Battling Apartheid

An intense study of the situation in South Africa by our own reporters and outside experts indicates that new initiatives and an alternative to President Reagan’s policy of constructive engagement are required if the risk of a bloodbath is to be reduced.

Two things need to be recognized at the outset. One is that there has been no fundamental change in the policy of apartheid used by the white minority to control the black majority. The second is that there may be no way to contain the spreading violence, but if there is a way, it is by ending apartheid.

The pressing question for the United States is: What, if anything, can it do to accelerate the abandonment of apartheid? There is no unanimity on the answer. But it seems to us that there are useful opportunities for American businesses, for American investors and for the U.S. government.

American businesses operating in or with South Africa “should probably remain for the time being,” to quote John de St. Jorre, the author, writing in our Sunday Opinion section. But they must do more to persuade the Pretoria government “to dismantle the racially structured and grossly inequitable apartheid system.”

We agree. The Sullivan Principles, setting forth appropriate workplace conditions and committing companies against apartheid, will remain little more than a screen designed to justify remaining in business with South African unless they are used aggressively to bring about fundamental change that abandons race as the social and political denominator.

American investors can reinforce that effort in a number of ways. There is a susceptibility of managers to stockholders, but too often stockholders have not used that authority to prod the managers into full and aggressive compliance with the Sullivan Principles. Divestment is an appropriate reaction only if managers refuse. Institutions, including retirement funds, have leverage on corporations most effectively used inside the annual stockholders’ meetings.

There is another troubling aspect of the campaign for divestment and disinvestment. Not all business connections are as clear as the ownership of a car factory or the proprietorship of a bank. The Regents of the University of California were wise to postpone a divestment decision until the practicalities of divesting and its potential usefulness were studied.

There are now proposals for legislation to bar new investments, to limit bank lending and to control trade. That is premature. Economic sanctions have rarely if ever been an effective instrument for bringing about peaceful change. That is why it is better at this stage to test the leverage still in the hands of those doing business with South Africa.

For more than four years now the Reagan Administration has opted for soft talk in public and tougher talk in private to win concessions from South Africa. This has served to encourage nothing more than superficial change. The result has been “adaptation” rather than “reform,” in the words of Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaner poet. Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s enthusiastic claim that “South Africa is changing” fails to appreciate that the change that really matters, ending racism, is as distant as ever--witness the comments of the white leaders in recent days. The blacks are not impressed with the lifting of segregation rules in some public places when they remain without political and economic rights.

The depth of American revulsion with South Africa’s racism would become clearer to the South Africans if the polite rhetoric of the Administration were reinforced. One step would be tighter trade restrictions on sensitive items, including high-technology products. There are items on the list of exports with strategic implications that should not be permitted, given the risks to South African stability brought on by the stubborn pursuit of racism.

Nothing may be accomplished by pursuing the full implementation of the Sullivan Principles,by tightening strategic exports, by making sure that the American commitment to peaceful change is not seen in Pretoria as license to perpetuate racism. But if change does not result, the issue of divestment may be academic. The opportunity for investment most likely would, along with the opportunity for peaceful change, be lost in violence made inevitable by an elite blinded by its privileges from seeing the options that still exist.