5.
offered a cease-fire, saying let's go ahead with the elections. It was going to require tremendous pressure from the western side to get South Africa to come to the table and comply, accept the cease-fire and go ahead with the elections. Well, the Reagan administration, at the very beginning, sent cables to the front line diplomats, the American ambassadors to the front line states, and to the American ambassador to South Africa. To the front line states, the cable said, on all questions concerning Namibia and the diplomacy there, all holds are off. Everything is under review. That's been the favorite phrase of this administration--everything is under review. And the statement to the American ambassador to South Africa was, you contact P. W. Botha and tell him that South Africa will not be stampeded into any agreement on Namnibia. Well, the South Africans were just pleased as punch with that, and of course
they walked out of the process knowing there would be no reprecussions from the United States. Now there are other kinds of moves. afoot: to lift the moratorium on the export of nuclear material, and to invite the prime minister of South Africa to visit the United States. We know Reagan recently characterized South Africa as a friendly government and a reliable ally. He's mistaken in his humanity and also mistaken in his history. If I recall correctly, South Africa was the only commonwealth country during World War II that did not declare war against Nazi Germany, so it has not been a reliable ally, and to characterize a government so heinous as that as a friendly government says as much about Reagan as it does about anybody else. There is now the contemplation of an invitation to invite Lucas Mangope, the leader of the Bophutatswana Bantustan, to visit the United States officially, thereby making the U.S. the first western nation to defacto recognize a South African Bantustan, thereby blessing the South African plan for a grand apartheid, you know, separation of thirteen percent of the land mass for seventy percent of the people, and the other eighty-seven per cent, the best land with all of the rainfall, all of the mineral goodies, for the whites. He was to be invited two weeks after, after Chester Crocker (now Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) was confirmed. Whether that's still in the channels or not, I do not know. After the Botha invitation was sent up as a trial balloon and shot down, I think they began to rethink some things.
Now the current issue that is going on today is the vote on Angola. You know, the first thing that the administration did was to propose the repeal of the Clark Amendment that prohibits U.S. covert activity in Angola. The first thing that the Reagan administration did when it came to power was to express its loathing for Communism everywhere in the world. The view is that whatever is wrong in the world, the Communists are responsible for it. Now, that's a nice and tidy view, but in many parts of the world it just doesn't work. Jeane Kirkpatrick said recently that Marxism was worse than racism. Well, you tell that to South African families that see black children die every fifty-five seconds of malnutrition. You tell that to 20,000,000 people that can't vote. You tell that to a nation that executes more people per year than all of the western nations put together. You tell that to twelve and a half million people that have been arrested for passbook violations since 1950, and they don't understand what you're talking about. So it's a silly American policy to try and statistically analyze Southern Africa in that kind of context, and in so doing we sometimes push African countries who don't want to be solely in the Soviet embrace into that embrace. Angola is a perfect example of this.