Will Thatcher Melt on S. Africa? : She May Soon Have No Choice but to Back Sanctions and Weep

I once saw Margaret Thatcher weep. It was in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1979, during the Commonwealth heads of government conference that, after a fashion, settled the Rhodesian question and led to the creation of the independent state of Zimbabwe.

At the time, Thatcher had been Great Britain’s prime minister for only a few months. She had assumed office committed to protecting the interests of Rhodesia’s white-settler community. At Lusaka she was pressured to go back on that commitment and, finally and reluctantly, she did so.

I was at the conference as an adviser and speechwriter for Malcolm Fraser, then prime minister of Australia. Lord Carrington, the British foreign secretary at the time, has been given most of the credit for the Lusaka settlement, and particularly for bringing Thatcher around. But Fraser and his foreign minister, Andrew Peacock, played a major if less heralded part in deciding the outcome (most of the subsequent heralding having been done by British commentators).

As it happens, it was at an Australian party at the end of the conference that Thatcher broke down--the last straw being her discovery that the agreement had been leaked prematurely to the press, thus preventing her from breaking the delicate news of her capitulation in her own terms.

This episode comes to mind at this time not merely as a piece of interesting history but also because the question of whether Thatcher will or will not change her mind concerning another Southern African issue has become critical. And while Lord Carrington has departed the scene to look after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Malcolm Fraser, as a co-chairman of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, is once again an important actor in the developing drama. That group was initially organized to achieve a negotiation among the black, Colored and white communities in South Africa, but, having decided that the South African government is completely intransigent, it has become a leading advocate of a tough line in dealing with Pretoria. Fraser, a man of powerful wills who is implacably opposed to apartheid, has been the dominant figure in the group.

The question that is currently at issue is, of course, whether or not to apply sanctions to South Africa. Thatcher and Fraser both have consistent, though sharply conflicting, general views concerning sanctions.

(Their consistency stands in commendable contrast to the opportunism of many others who are engaged in the debate--those whose views on the efficacy of sanctions in this case differ sharply from their earlier views on the same subject when the countries in question were communist.)

Thatcher was skeptical about the application of sanctions against the Soviet Union and Poland a few years ago, and she is skeptical about them now. As prime minister of Australia, Fraser supported sanctions at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and he supports them now against South Africa.

Another critical difference between Thatcher and Fraser turns on their evaluation of the Afrikaner leaders. Thatcher believes that as a proud and stubborn people the Afrikaners cannot be bullied, that attempts to do so will be counterproductive and that persuasion is the only possible way to make progress. Fraser insists that the Afrikaners have reached the stage at which they are immune to reason and argument and will respond only to coercive pressure.

Moreover--and perhaps as a result of his ministerial experience in successive Australian governments during the Vietnam War--he is no believer in incremental pressure, the slow turning of the screw. He believes that a sudden and severe shock must be administered, one that will alter radically the mode of thinking of South Africa’s leaders.

As between the views of these two strong-minded people, which will prevail? And--a different question--which is right?

I believe that, as at Lusaka, Thatcher will finally be forced to yield again, substantially if not entirely. This despite Britain’s enormous economic investment in South Africa, the hostility to her stand at home, the importance of the black vote in the politics of the United States, the European disinclination to resist Third World pressure and the prospect that the Commonwealth--the only remaining instrumentality that gives Britain any claim to be more than a regional power--will disintegrate if she maintains her position. All these factors suggest that she may find cause to weep again.

As to the second question--which view is right?--that is much harder, and we are unlikely to know the answer until after the event.

Perhaps it will turn out that neither is right. In that all the actors on the South African stage are prisoners of their history, doomed to play out roles that leave them little choice or scope for improvisation, it is a truly tragic situation. And tragedies do not unfold according to the rules of enlightened self-interest that usually pass for political logic among people who lack the imagination of disaster.