U.S. Support for S. Africa

The Draconian repression of anti-apartheid black South Africans, recently imposed by the racist Pretoria regime to suppress all legitimate dissent on the 10th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, is a signal that it is prepared to unleash a blood bath to perpetuate its abominable system of modern-day slavery.

The inaction of the Reagan Administration in the face of this threat is utterly shameful! President Reagan has imposed an embargo on Nicaragua and has resorted to McCarthyite tactics to pressure Congress into authorizing $100 million in aid for the contras, who are waging a war of terror against that country’s elected government. He has justified these stern measures, at least in part, on the ground that the 1984 internationally supervised elections in Nicaragua did not meet his standards of fairness. Yet he refuses to impose meaningful sanctions against a regime that denies black South Africans even the right to vote in the land of their birth.

Bishop Desmond Tutu of Johannesburg, a Nobel Peace laureate, recently warned that “only intervention by the outside world can avoid Armageddon.” What is the Reagan Administration waiting for?

Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the black resistance, declared in 1955: “Fascism has become a living reality in our country, and its defeat has become the principal task of the entire people of South Africa.” These words are as true today as they were then. One might only add that the assistance of this effort has become a moral obligation of freedom-loving people everywhere.

When Hitler’s Nazism victimized millions of innocent Caucasians, the civilized world responded. Now that the victims of the same kind of repression are black, will the Reagan Administration continue to adhere to its failed policy of “constructive engagement” and refuse to impose meaningful sanctions?

WILLIAM BOTHAMLEY

San Diego