. But, of course, it is not. The well-oiled Soviet propaganda and disinformation machine is humming along. Moscow's "useful idiots" are at work.

In the riot-torn townships there are instigators inciting the people to violence. The August 12 LOS ANGELES TIMES ran a gripping article detailing the abuse and hatred leveled at black policemen in the townships. Many of these men, their homes destroyed, have had to move their families away for protection. The testimony of Detective Warrant Officer Templeton Sibaca, 42, a 16-year police veteran in Daduza township, was most moving:

"I never once thought they would turn against me after all I had done for the community.... I had joined the police force about 16 years ago out of concern for my community. I was trained as a teacher, but I felt I could do more as a policeman....

"Until a few months ago, the black community accepted that we were doing a job that had to be done by someone — blacks want protection from criminals like anyone else — but now it has changed. People want us to quit the police force. They see us as enemies. There are instigators in community, radicals who incite people's anger, and we have suddenly become the targets for the most intense hatred."

The Lesson of Uganda

With so much attention focused on South Africa recently, the American press (but not the British) has failed to give adequate coverage to the awful conditions prevailing in Uganda in the wake of that country's recent revolution. The July 24 WALL STREET JOURNAL, however, did an overview piece on what it called the "Luckless Land." Titled "Idi Amin May Be Gone, But Ruinous Violence Continues in Uganda," the article was written three days before the July 27 coup that unseated — for the second time — President Milton Obote:

KAMPALA, Uganda — On a recent Monday night, a businessman was hacked to death at his home here. After the funeral, the victim's friends puzzled over some post-mortem questions. Was the murder political, religious or business-related? They had no answers, but one thing they knew: The killers weren't thieves. They wore army uniforms, and they stole nothing. Uganda is full of such murders and such mysteries. People are killed just about every night in Kampala, a city of fewer than 500,000....

"Death has become an everyday story," says a nervous young Catholic priest. "Children aren't afraid of dead bodies any longer. They've seen too many." Then he whispers: "It was better under Amin."

Bitter rivalries with their roots in politics, religion and business have become modern-day overlays on the map of tribal divisions that traditionally made Uganda a nation without nationalism. Today, the capital city of Kampala has the feel of a frontier town. Anything goes. Killers are for hire, cheap. A foreign resident shakes his head over being told that a government minister, acting through his permanent secretary, has put out a murder contract on another permanent secretary. "I know all three of them," the foreigner muses.

Uganda has one of Africa's most complex political geographies. In the 19th century, what now is Uganda was the relatively sophisticated kingdom of Buganda (early explorers' translators from the east coast couldn't pronounce the "B"), handful of rival kingdoms and dozens of mini-states. The people spoke more than 60 languages. Uganda, whose various parts were joined together as a British protectorate in 1894, has paid a price for its diversity ever since. In fact, the 23-year history of Uganda since independence can be read as a war against the Baganda (people of Buganda) of the Kampala area in an attempt to reduce the privilege they had enjoyed under the British.... Other Ugandans, led by the nation's first president, A. Milton Obote, other members of his Langi tribe from the northeast and Acholis from the north began chopping them down after the British left.

In 1971, President Obote was overthrown by Idi Amin, a member of the Kakwa, a small tribe considered backward by many Ugandans. Idi Amin lasted until 1979, when he fled the country in the face of invading Tanzanian forces and Ugandan rebels. In 1980, Mr. Obote returned from exile and again took over the presidency. He soon resumed his campaign against the Baganda....

This is a fertile land — "Throw down one seed and four plants grow, runs an often-cited saw — with enormous potential for coffee, cotton, tea and food crops. But today only coffee, which earns about $8 million a week in foreign exchange, is prospering....

And now, Ugandans have been "liberated" a second time from Mr. Obote. Ironically, Idi Amin, from exile, has offered to extend his good services to the nation, which is gripped in a war between the new military government of Lt. Gen. Tito Okello and a rebel force called the National Resistance Army (NRA).

The British newspaper DAILY MAIL, in its July 29 edition, ran an article titled "Curse of the Terror That Never Ends." In it the author, Paul Johnson, proposed what he recognized is an unacceptable solution to Uganda's agony:

Africans were told by their nationalist leaders that the end of Colonialism would bring freedom and happiness. For the vast majority it has brought military dictatorship, for many millions hunger and even death by starvation.

Uganda has a long history of sectarian violence.... But at least the British ended the violence and imposed equality under the law. Colonialism at its best had one outstanding merit. It was impartial.... The British were harsh but just.... Because they kept the peace they brought prosperity. Uganda became in the view of many travellers the most delightful country in Africa.

But when independence was rushed through in 1963, the paradise turned into a nightmare of monsters.... The country was so badly governed that when, in January 1971, Idi Amin staged a military coup and expelled Obote, most people inside and outside Uganda were overjoyed. The nightmare soon returned however. Amin was the son of a tribal witch-woman. And though a Moslem for political purposes, he revived the fearsome magic which had flourished before British rule..... He murdered the Governor of the Bank of Uganda, the Foreign Minister and the head of the university. He personally beat to death the local archbishop and two of his own Cabinet Ministers. He slaughtered his wife and dismembered her body. On the advice of a witchdoctor, he ate the heart of his son, whom he had also murdered. He kept selected organs of his victims in the fridge. He was the first refrigerator-cannibal ruler of Africa....

It is hard to see the country getting itself a just and effective government in the near future. There is too much bitterness, too many unavenged killings.... The best solution would be for all the various groups to invite Britain to send a High Commissioner to rule the country until the Army can be retrained, the police and judiciary re-established on an impartial basis, and fair elections held to produce a truly representative Parliament. But this would probably be too big a blow to the pride of Africans. The likelihood therefore is that Uganda will continue its post­ Independence history of bloody tyranny, punctuated by anarchy.

What is really needed is the establishment of a just, fair and firm government that can also educate — which the British Empire, for all its glory, could not do — the various subject peoples as to the real purpose of life. The Government of God will institute true religion, which will put an end to, not just temporarily squelch, witchcraft and other pagan practices.

The Uganda horror story and its lessons for the rest of Africa — and South Africa — was stressed in the "Worldgram" newsletter section of the August 12 U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT:

Power grab by Uganda's military men in late July is latest in a long chain of upheavals in black-ruled African lands. In most nations, roots of the violence are similar: Greed, tribal rivalries and economic woes. Ousted Ugandan President Obote is a two­ time loser....

Extent of African violence is astonishing. Since 1956, the continent has seen 56 successful coups. In the last 18 months alone, five of eight succeeded. Benin has had six takeovers, Ghana five, Nigeria four. Even democratically oriented Zimbabwe and Kenya fear tribal ferocity....

And note this — If blacks in white-ruled South Africa ever win a one-person, one-vote, democracy, black-vs. -black antagonisms certainly will spring to life.

The radicals in South Africa and their U.S. supporters have shrewdly used the liberal news media to their advantage. America's politicians, ignoring the lessons of Africa as a whole, are running scared of an "aroused public opinion." They are rushing into law a sanctions bill that the August 23 NATIONAL REVIEW cynically called "The Genocide Promotion Act of 1985." The words of President Botha in his Durban speech seem appropriate: "Look at what they [the revolutionaries] have done to a continent who is dying at present."

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau