It’s <i> Not</i> Understandable

The White House, in its determination to maintain its “constructive engagement” with South Africa, has once again adopted a posture more likely to encourage rather than to reform the obstinate racism of the white rulers there.

“Understandable” is the word that the White House chose to describe the imposition of a state of emergency in South Africa during the weekend. “It says it seeks to restore law and order, and that is understandable, but we look to the South African government to exercise its responsibilities in a scrupulous manner,” the spokesman for President Reagan said. In fact, the action is not “understandable.” Yes, there was violence. Yes, order in some areas was breaking down. Yes, there was a high risk that things would get much worse. But that situation had been made inevitable and irreversible by the white regime--turning off every appeal for an end to apartheid, rejecting those who offer nonviolent change as if they were no different from those driven to murder and destruction. And now the new police powers are being used to reinforce that very policy of repression, with indications that the authority is being used against all critics and all opponents, without discriminating between those who advocate political change without violence and those already engaged in guerrilla warfare.

To speak of a return to law and order under the system of apartheid is appalling, for there is no legitimacy to the law of apartheid--a system that guarantees disorder.

Reagan’s spokesman has once again affirmed the need in South Africa for “basic reforms moving away from apartheid, which system we consider to be repugnant and largely responsible for the current violence.” Wonderful words. But there is simply nothing in this bland American approval of a state of emergency that is going to propel South Africa into the kind of dialogue that alone can reverse the terror. There is nothing in this detached rhetoric from the White House press office that is going to encourage President Pieter W. Botha himself to make good on the promise that he made earlier this year for meaningful talks with the majority.

Perhaps there is nothing that anyone can do or say to rescue South Africa from this terrible but predictable result of generations of injustice. The white rulers may yield power only as it is torn from them in a convulsive, cumulative deterioration of the political order. But those rulers must be made to understand that they will not make matters better by plastering their system with another layer of repression, another sweeping denial of the rights of the black majority, another cruel frustration so evident in the way the emergency powers already have been put to use.