S. Africa Policy a Failure, Administration Panel Says

The Administration’s blue-ribbon advisory committee on South Africa described President Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy as a failure Tuesday and urged the United States to recruit its major allies to impose their own economic sanctions to pressure the Pretoria government to abandon its policy of racial segregation.

The 12-member panel of businessmen, lawyers and academics--including two former Cabinet officers--also called for closer contacts between the U.S. government and South African black organizations, including the banned African National Congress.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz disagreed sharply with many of the panel’s recommendations, including one urging more widespread sanctions against the white minority government. He appointed the committee a little more than a year ago in an effort to attract a bipartisan consensus behind the Administration’s policies.

Shultz, according to State Department spokesman Charles Redman, agreed completely with what he called the committee’s “basic finding” that the United States should encourage the South African government to open negotiations with representative leaders of the black majority aimed at replacing apartheid with a non-racial democratic system.

But, Redman added, “the Administration continues to maintain its skepticism about the efficacy of broad punitive sanctions in bringing about peaceful change in South Africa. The results of our own sanctions to date do not provide grounds for encouragement on this score.”

Little Administration action on the recommendations is likely.

The panel, headed by Frank T. Cary, chairman of the executive committee of IBM, and William T. Coleman Jr., transportation secretary in the Gerald R. Ford Administration, applauded the economic sanctions that Congress imposed last year by overriding Reagan’s veto. It predicted that the measures “will affect the calculations of the (South African President Pieter W.) Botha government and its supporters.”

But the committee said the message would be more effective if other nations joined in it.

“We recommend that the president begin urgent consultations with our allies (especially Britain, Canada, West Germany, France, Japan and Israel) to enlist their support for a multilateral program of sanctions” similar to those adopted by Congress, the committee said. Several countries have invoked sanctions, but they have been mild.

Strongly Worded Dissent

Three of the panel’s 12 members--John Dellenback, president of the Christian College Coalition and a former Republican congressman; Lawrence S. Eagleburger, former undersecretary of state for the Reagan Administration, and Roger B. Smith, chairman of the General Motors Corp.--said in a strongly worded dissent:

“Intensified sanctions, whether unilateral or multilateral, cannot serve as the cornerstone of a policy aimed at the positive and creative goals so carefully outlined in the basic committee report.”

But two other members, the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, the author of the “Sullivan Principles,” a code of conduct adopted by many U.S. corporations doing business in South Africa, and United Auto Workers President Owen F. Bieber, issued dissenting opinions maintaining that the majority report did not go far enough.

Blunt Assessment

The panel was blunt in its assessment of Washington’s effort to influence South Africa through diplomatic contacts instead of confrontation: “The Administration’s strategy of constructive engagement has failed to achieve its objectives.”

The committee discounted three factors often cited by conservatives as reasons for avoiding an open break with the South African government--U.S. dependence on South African strategic minerals, the strategic importance of the sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope and Communist influence in black opposition groups, including the African National Congress.

The panel conceded that Communists are active in the ANC, but it said the main reason is the South African government’s ban on the organization. The ban, it said, created a favorable environment for the Communist Party, which it described as a “tightly organized, clandestine party with close links to external sources of arms and military training.” The committee predicted that the ANC’s ties with the Communists “would diminish in an open political environment.”

In any case, the committee said, “the longer the delay before blacks obtain their rightful role in the governance of South Africa, the greater will become the appeal of communism to future generations of blacks.”

Reducing Vulnerability

The committee called on the Administration to reduce U.S. vulnerability to disruption of mineral supplies from South Africa by “conservation, mineral substitution, recycling, technological innovation . . . and coordinated stockpiling.”

In the meantime, although the United States depends on South Africa for much of its chromium, manganese and platinum, “the potential impact of such a denial (of mineral supplies) is not sufficient cause to determine U.S. policy toward South Africa,” it said.

The panel agreed that the sea lanes in the vicinity of South Africa are of vital importance to the West, but it concluded that the U.S. Navy is capable of keeping them open without the help of the regime in Pretoria.