After 25 years of victories culminating in the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, the antiapartheid community has lost a round. We were steamrollered-my own organization, TransAfrica, the African National Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Democratic Party, the whole loosely stitched antiapartheid movement in America.
De Klerk parlayed the release of a single person, Nelson Mandela, and the repeal of a handful of apartheid laws into an apparently credible picture of sweeping reforms. Headlines blared and Americans believed: “The demise of apartheid is at hand.”
How were we beaten so soundly? We were much too idealistic. We thought that truth would be weapon enough. Not some muddled truth, uncertainly grasped in ad nauseam debate, but the truth of irrefutable fact: black South Africans cannot vote or stand for any office in their own land; 4 million blacks have been stripped of their land and 9 million of their citizenship without promise of restitution or a dime of compensation; 40,000 black exiles remain effectively barred from returning home; 850 political prisoners languish in South African jails (19 are now on death row); de Klerk’s government spends four times as much to educate a white child as it does a black child; more than 50 draconian apartheid laws remain on the books empowering the government to do virtually anything from holding detainees without charge or trial to banning organizations Pretoria elects to no longer suffer.
It may be that, with a little help from powerful Washington friends, de Klerk understood American democracy better than we did. He simply puzzled out the following:
In America, image is more important than substance. Five years ago most Americans, knowing little about it, thought apartheid to be a simple matter of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Since then, more than 6,000 black Sou Africans have died fighting one another. Americans began to lose interest without knowing what international human rights organizations had well documented: that de Klerk’s government had established a well-funded campaign to train, arm, transport and direct Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha forces in attacks against the African National Congress and their sympathizers. Through this secret campaign, de Klerk deftly diminished global sympathy for the cause of black South Africans generally, weakened the ANC, strengthened his conservative black ally Buthelezi while coming away with his reputation of reformer unscathed. He depended on journalists not to look for the story within the story.
The American antiapartheid community is underfunded and governments can always outspend private organizations. Over the past year, 11 American lobbying firms received more than $2 million for doing de Klerk’s work with Congress, the executive branch, the media, U.S. banks and businesses. American hired hands wrote his speeches, scheduled his meetings and spoke on his behalf. Washington lobbyist John Sears admitted that he was paid by de Klerk to inform on TransAfrica’s activities.
Sanctions could be lifted without meeting the strict requirements of the American antiapartheid law because President Bush never wanted sanctions to begin with. American law required that de Klerk release all political prisoners before sanctions could be lifted. The respected South African Human Rights Commission has documented that 850 remain in jail, but President Bush looked the other way. The law further required that the South African Population Registration Act (under which South Africans are registered at birth by race) be repealed with “no other measures with the same purposes” put in its place. De Klerk instituted other measures which continued racial registration for 28 million black South Africans. Again, President Bush ignored the law and looked the other way.
The influential antiapartheid coalition of African-Americans and Jews was vulnerable. Earlier this year Harry Schwarz, a member of the South African Board of Jewish Deputies and a 16-year veteran of the Progressive Democratic Party in Parliament, was appointed South African ambassador to the United States. Around the same time, Hans Saenger, former chair of the Transvaal Council of the South African Board of Jewish Deputies, was sent to the United States to lobby American Jews against sanctions. Saenger came away convinced that many American Jews could be persuaded that the time had arrived to lift sanctions. A Jewish member of Congress told me then that one of Ambassador Schwarz’s objectives would be to drive a wedge between blacks and Jews on the issue of sanctions.
Congressional Democrats were disorganized and unable to challenge Bush on the sanctions question. The Congressional Black Caucus took on the battle in the House of Representatives. Virtually singlehanded, Ted Kennedy fought in the Senate. The rest of the Democrats sat on their hands.
Thus went the story of a badly lost round.
The long-term consequences of this American relaxation of pressure could be enormous. Reality disguised is not reality altered: apartheid is alive and well in South Africa. Blacks still have no real political or economic power. And virtually all incentive for de Klerk to negotiate significant concessions has been prematurely removed.
