South Africa: Policy Advice

Secretary of State George P. Shultz has named an outstanding citizen committee to offer advice in the coming year on U.S. policy regarding South Africa.

“This is a serious undertaking, one that the President and I hope will lead to a bipartisan consensus that is a positive and necessary force behind any effective foreign policy,” Shultz said.

That commitment and the quality of the committee members were reassuring. Blue-ribbon committees too often serve as a substitute for decision-making in controversial situations. President Reagan has clung to his policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa long after it was clearly counterproductive. The positive steps that he has taken have been under intense pressure from Congress, where a bipartisan policy on South Africa already is evident, rather than on his own initiative. His grudging acceptance of sanctions this year came only in a move to head off tougher congressional action.

As a result, the situation has worsened. Namibia’s long-overdue independence has been stalled for five years by the flirtation between the Reagan Administration and Pretoria. The President’s preoccupation with the Cubans in Angola is now being escalated into a proposal for direct American military aid to guerrillas allied with Pretoria in Angola. All this has tended to give comfort to the apostles of apartheid rather than to accelerate the change that will come, one way or another.

Shultz said that he wanted the advisory committee’s report by next December. The committee will have served little purpose if it waits that long to speak. But Shultz also said that he would “welcome their advice as we go along”--an invitation that the committee should seize immediately. Events are moving too fast to wait a year. And the expertise represented in the committee means that it is ready for action, ready to speak with authority.

Speed is essential if the committee is to conform to Shultz’s goal “that apartheid must go, that we want it to go in a peaceful way, without a blood bath.” The ban on photo coverage of unrest in South Africa has failed to conceal the fact that the violence is continuing, and with it an escalation of the violation of human rights. Leading opposition figures in South Africa have acknowledged how close the situation is to an explosion of more widespread violence that could eliminate the last chance for peaceful change.

Much is made in South Africa of the commitment of the minority white regime to constitutional change that will give the black majority a voice in government, but no fundamental reforms to implement this policy have emerged. Indeed, the government has been hard-pressed to find blacks who are willing to negotiate--a problem complicated by the fact that many of the opponents have been imprisoned and others were until recently facing treason charges. There is now evidence that the South African government finally is going to produce some specific proposals to implement its promises. The committee will have served a particularly useful purpose if it can accelerate that process and contribute to the development of proposals that can be accepted by the majority.

The committee will be under the chairmanship of Frank T. Cary, chairman of the IBM executive committee, and William T. Coleman Jr., an attorney who headed the Department of Transportation under President Gerald R. Ford. The others are Lawrence S. Eagleburger, former under secretary of state, now president of Kissinger Associates; Vernon E. Jordan Jr., lawyer and former Urban League director; Griffin B. Bell, lawyer and attorney general in the Carter Administration; John Dellenback, president of the Christian College Coalition; Father Timothy Healy, president of Georgetown University; Helene Kaplan, attorney and chairman of the Carnegie Corp. and Barnard College; Franklin Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation; Owen Bieber, UAW president; Roger B. Smith, GM chairman, and the Rev. Leon Sullivan, author of the principles guiding U.S. corporations in South Africa.