Diplomacy: Fence Mending

Botha goes calling in Europe

The headline in one Johannesburg paper almost shouted the news: P.W. LEADS SOUTH AFRICA OUT OF ISOLATION.

Another daily described the forthcoming event as a “venture to the exterior.” The excitement was caused by Prime Minister P.W. Botha’s 16-day trip to Western Eu rope, the most ambitious journey under taken by a South African leader in almost 40 years. The purpose of the trip, which is taking Botha to Portugal, Switzerland, Britain, West Germany, Belgium, France, Austria and perhaps Italy: to move South Africa a bit further from the limbo to which its apartheid policies have condemned it for the past generation.

Even South Africa’s strongest critics admit that Botha, 68, who became Prime Minister almost six years ago, has made things a little better. He has given a measure of political power to the Asian and “colored” (mixed-race) minorities, though none to the 21-million black majority. He has reduced the hostilities be tween South Africa and the black-ruled states of Mozambique and Angola. Finally, Botha has said he is prepared under certain conditions to give independence to Namibia, a territory that South Africa governs in violation of United Nations resolutions.

From the start, Botha’s hosts went to some effort to keep a discreet distance be tween themselves and their guest. “I’m here because I was invited by different governments,” Botha declared upon arrival in Lisbon, though most of the govern ments concerned were saying that he had invited himself. When asked about the demonstrations that threatened to interrupt his travels, Botha bristled, “We live in a free world. It is everyone’s right to demonstrate, even to make fools of themselves.”

In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher prepared for the South African’s visit by emphasizing her opposition to apartheid and insisting that her government would maintain the present arms embargo against South Africa. On Saturday, as the two leaders met for lunch, 7,000 demonstrators gathered at London’s Trafalgar Square, where they heard Deputy Labor Party Leader Roy Hattersley call Botha’s visit “an insult to Britain’s black and Asian population.” Still, like the other European governments, the British recognized South Africa’s importance as a trading partner and as a political power. In the words of a Thatcher aide, the government’s aim was “not to drive the South Africans further into [isolation] but to bring them out.”