Resisting S. African Pressures Costs 9 Nearby States Billions, U.N. Study Says - Africa: A U.N. report urges world support for a campaign to bring down the white-minority government.

Resisting South African military and economic aggression has cost nine neighbor states more than 1.5 million lives and $60 billion since 1980, a U.N. study released Friday found.

The study said continued resistance will demand additional sacrifice and expense, and it urged world support for a campaign to bring down the white-minority led government of South Africa.

So far, it said, the burden of the struggle has fallen largely on the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. Both have been caught up in civil wars in which South Africa has supported rebel movements and sometimes intervened directly.

Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean, has had the greatest loss of life--900,000--in a civil war that the study blames largely on the South African government’s support for the Mozambique National Resistance movement, known as Renamo.

The report, published by the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, charges that South Africa, using Renamo as its “chief instrument,” has tried since 1981 to destroy Mozambique’s economic and social structure. Including lost exports, the study said, the war cost Mozambique nearly $3 billion in 1988 and $15 billion in the previous eight years.

For Angola, on the Atlantic coast, economic losses were estimated at $30 billion for 1980 to 1988. The report says the higher figure is due to Angola’s higher stage of development and its oil and other natural resources.

The human loss in Angola was put at 500,000, much of it related to combat involving South African forces.

“The $60-billion loss to the front-line states (South Africa’s six black-ruled neighbor nations--the others being Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe) has been determined through a careful computation of Angola’s and Mozambique’s estimated rates of growth of gross domestic product over war and non-war years and through calculating also the impact on the GDP of the other states which are targets of direct and indirect South African military action,” the report said.

It said South Africa has employed a “total strategy” in its effort to become a regional superpower. It traced the origin of the strategy to a 1977 defense white paper calling for coordinated economic, military, diplomatic and political policies aimed at keeping the front-line states dependent and submissive.

The task force that carried out the study said this strategy aimed at the destruction of rail lines in Angola and Mozambique, lines that also serve the landlocked states of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana, thus forcing them to use South African routes. Control of transport has enabled Pretoria to dominate regional trade, the report said, increasing South Africa’s power over its neighbors.

It accused South Africa of “rural terrorism” and said that half the population of Mozambique and Angola have been driven from their homes. In addition, it said, 1.5 million people have taken refuge in adjoining countries that can ill afford to accommodate them. An additional 6 million have been displaced internally, many of them in urban slums.

The loss of life in other front-line states, the report said, ranged from 50,000 in Zambia to 50 in Botswana, mostly incurred by raids against South African black nationalist forces.

Economic losses were more substantial, it said, topped by Zimbabwe’s $8 billion, nearly half the total for the front-line states other than Mozambique and Angola.

To redress the human and economic toll, the task force called for a tripling of aid and an all-out drive against apartheid. For 1989, the study estimated that $1 billion should have been provided for survival and refugee aid and $1.5 billion for rebuilding damaged economies, along with $500 million in military aid--a total of $3.47 billion, including smaller programs. But only $1 billion was made available, it said.