To End Apartheid

The government of Prime Minister Verwoerd last week reduced still further the shrinking circle of liberty in South Africa. With only one dissenting vote, the South African Parliament enacted a sweeping No-Trial Bill, empowering the Minister of Justice to hold whomever he chooses incommunicado and without trial for 90 days. Under this "law," which virtually destroys the rule of law in South Africa, the Government can renew the detention period endlessly.

The No-Trial Bill follows only a few months after the harsh Sabotage Bill which prescribed death for acts of sabotage and greatly broadened the grounds for political arrest. This bill, in turn, capped 14 years of Afrikaaner Nationalist legislation that established the system of apartheid and enfeebled the critics of repression.

Apartheid has denied all meaningful political rights to Negroes, Indians, and mulattoes who comprise 80 per cent of South Africa's population; it has also limited their education, barred them from skilled jobs, up-booted many from their homes, and subjected them to the inhuman apparatus of a police state.

In establishing apartheid the government has silenced all African dissidents through banning, exile, and house arrest. Last year it began earnestly to apply similar restrictions to its white opponents, jailing the radicals and intimidating the liberals. Through these measures the government enlarged the scope of apartheid: the system now clearly poisons the white community as it imprisons the non-whites. The Verwoerd regime has again validated the dictum that the rights of some cannot be destroyed without imperiling the rights of all.

Throughout this increase of injustice the United States as remained largely mute. True, the U.S. no longer tills police weapons to South Africa, and at the United Nations last fall its representative spoke against apartheid. but in that same U.N. debate it also opposed doing anything effective against apartheid, and the passage of the No-Trail Bill provoked no censure from the President, the State Department, or the U.S. Ambassador in Johannesburg.

Indeed, American ambassadors to South Africa have done little either to oppose apartheid or to encourage the liberals who have tried to forstall it. Their inaction contrasts unfavorably with the recent outspokenness of the British ambassador in South Africa and the "winds of change" warning delivered by Prime Minister MacMillan in Capetown three years ago. The British Labor party has gone still further, advocating a boycott of South African goods.

The American government should impose such a made embargo against South Africa now and encourage the British to join. These sanctions, already advocated by the United Nations General Assembly, might bring sreversal of apartheid.

The United States last year purchased over ten per cent of South Africa's total exports valued at $2.2 billion. If Britain joined din the boycott, South Africa would be denied roughly one-third of its export markets. In an economy dependent upon exports for 25 per cent of its national income, such losses bring severe dislocation.

When the boycott is imposed there must be a clear statement of its purposes and the conditions under which it will be lifted. The reversal of apartheid must include repealing all repressive police legislation. South Africa must abolish the pass laws and the measures dependent on them which restrict the movement, residence, employment, and education of nonwhites. It must allow the functioning of the political movements of nonwhites and must be committed to the gradual extension of political rights to all citizens on the basis of merit not race.

While advocating these measures, the United States must make clear its opposition to the black nationalist aspiration of expelling the white man from South Africa; a repressive majority would be just as undesirable as a repressive minority.

Expressed in these terms, the boycott may achieve its goals by inducing a realignment within the white electorate; a boycott would weaken the fierce proponents of apartheid, hearten the liberal opposition, and convince the apolitical that the whites in South Africa will lose more by remaining attached to apartheid than by gradually sharing power.

It is possible, of course, that a boycott may solidify white support for apartheid; yet, the prognosis for South Africa without outside intervention is clear. Although harrassed, South Africa's liberals today still have talented spokesmen, wealth, and newspapers. In a few years, as government intimidation takes its toll, these assets will be gone. The non-whites, denied opportunities for gradual progress, will become increasingly attracted to revolution.

Soon the only peaceful solution to South Africa's problems may be partitioning the country into two states similar in concept to India and Pakistan. Partition, though, is far less likely than a major conflict between the races in which the independent African states will join the fight against the whites. Intervention in this malestrom would present far more perils to the United States than intervening through a boycott does now.