Anti-Apartheid Movement Targets S. Africa’s Remaining Ties to West

The international anti-apartheid movement on Friday launched a new campaign aimed at cutting South Africa’s remaining political, economic, cultural and other links with the West.

Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, the main group fighting minority white rule in South Africa, described the campaign as “a concerted offensive” that will “attack apartheid from all corners of the globe.”

Tambo, closing an ANC conference attended by 500 delegates from 60 countries, said that an intensified campaign to isolate South Africa internationally was an important element in the ANC’s overall strategy to bring down the government of President Pieter W. Botha and end apartheid, the system of racial separation and minority rule.

By escalating both its political struggle inside South Africa and its armed insurgency, the ANC believes that there will be “further shifts in the balance of strength,” Tambo said, and “our people will reach the point where they overpower the regime.”

The campaign will push for adoption by the U.N. Security Council of comprehensive and mandatory economic sanctions against South Africa and for exclusion of the government from international bodies.

Anti-apartheid groups, recognizing the likely opposition to such measures by the United States and Britain, plan to seek a wide range of interim steps, including increased boycotts of South African goods, tighter curbs on sales of equipment with military uses, tougher measures to implement the far-from-comprehensive oil embargo and more pressure on foreign companies to pull out of the country.

And, where government opposition to sanctions remains strong, the conference called for grass-roots campaigns of “people’s sanctions,” including consumer boycott demonstrations and other protests, targeted on companies operating in South Africa, on tourism to the country, on entertainers and sportsmen who continue to visit there and on transport and communications linked with it.

The conference also called for “a massive campaign” to be organized in the United States, against the Reagan Administration’s entire policy in southern Africa, particularly its support for the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), a rightist group led by Jonas Savimbi, that is fighting the Marxist government in Luanda with extensive South African support.

The “action program,” drawn up by the conference to give direction to what had often been diverse and uncoordinated efforts, provides for concerted campaigns, on a global scale where possible, by churches, labor unions, local governments, professional organizations of lawyers, physicians and academics and women’s and youth groups.

ANC officials describe the program as the first comprehensive campaign drafted by anti-apartheid groups on so broad an international scale.

“Inevitably, many piecemeal measures will have to be adopted,” Johnstone Makatini, the ANC’s international affairs director, commented, “but for the first time they will be part of a planned, coordinated campaign. This means that what happens in Australia will be reinforced by actions in Canada, Germany, Mexico and Argentina, that this will put pressure on Britain and the United States and that any action in those two countries moves us to a new level.”

Once sanctions are imposed, the program calls for anti-apartheid groups to monitor their implementation closely to prevent South Africa’s skilled “sanctions busters” from finding ways around them.

The program also calls for increased international support--political, financial, and educational--for the ANC, and it proposes implicitly that the international anti-apartheid movement coordinate its activities through the ANC.

Salim Ahmed Salim, Tanzania’s deputy prime minister, who was chairman of the meeting, described the 75-year-old ANC as “the vanguard of the liberation struggle” in South Africa and urged anti-apartheid groups to campaign for its recognition internationally as the “authentic representative” of that country’s people.