4.
have had those elections by now. We'll get to why they haven't, I think, when we go on to talk about the Reagan administration a little bit.
On the question of South Africa, I think the Carter administration deserves bad marks. On the good side, it put in place or participated in the mandatory arms embargo. It deserves some credit for that. Although there are many holes in it and there were many breaches during the Carter administration, it also honored the process of placing restrictions on the export of technical data and commodities to the South African military and police, and it imposed a moratorium on the export of American nuclear enriched uranium materials to South Africa, and refused to recognize the Bantustans. But, on the other side, of course it made no move to disturb the substantial economic relations between the U.S. and South Africa. The investment now, of course, exceeds 2,000,000,000. The loans exceed 2,000,000,000. The diplomatic relations are fine, and in all likelihood will continue in that fashion. So Carter did nothing on that score.
Now we have the election of Ronald Reagan, which, from the South African point of view, caused nothing but pure jubilation. They knew that they had gotten a friend in the right place. Reagan said during the campaign in Chicago that the problem in South Africa was more tribal than racial. The South Africans said that's great stuff. He's just our candidate, you know. He's not even verligte, he's verkrapte. He's our guy. And when you looked at some of the other Reagan people, you saw similar attitudes. John Sears, Reagan's first campaign manager, now gets about $600,000 a year from South Africa as their official registered agent in Washington. A member of the Reagan transition team, Marian Smoak, gets $400,000 a year to represent the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance in Namibia. Through some sort of perverse humor, Reagan has nominated Ernest Lef ever as the Assistant Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs, and Ernest Lef ever believes that the United States must move closer into an alliance with South Africa. And our good friend, Alexander Haig, when he was a member of the National Security Council, in a book written by Chester Morris called Uncertain Greatness, was recorded to have, whenever African issues were raised at the National Security Council, made tom-tom beats on the table! So that gives you some real sense of the crowd of people who are now making policy vis-a-vis Africa.
So the South Africans were really jubilant, and we believed that because they thought that there was a green light, in January they felt that they could march into Mozambique and within the environs of Maputo kill'twelve people. And they felt that without reprisal they could walk out of the Geneva negotiations on Namibia in January. We had hoped to go to Geneva and finish with election details so that under the U.N. aegis elections could be held there in March, but the South Africans walked out and the Americans said nothing about it. Everyone knew that in order for this thing to work in Namibia, it had to work like it did in Zimbabwe. That the Africans had the responsibility of bringing
the Africans to the table. The front line states said, "We will get ZAPU and ZANJ. But it is the western powers that really have to bring in Ian Smith to the table." The black folk will talk to the black folk and the white folk will talk to the white folk. Same thing was true for Namibia, that the Africans would bring SWAPO to the table and make them agree and get Angolan compliance and all of that. They did that. SWAPO has agreed. They went to Geneva,