S. Africa Invokes Emergency Laws : Policy of U.S. Founders With Sanctions Move

With adoption of U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa expected soon, the Reagan Administration’s policy of “constructive engagement” with this country is on the point of collapse, with no alternative to replace it.

No longer will the United States be able to exert its influence in quiet diplomacy to nudge South Africa into broader and faster reforms with regard to its policy of racial separation and into better relations with its neighbors.

South African whites, both in and out of government, are already suggesting that the U.S. sanctions, which are close to adoption by Congress, will sever the close working relationship that the Reagan Administration has attempted to foster and, as a result, free them from any need to please the United States.

Loss of Leverage Seen

And, lacking any real leverage over the minority white regime here, Washington will no longer be able to approach black African states as the mediator in negotiations for the independence of Namibia, which Pretoria continues to administer in defiance of U.N. resolutions, or on lesser regional issues.

Force for Change

Under constructive engagement, no sanctions were envisioned and American business was encouraged to maintain and expand operations here as a force for change. The American policy was aimed at fostering South African self-confidence so this country would progressively remove the strictures of apartheid and improve relations with its black-ruled neighbors.

The many critics of constructive engagement argue that the policy failed long ago, that it has not ended apartheid within South Africa, that it has failed to secure Namibian independence and that Pretoria’s relations with its neighbors remain those of a neighborhood bully.

Although Chester A. Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs and author of the non-confrontational policy toward South Africa, continues to defend constructive engagement as the only policy with a hope of success, it is clearly in a shambles today:

--More than 475 people, all but three of them blacks, have died in nearly a year of unrest, the worst in almost a decade. The government’s limited reforms in race relations have done little to end the violence. President Pieter W. Botha has stressed repeatedly in recent weeks that South Africa alone will decide on further reforms and that their pace will not be forced.

--The American ambassador to Pretoria, Herman W. Nickel, was recalled to Washington more than a month ago to show U.S. displeasure over a series of South African moves: a raid on alleged terrorist offices in neighboring Botswana that left 12 dead; an apparent attempt to blow up an oil refinery--half American-owned--in Angola’s Cabinda province; the installation of a “transitional government of national unity” in Namibia in defiance of U.N. calls for its independence. There is no indication when Nickel will return.

--Negotiations on the future of Namibia, also called South-West Africa--have collapsed. Angola first ended the intermittent discussions with South Africa on Namibia and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from its soil because of the abortive raid by South African commandos May 21 on its Cabinda oil refinery. Last week, Angola broke contacts with the United States, the mediator in the talks, after Congress, at the Reagan Administration’s urging, removed a nine-year ban on U.S. assistance to the rightist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, a guerrilla movement known as UNITA.

--American relations with Mozambique, another neighbor of South Africa’s, had improved markedly after the United States encouraged a nonaggression treaty between Pretoria and Maputo, gave Mozambique emergency food supplies to feed famine victims and promised the Marxist government military assistance to fight rightist guerrillas. But congressional action sharply restricting that aid for ideological reasons has put the new relationship in serious jeopardy.

--The regional detente that the United States had tried to foster seems to be yielding, at least partially, to conflict and violence again. Not only did South African commandos raid suspected offices of the African National Congress in Gaborone, the Botswana capital, and attempt to blow up the Cabinda oil refinery, but South African troops resumed their cross-border operations in southern Angola against the Namibian guerrillas of the South-West Africa People’s Organization despite a U.S.-brokered agreement last year for a full withdrawal of South African troops from Angola. Mozambique contends that South Africa failed to halt support for the guerrillas as promised when the nonaggression treaty was signed.

“Whatever Chester Crocker may think he has achieved in four years of constructive engagement and quiet diplomacy is now turning to ashes before his very eyes,” a Western European ambassador said in Pretoria. “He may not be ready to give up on constructive engagement, but clearly South Africa has. . . .

“That is the message of the past two months after the U.S. adoption of sanctions became inevitable; that is the reasoning behind actions like Cabinda and Gaborone, and that is why Nickel’s recall is not just for consultations but to work out a new American policy that has fewer illusions about South Africa and American ability to influence it.”

Tactical Change Seen

What that policy could be is not certain here. Although critical of the results, Western diplomats here tend to accept Crocker’s argument that constructive engagement as a broad strategy based on strong encouragement rather than harsh condemnation is a valid, if not necessarily the best, way to deal with South Africa. They foresee changes in tactics--a tougher public stance, or “more stick, less carrot,” as another ambassador put it--and a new name, rather than a fundamental policy shift.

Crocker himself asserted in a televised interview with black African journalists last month: “We believe we have the right approach in southern Africa and, as President Reagan has made clear, we intend to stick with it. We do not believe the South African government is going to be coerced by measures taken against its people and its economy, and so we are going to stick with (constructive engagement). We have to use what influence we have in the wisest possible way . . . and we will have more influence by remaining there than by pulling out.”

Yet, Administration officials have made clear in Washington that the United States is in the midst of a major policy review on southern Africa, brought on largely by Pretoria’s actions during the past three months.

Among American diplomats in the region, there are suggestions that U.S. policy--whether it is called constructive engagement or something else--will become tougher, that South Africa’s other major trading partners, particularly Britain and West Germany, will be brought into it and that “conditionality,” clearly linking good relations with domestic reforms, will become a hallmark.

What U.S. Alternatives?

“Constructive engagement has brought gains, although their significance, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder,” a senior U.S. diplomat based elsewhere in southern Africa commented. “More to the point, as we reassess and our partners reassess, is what could replace it, what policy alternatives do we truly have?

“A return to the harsh rhetoric of the Carter Administration would be an indulgence in political self-delusion, and certainly the sanctions as (likely to be) adopted by Congress are not stern enough to do the things that constructive engagement failed to do, like ending apartheid. We may call it something else, but constructive engagement seems likely to remain as our basic approach.”

This will not necessarily please South African whites. The argument is heard here increasingly that constructive engagement, despite its image of being “soft on apartheid,” has placed a greater burden on South Africa than on the United States but that it benefited Washington more than Pretoria.

“We are not sorry to see constructive engagement die,” Prof. Carl Noffke, director of American studies at Rand Afrikaans University, commented. “Constructive engagement, its critics notwithstanding, simply did not benefit South Africa to the same extent as the United States. Washington’s influence with us, for example, greatly enhanced its influence in black Africa, but what did we get in return? After four years, there are very few visible signs of benefits for us, achievements that would have come no other way. But there were some major costs.

U.S. Reaction Weighed

“Put another way, South Africa had always to carry the burden of maintaining a positive partnership with the United States, and we found ourselves asking, time and again and often quite inappropriately, ‘How will the Americans react?’ Just as the United States is going through a policy reassessment, so are we, and future relations, I think, will have to be based on a more sober and realistic view of each other.”

To Prof. John Barratt, director of the South African Institute of International Affairs, a basic flaw in U.S. policy in the region has been unrealistic expectations--the belief that, within two presidential terms, the United States would be able to push South Africa firmly along the path of domestic reform, to win independence for Namibia and to stabilize what had been one of the world’s most troubled regions.

“As a policy, constructive engagement raised expectations that could not realistically be met,” Barratt said, “and, thus, whatever achievements may be claimed now inevitably fall short. . . . Eighteen months ago, in fact, the policy looked like it was working well with reforms under way here, important agreements with our neighbors and even some movement on Namibia. Now, it is hard to be optimistic about many things.”

A second flaw, Barratt said, was the lack of political consensus in the United States behind constructive engagement, for this has made it vulnerable to attacks from the left and even the right in Washington. “It is quite a big problem to find a policy that will not be continuously under attack,” Barratt said. “If one accepts all the goals of constructive engagement, and they were quite noble, chances of achieving them are clearly diminished if you have to keep tailoring the policy to meet political attacks at home and find Congress continually undercutting it.

“This might well mean a policy that is not so favorable or flattering to South Africa as constructive engagement has been, but in the long run it is more important to us here to have a politically sustainable policy in the United States. Today, with Congress adopting sanctions, the Administration opposing them, with South Africa a focus of political controversy and with constructive engagement in shreds, the United States has no definable or sustainable policy in this region.”