Fresh Anger over Apartheid

Bishop Tutu and conservative Congressmen join the protest

His voice was resonant, his accent lilting, his demeanor disarmingly gentle. But his words carried a sting. “We do not want our chains comfortable,” South Africa’s Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. “We want them removed.” The black clergyman, who will travel to Oslo this week to accept the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, assailed the U.S. policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa as “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” “We shall be free,” he declared. “And we shall remember who helped us become free.” Breaking their own rules, the subcommittee members gave Tutu a standing ovation.

The bishop, 53, was at the center of a sudden escalation of protests in the U.S. last week directed at South Africa’s government and Washington’s relations with it. Tutu’s tour culminated Friday morning in the Oval Office, where President Reagan defended his policy of using “quiet diplomacy” to prompt reforms of South Africa’s repressive policies. At a press conference afterward, Reagan said South Africa’s policies were “repugnant” and insisted that “we have made sizable progress in persuading the South African government to make changes.” Tutu was not convinced. “There may have been some effects,” the bishop said dryly about U.S. policy, “but none that the victims of apartheid can see.” Reagan’s approach, he insisted, had “worsened the situation of South African blacks.”

The main impact of Tutu’s tour was the note of moral dignity it gave to the rising protests in the U.S. “When the missionaries first came to Africa,” he told a celebrity-studded audience at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, “they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” After the laughter, Tutu switched moods. “Where is the anger?” he asked, referring to the U.S. Government. “Constructive engagement is an abomination, an unmitigated disaster.”

The current surge of protest activity began Thanksgiving week with the arrest of four prominent black leaders at the South African embassy in Washington. Since then the demonstrations have spread to eight cities and are expected to attract larger rallies at planned events this week. They have had a revivalist, 1960s civil rights tone, as black activists joined white liberal politicians, labor leaders and clergymen in crossing police lines to be arrested. By week’s end 31 demonstrators, selected for their symbolic value, had been arrested in the daily rallies outside the embassy.

Pickets in ever mounting numbers also appeared in front of South African consulates in New York, Chicago, Seattle and Houston. In Boston, some 80 members of TransAfrica, the umbrella organization directing the national movement, picketed the offices of Attorney Richard Blankstein, the honorary consul for South Africa. After a brief shoving match with police, three protesters gained entry to Blankstein’s building and met with him. They emerged 24 minutes later with his signed resignation. In San Francisco, members of a longshoremen’s union refused to handle cargo from South Africa carried by a Dutch ship until shipowners got a federal judge to order them to do so.

A significant addition to the ranks of traditional liberal protesters came last week. Indiana’s Republican Senator Richard Lugar, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican Senator Nancy Kassebaum, head of a subcommittee on Africa, sent a letter to Reagan urging him to speak out more forcefully against apartheid. They complained that the State Department had failed to attack “the evils of apartheid and the violations of human rights in a straightforward, understandable manner.” In addition, 35 conservative Congressmen, including such New Right Turks as Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich, invited South African Ambassador Bernardus Fourie to Capitol Hill and gave him a letter threatening to support economic sanctions against South Africa unless there is “a demonstrated sense of urgency about ending apartheid.” South Africa, they warned, cannot count on “benign neglect” by American conservatives of its racial policies.

The Administration sought to stem the rising tide by having Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, explain the Administration’s policy of “constructive engagement.” Crocker complained that the policy, largely his creation, has been misunderstood. “It is not an embracing of any status quo,” he said, adding that the U.S. has supported those black union leaders, students, clergymen and businesses seeking reforms in South Africa. The Administration contends that economic sanctions have rarely proved effective and could not be expected to have a great influence on such an embedded practice as apartheid. Jimmy Carter’s more confrontational approach had also made little difference, they argue, so working on a friendlier basis with the South African government is well worth a try. The Administration claims to share the protesters’ moral indignation, but it faces the practical problem of deciding how best to remedy a bad situation.

The recent protests in the U.S. were provoked in part by the arrest of 16 black labor leaders by South African police. Jesse Jackson and Senator Edward Kennedy, who have been granted visas to travel to South Africa, had planned to press for the release of the unionists while in Pretoria. Ambassador Fourie announced at week’s end that eleven of the prisoners had been released and five will be charged with crimes. Fourie claimed to be “perplexed about why this movement is so silent when it comes to human rights violations in the Soviet Union or those that occur in other parts of Africa.” He added, “We will listen to constructive criticism, but we will not be intimidated by anyone.” -By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Johanna McGeary and Alessandra Stanley/ Washington, with other bureaus