S. Africa Military Called Stronger Despite 22-Year Arms Embargo

South Africa is better equipped militarily than it was 22 years ago when the United Nations first imposed an arms embargo to try to force an end to apartheid, a U.N. report said Tuesday.

“Moreover, South Africa is continuously expanding and upgrading its military force because of its perception of external threat,” said the document, which estimates South Africa to be the 10th largest arms manufacturer in the world.

The report was prepared by the U.N. Center on Transnational Corporations for the 40th U.N. General Assembly that begins in mid-September.

“The white-minority rulers of the country today appear even better prepared militarily to enforce their apartheid policy than they were when sanctions were first imposed” by the U.N. Security Council in 1963, the report said.

Apartheid is the white-minority government’s policy of racial segregation.

“The embargoes voted for in 1963, made mandatory in 1977 and extended in 1984, have not achieved their primary goals of helping to eliminate apartheid or to reduce the threat of war in the region,” the report said.

“South Africa maintains its apartheid policies, its ability to determine the pace of change in Namibia (neighboring South-West Africa) and its ability to force neighboring states to keep their support of opposition groups to a minimum,” it said.

South Africa got most of the military hardware from abroad between 1963 and 1977 when “it had little difficulty in attracting foreign interests to sell the wherewithal for a transition toward military self-sufficiency,” the report said. It did not name the foreign sellers.

The document reported that “imperfect as they might be, embargoes are a necessary part of international policy to eliminate apartheid.”

The report also said that South Africa’s “Valindaba uranium enrichment plant is estimated to produce enough plutonium for two to three bombs a year. Thus, South Africa could already have a stockpile of 15 to 25 nuclear bombs.”

But the report provided no evidence that South Africa has a nuclear weapon.