Bill Hayden
This article outlines Australian Government policy on South Africa. Mr. Hayden draws attention to the nature of the apartheid system and argues that the evils of this form of institutionalised racism are unique in the world and thus demand special attention. He also examines the consequences of the South African Government's failure to institute any but what he sees as merely cosmetic reforms and explains the rationale of the economic and sporting sanctions applied by Australia.
Nearly 40 years ago, apartheid was unveiled as the grand design for the survival of white minority rule, based on a master plan of racial injustice. Nearly four decades later, the legacy of this brutal violation of human rights is inflicting a terrible revenge on South African society. The apartheid system has gone through various labels in its time, from Separate Development to the present Co-operation and Development. None of them has been anything other than a euphemism. Apartheid is constitutionally authorised racial repression designed to maintain and protect the economic order and privilege. This system of repression has been defended by a range of laws drawn up to separate the races, down to the most pettifogging detail. Consider the racial changes allowed or ordered by the South African Government in 1984, as reported in the local newspapers. Under the Race Classification Act, 518 coloureds became white, 14 whites became coloured, seven Chinese became white, two whites became Chinese, three Malays became white, one white became Indian, 50 Indians became coloured, 54 coloureds became Indian, 17 Indians became Malays, 26 Malays became Indian, 89 blacks became coloured, five coloureds became black, one black was put into the "other Asian" category, three blacks became Indian, four coloureds became Chinese and one Malay became Chinese. One can only marvel at minds which can produce such decisions.
But South Africa is more than a slightly lunatic anachronism. Its race laws have been reinforced by what can only be described as state terrorism and enforced by police and defence forces given full authority to use violence, even fatal violence, against those who have the temerity to oppose the system. The tyrannical nature of the regime which keeps apartheid going has poisoned the South African Government's relationship with the international community. South Africa flouts both United Nations' authority and world opinion with its military occupation of Namibia. In its attempt to throw a cordon sanitaire around apartheid, it thinks nothing of waging violence and subversion against its neighbours. It threatens economic and even military punishment against the frontline states for expressing sympathy for black South Africans. South Africa has, by its own actions, become the pariah dog of the international community, a source of fear and insecurity among the majority of its own citizens and all those living round about it.
It is no wonder that the writer Andre Brink has taken the dangerous step of announcing his refusal to be drafted into defence forces which are used as instruments of state terrorism by South Africa. "The Fatherland to be defended", Brink has said, "must be interpreted as a spiritual quality, a system of values, the kind of values whose defeat would endanger the essential humanity of a community. But to fight for South Africa ... has nothing to do with the protection of values that deserve to survive."
I have said nothing about this institutionalised racial repression that is not already well-known to a gathering such as this. But it is important that I explain the fundamental reasons for it. It is important because, if we do not understand these reasons, it will be impossible for us to do anything effective to help South Africans change it. And we do have a responsibility to make the attempt, for reasons that I will come to in a moment.
Past and contemporary theorists of apartheid and its apologists outside South Africa dwell on what is said to be the historically innate tribalism of black Africans and the capacity of this tribalism to create division. It is the profoundest irony that the most clannish and secretive and exclusive tribe in South Africa is the white tribe itself. The irony is compounded by the fact that the policies of the South African Government are so obviously designed to aggravate the sense of tribal identity among blacks. The central point of these policies -- the homelands -- is based on the concept of tribal identity. The constitutional changes agreed to in the 1983 referendum -- whatever else may be said about them -- serve to entrench racial separation. One of the few legal black political organisations in South Africa is Inkatha, a group based on the Zulu tribe. This is why the South African Government has particularly targeted the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front, for these are organisations seeking to represent all racial groups in the community. These ironies aside, the so-called propensity towards tribalism by blacks is said by the white tribe to be the reason for the intricate and violent system of race law that has obtained in South Africa for the last four decades.
There is another, pragmatic, reason for apartheid. This is that it is an integral part of -- and the major enabling mechanism for -- protecting the privileges of South Africa's economic elite. Black South Africans have an important economic value. But, as human beings, they are awarded almost no value at all. The homelands serve both as recruiting ground for cheap labour and dumping ground when labour becomes redundant. The panoply of regulation that is unique to apartheid plays a crucial role in the economy. The group areas system, for example; the system of influx control; the recruitment of migratory labour from neighbouring countries; the racial basis on which access to skilled jobs is controlled; systematic discrimination against black trade unions; the compound system in gold and coal mining -- all these are crucial to South Africa's economic system. This is a significant reason for the kind of changes that have been made in the apartheid system; changes that have marginally softened the face of apartheid without reducing its effectiveness.
THE EXTENT OF CHANGES
There have been changes. It is important to be fair about that. Certain limited political rights at the national level have been allowed to 3.5 million coloureds and Indians. Some of the more obnoxious provisions in the laws governing sex and marriage across the race line have been or are being repealed. The Government has accepted the right of permanent residence of 10 million blacks now living in urban areas. Many aspects of petty apartheid have been moderated. Labour relations legislation has been altered to allow growth in black trade unions. In addition to these changes, the Government declares that it is ready to negotiate over future constitutional structures for blacks "at the highest levels". It has publicly accepted the necessity for peaceful change, albeit evolutionary and gradual.
It says it is ready to consider significant amendments to its influx control and pass laws.
But, since we are being fair about these changes, it has to be said also that they are for the most part cosmetic and unimportant -- inadequate to meet the demands of the current realities. Inequality and injustice remain, to a degree that black South Africans have obviously decided is intolerable. Government opponents continue to be detained without charge or trial. The Government remains committed to the enforcement of the Group Areas Act and other laws which maintain the formal separation of the races. State education remains racially separate. The Government has killed or jailed or chased into exile almost all the black leaders with whom it says it wishes to negotiate. Petty apartheid may have been moderated but it survives in rules as arcane as any dreamed up by protocol officers of the Habsburgs or priests of ancient Peru. Blacks may marry whites but they may not live with them in white areas. Blacks may have rights to freehold but not in white areas. Blacks may play sports with whites but only at the discretion of the sports clubs involved. Blacks can become honorary whites when they are good enough athletes but they may still not travel in white-only railway carriages, as the West Indian bowler Colin Croft discovered a few months ago. Blacks may share public parks with whites but not public lavatories. Blacks can go into some hotels but not others. In some hotels, they can eat and sleep but not dance or swim. Blacks can go to white theatre in Johannesburg but not to white cinemas. Blacks can enrol in the military but they will serve in units normally manned on racial lines. Once enrolled, they will find that, though military hospitals are integrated, living quarters are not. So change has been made. But it has been made in the main unevenly, hesitantly and (it must be said) cynically; for the engine of the change that has taken place has been, not ideological conversion, but economic pressure. Apartheid is still an essential ingredient in the South African economy but the pressure that is being mounted against it means that it must be given a less inhuman face.
The tremendous rate of economic growth by South Africa over the past 20 years or so has been enabled to a definitive degree by the existence of cheap labour supplied by and put in bondage to, the apartheid system. It has not repaid the compliment, however, by either advancing the cause of power-sharing by blacks or helping increase their economic power. Black wages have been growing over the past few years by 12 per cent a year but inflation has been growing in the same period by 17 per cent a year. The wages gap between black and white wages is still enormous. In the finance industries, blacks earn roughly 44 per cent of white wages and in transport and communications, about 30 per cent. In all other sectors, blacks receive well under 30 per cent. In mining, where disputation looks set to become endemic, blacks receive less than 20 per cent of white wages.
The apartheid system has the strength, of course, to withstand any attempt by blacks to win a greater share of the fruits of South Africa's economic progress, at least for the time being. This strength is expressed in an array of laws and regulations, backed by force. Black labour is still tightly controlled. Employers are liable to heavy fines if they employ unregistered workers.
Black businessmen are not allowed access to the white private enterprise system. Even in their own "free" enterprise system, they are hemmed in by government regulation. Housing, schools, transport and health services are still subject to the race laws. Twenty-three million blacks comprising 70 per cent of the population earn 26 per cent of national income, compared to the 4.5 million whites (comprising 15 per cent of the population) who receive 64 per cent of national income. The whole system of apartheid prevents any prospect of blacks being able to wield effective industrial bargaining power.
GROWING VIOLENCE
It is the South African Government's refusal to countenance any effective breakdown of the apartheid system that is driving blacks away from the idea of peaceful change and towards violence. The South African Government talks vaguely about dialogue in "meaningful open forum" but the only matters which beg to be discussed are apparently not allowed on the agenda and the only people who can speak for black South Africans are in their graves, in jail or on the run. Even before Sharpeville, South African Governments have been talking at the blacks in the language of violence. Nobody should be surprised therefore -- certainly not the South African Government itself -- that blacks feel driven to use the only mode of communication open to them or allowed to them. A riot at bottom, Martin Luther King said, is the language of the unheard. Indeed, the only really surprising thing about the current violence in South Africa is that black South Africans have not behaved more violently, given the mountain of injury done to them.
Even now, when the South African authorities go to pains to point out what appears to be aimless violence by blacks against their own kind, it is instructive to analyse the nature of this violence. Far from being indiscriminate, it is reported by observers, a little less subjective than South African police, to have been directed at agents of law and order which blacks have reason to hate and against the property of people rightly or wrongly regarded as agents of economic mastery which blacks find oppressive. The blacks, more than the police, were reported to have helped protect Indians in the Natal violence early last month; it was the Indians and blacks, not the police, who were reported to have patrolled the township of Inanda near Durban, where blacks and Indians live together. The South African Government says that its State of Emergency to deal with the language of the unheard applies in only 36 districts. But these 36 districts are home to fully one quarter of South Africa's population. The situation therefore is more serious than the authorities seem willing to admit.
Internal pressure having effected only inadequate change to apartheid, the victims of apartheid have chosen violence to replace it. So the bloodbath seems inevitable, as much as both its cause and occurrence are deplorable. The probability, however, is that violence will not be more effective in prospective circumstances. The present violence has caused the South African Government strife and embarrassment at home and abroad.
It may even eventually bring about more change on the periphery of the system. But there is small doubt that it is containable for the time being by a regime which holds the Bismarckian view that the great questions can only be decided by iron and blood. The South African Government has given itself enormous political and physical power. It has shown itself to be utterly ruthless in the exercise and protection of that power. It will be a long, hard time before it will allow itself to be forced to surrender that power. The South African Government has shown itself so far unmoved by internal violence. It has shown itself so far unmoved by attempts by various nations to use their good offices for bridge-building and persuasion towards change. What it is afraid of is the pressure applied or threatened to the one area where it is immediately vulnerable: its economy.
This external pressure has been well reported and documented lately because it is growing. The structure of foreign investment in South Africa is especially vulnerable to such pressure, or the threat of it. Five countries provide roughly 90 per cent of this investment. They are Britain, the United States, West Germany, France and Switzerland. France, which is responsible for between five and ten per cent of this investment, has now banned all investment and loans to South Africa, among other things. It has called on the rest of the United Nations to follow its example.
Yet another irony about South Africa is that business is at the forefront of the battle against apartheid. Nowadays, apartheid is bad for business. The South African Government has managed to protect the currency and stem the accelerating flight of short-term capital caused by worldwide fears about the violence and disorderliness that apartheid creates and encourages. The Government did this by the drastic expedient of currency controls and freezing the repayment of foreign debt. The benefits from this action will no doubt be only temporary.
ECONOMIC SANCTIONS
We condemn apartheid as an evil doctrine. So long as the South African Government continues to practise it, it cannot in our view expect to be welcomed back into the international community. We believe that South Africa can be pressured into peaceful and positive change by the international community acting together and using measures that are effective. There is no point in threatening actions if the threat cannot be carried out. There is no point in threatening actions that go beyond a government's power to carry out. The range of sanctions proposed or adopted by the international community -- a ban on new investment and loans, for example -- appeal to the Australian Government for two reasons. One is that they are proving to be effective. The other is that they have growing support, particularly in some countries with strong financial connections with South Africa.
So the Australian Government last month ordered the suspension of all new investment in South Africa by the Government and public authorities, except for that which is necessary to maintain our diplomatic and consular representation there. Direct investment here by the South African Government or its agencies is now prohibited. All Australian financial institutions have been asked to suspend new loans to borrowers in South Africa, either directly or indirectly. The Australian Trade Commissioner will be withdrawn from Johannesburg by the end of this month. Various forms of official government assistance for Australians trading in South Africa have been withdrawn. We have banned exports to South Africa of petroleum and petroleum products, computer hardware and any other products known to be of use to South Africa's security forces.
The recent mission by Mr. de Kock, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, seeking help to mitigate South Africa's liquidity crisis, ran into widespread nervousness among the international banking community.
A serious problem for South Africa is that its consistent deficit budgeting over recent years -- caused by huge expenditure on the repressive institution of apartheid and its defence -- has been financed by foreign investment and loans. In the first six months of 1985, the South African Government is reported to have borrowed 10 per cent more from overseas than it did in the whole of 1984. Mr de Kock found himself face to face with the question whether or not investors are looking for better things to do with their capital than risk it in financing such a destructive repression. Bankers in Britain (from which comes half of all South Africa's foreign investment) have made it clear that the economic questions about South Africa can only be decided by political answers. Mr de Kock himself has now publicly admitted that the future of the South African economy depends on progress towards political change. This is the real pressure point for South Africa: unmoved when schoolchildren bleed in Soweto and Uitenhage, it will jump when the rand bleeds in London and New York.
In saying this, I have in effect explained why the Australian Government has decided to take action against South Africa and its apartheid system.
We have prohibited the import from South Africa of krugerands and all other coins minted there and all arms, ammunition and military vehicles. We have put an embargo on all new government contractual dealings with majority-owned South African companies for contracts worth more than $20,000. We have decided to avoid government procurement of supplies from South African sources, except that needed to maintain diplomatic and consular representation in Southern Africa, and to restrict government sales of goods and services to South Africa.
We have introduced a code of conduct for Australian companies which seeks to ensure that they do not try to exploit apartheid in ways which would not be acceptable here. It proposes that places of work should not be racially segregated, for example, and that (as in Australia) there should be racial equality in such areas as recruitment, employment, wages, training and promotion. Not having extra-territorial legislative authority, the Government has decided that the code should be voluntary. Discussions on the code between Government and business are proceeding amiably and constructively. European and American business adhere to similar codes which ensure that continuing economic changes help, not exploit, black South African labour. The Australian Government will expect Australian business to observe the same standard.
In other words, we are part of a growing international constituency which seeks, through sanctions of various kinds, to pressure the South African Government into peaceful changes to a multiracial society with universal adult suffrage and the standard of human rights proposed by the UN Declaration. We have put in train a range of measures which allows us to exert this pressure to the limit of our powers and resources.
We have also set out one other action which will enable us to extend our pressure against apartheid if or when the need demands. Conscious of the inadequacy of previous attempts at multilateral economic sanctions, we have voted at the Security Council for measures that are mandatory and effective. We will continue to contact other nations with the objective of exploring further action in this regard. In addition, we have decided to prepare the way, through legislative amendment, to withdraw facilities connected to South Africa under various government schemes. I mean the Export Market Development Grant Scheme, the Australian Overseas Projects Corporation and the Tourism Overseas Promotion Scheme. The Government would then be able to withdraw these facilities at short notice if the need arose. Finally, the Government is working on a strategy which would seek help at the forthcoming CHOGM meeting in the Bahamas for positive and effective UN action against South Africa.
We have in mind a group of international authorities who would work out proposals for peaceful transition in South Africa to a multiracial society with universal suffrage and another group of international experts to study how the suspension of new investment in South Africa might be implemented and coordinated. The Government has made the point plainly that these are first steps in our programme of effective pressure on South Africa for peaceful reform. How and if we proceed further -- in civil aviation matters, for example -- depends on our assessment of the way affairs are evolving in South Africa.
Of course, there are people with an interest in the South African question who disagree completely with the idea of sanctions. They say that sanctions are an unwarranted complication into affairs that are complicated enough. Apartheid will be undermined eventually by international economic pressure, the critics say; this process will be more benign in conditions of economic prosperity than in economic austerity brought about by sanctions. And anyway, the critics say, sanctions will be more likely to hurt the interests of black South Africans than to change the minds of the white elite. Some of these points may have been arguable when economic and social conditions in South Africa were relatively stable and apparently unchangeable. But this cannot be said of present or prospective circumstances. Political rights, not economic rights, are at the centre of issues in South Africa today. Until this central issue is resolved, neither economic nor social stability are possible in South Africa.
BLACK SUPPORT
Secondly, for all the critics' reservations and protestations, apartheid would still be in better shape if the international community had not expressed its opposition to it through sanctions and other actions. In any case most black leaders are simply begging for sanctions, even though they can be sentenced to death for doing so. They are especially angry at the patronising judgement that sanctions are bad because they hurt black South Africans. The fact is that black South Africans have been hurting because of apartheid for the past 40 years. Who can blame them for being furious and cynical at the notion that sanctions will somehow hurt them more than apartheid can? The question is often asked: why should South Africa get this special attention? Before I answer I want briefly to talk about sporting sanctions. It was decided at Gleneagles, 10 years ago, that sport was an activity by which the Commonwealth could express its detestation of apartheid in general. Most sports in Australia have abided by the spirit of Gleneagles. The most notorious current case of athletes who do not intend to is the rebel cricket team under Kim Hughes. Let me make it clear: the Government has no power to stop them from going. Some might sympathise with people given the prospect of such large and unexpected wealth. They have the right to go. But, before they do, they should consider some pertinent points.
First, the moment they set foot in South Africa, it is London to a brick that Brisbane will have to kiss the Olympic Games goodbye. They should be quite clear about that.
Second, they should be clear that the black South Africans who will come to demonstrate against them have an excellent chance of being jailed without charge or trial or being shot dead or any punishment between. Third, they should ponder the question why the South African authorities have budgeted $6 million for their security, on top of the $2.7 million that their tour is going to cost in the ordinary way. The answer is that every dollar of it will be needed for the police dogs and scout cars and barbed wire to keep away black South Africans who will want to express their disgust and resentment at the tour. They should consider the damage they are about to do to their country's reputation and the insult that they are about to offer their non-white counterparts. Finally, they should by now understand that South Africa will pay any price and go to any lengths to mount any activity that will help make apartheid respectable. That is what the rebels are being paid to do: the price of their reputation is to make apartheid respectable. They sell themselves and their reputations cheaply. Otherwise, South Africa would not be prepared to invest a king's ransom on Australia's B team.
It is often said that sports sanctions are an unfair burden to athletes. Sanctions on business and investment, the code of conduct and other measures whose details 1 gave a moment ago demonstrate that this is not so. The onus of Australian sanctions policy is now spread across a broad social range. The Commonwealth and African countries are watching the rebel tour closely. And it is not for the cricket. In the long run, the tour will be an event that Australians will come deeply to regret.
APARTHEID IS UNIQUE
Given the circumstances and considering the publicity given to them, I am frankly often amazed that the question so often arises about South Africa attracting such singular attention. Everybody should be clear by now about what the South African system is all about. It is unique. It has been carefully drawn up so that a white-controlled economy can exploit a bottomless pit of cheap labour -- even slave labour. Every nook and cranny in the law and all the apparatus of order have been mobilised to keep this system running as smoothly as possible, because it is extremely profitable. Two-thirds of the people of South Africa have been assigned 13 per cent of the land in South Africa -- so that the system will not be threatened. South Africa has the only Christian sect which approves this system. And the system is protected by police, military and paramilitary forces given carte blanche to use brutality against fathers, mothers and children alike. This institutionalised racial repression does not happen anywhere else in the world -- not even in such favourite bogeys as Uganda or Libya or the Soviet Union. People were tried and found guilty at Nuremberg for doing less. There might be those who want to pass it by on the other side of the road or make money out of it or even play cricket with people who tolerate it. I feel very sorry for them. But, if they think about it, even people so desensitised are surely sensible enough to see that South Africa is a very special case indeed. This is why the Australian Government feels honour-bound to do what it can to change it.
Now we have to be careful when we attempt this that we do not use South Africa (if I can use Chester Crocker's words of five years ago) "as a political firesale to be ransacked for confirmation of previously held convictions". The condition of non-white South Africans is too serious for us to use them for our own political games. As of now, apartheid survives: a unique system of institutional and constitutional repression imposed on the majority by a powerful minority on purely racial grounds. There are signs that the South African Government has been so unsettled by a combination of external pressure and sheer fury internally that it may be prepared to consider the unthinkable and unspeakable. There are white South Africans who are weary of the racial tension and want an end to it. There are black South Africans who have demonstrated that they are ready to wage violence and die for an end to the system that oppresses them. We cannot disconnect ourselves from this and all its ramifications.
By its history and its position in international developments and conditions, South Africa is part of the Western experience, just as we are. Whatever we may think of the international order, South Africa is an integral part of it. In all manner of ways -- as the major producer of the world's gold, vanadium and other minerals, for example; lying next to significant oil shipping routes -- South Africa is also an integral part of the international security system. We are connected to South Africa in this way too.
If the South African Government continues its uniquely noxious social system, all this is going to be overwhelmed by the approaching storm.
The world community has tried to effect reform in South Africa by encouraging and cajoling various South African Governments. The effort has been patient and it has in the main been unavailing. Because of their obduracy and their prejudice, the white elite in South Africa is involved in ever-spiralling internal protest and unrest. The State of Emergency, with its attendant array of force, may contain this unrest -- but only for the time being. South African whites are learning that every summer has to be paid for by winter. Protest in South Africa will grow. Violence will spread. Their effects will be felt along all the connections between South Africa and us in the world community. Some people see in all this the hand of communism. There is little evidence for this excuse. To the extent that there is communist influence in South Africa, it is the product of the South African Government's own actions. To the extent that it grows the South African Government can take all the credit. lf communism is the result of what is happening in South Africa today, the South African Government can blame nobody but itself.
So there are eminently respectable reasons -- of principle and self-interest -- why Australians should be active in the international campaign against apartheid. We should be realistic about the difficulties, however unhappy we may be about their reasons and origins. We should resist any romantic illusions that apartheid will die without a struggle. One of its most malevolent manifestations is its deliberate fostering of tribal identity among its victims. This will be extremely difficult to break down. Even the white elite will have its own tribal problems: if the South African Government embarks on really serious reform, it will have to do so over the opposition of the ultras camped on its right.
Black leaders who could have helped are in their graves or in jail. The wrong that has to be righted has been built into every facet of the society. The whole process will need to be managed with the greatest sensitivity. But a beginning must be made. There has been enough misery in South Africa already. The consequences are ready to spill well over the borders of South Africa.
The Australian Government intends to play its part in getting the reform process under way. It tends to do this through its own forms of pressure on South Africa, through its direct contacts with South Africa, through CHOGM and the Commonwealth and through the UN. Our objective is simply stated. We do not want to bring South Africa to its knees. We want to bring it to its senses. Apartheid must go. Instead, all parties involved must begin the process of replacing it with a society that is multiracial and non-fragmented and governed according to a system of majority rule chosen by universal suffrage. Anything less and South Africa will remain a danger to world stability, a cause of oppression at home and a source of shame and disgust around the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment