Shultz Applauds S. African Steps : Assails Boycotts, Upholds Administration Approach

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, citing progress by South Africa toward dismantling its system of racial separation, Tuesday defended the Administration’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the Pretoria government as far more effective than the commercial boycotts advocated by congressional critics.

“There has been more reform in South Africa in the past four years than in the previous 30,” Shultz declared in a speech to the National Press Club.

“We choose to focus on getting results. We can’t have it both ways. We cannot have influence with people if we treat them as moral lepers, especially when they are themselves beginning to address the agenda of change.”

Reaction to Law Reform

Although Shultz broke no new ground in the speech, he delivered a firm defense of Administration policy the day after South Africa said it would repeal laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sexual relations.

Shultz hailed the announcement as representing the sort of change that is required. But he added: “These changes are not enough. South Africa is not now a just society.”

Constructive engagement, the Administration policy of using normal diplomatic dealings rather than boycotts or other sanctions to encourage the South African government to change, was criticized on two fronts Tuesday.

Complaint in Cape Town

In Cape Town, South African Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha complained that the United States is demanding too much too soon. He said Washington “refuses to judge South Africa within the framework of the African continent.”

And on Capitol Hill, Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Banking subcommittee on international monetary policy, said: “The present (U.S.) policy is simply not yielding results, and we seem to have slipped backward in the last six months.” He predicted that Congress will pass boycott legislation this year.

Shultz implied that advocates of tougher U.S. action may, in fact, be posturing. “We should be indignant at injustice and bloodshed,” he said, “but indignation alone is not a policy.”

The secretary argued that change in South Africa can come only with the support of the white minority that dominates the nation’s political life.

“If we recognize that white opinion holds vital keys to change, then we must also recognize that change must originate in shifts in white politics,” he said. “In this regard, in the past three years the white government has crossed a historical divide: It has been willing to accept major defections from its own ranks in order to begin to offer a better political, economic and social deal to the nation’s black majority.”

He was alluding to the split-off of far rightists from South Africa’s governing National Party--under the banners of the Conservative Party and the Herstigte Nasionale, groups that include unreconstructed opponents of any real concessions to the nation’s black majority.

Meanwhile, the Senate Banking Committee considered legislation by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.) to bar the sale of South Africa’s gold krugerrand coins in the United States, to prohibit loans by U.S. banks to the government and to forbid the sale of computers to South Africa.

‘Aid and Comfort’

“The United States is seen by black South Africans as the South African government’s closest friend in the international community, and the policy of constructive engagement is seen as providing aid and comfort to the architects of apartheid,” Kennedy said.

Asked why the bill included the provision on computers, Weicker replied, “You don’t keep track of 23 million blacks manually.”

Shultz said economic sanctions would hurt South African blacks far more than the government or the white minority in general. He said U.S. business interests have been a force for change that should be encouraged, not hobbled.

“I do not understand why it is good for American investors to create jobs for black workers in Zimbabwe or Zaire but not in South Africa,” he said, “and I suspect that the tens of thousands who have flocked to the squatters’ camps outside Cape Town in a desperate search for work do not understand either.”