Hero’s Welcome for a Man U.S. Betrayed: Mandela Comes to America

Foreign policy is full of ironies, but few are as sharp as one that will be played out this week when a black leader from South Africa begins a triumphant 12-day tour of the United States.

Twenty-eight years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency fingered Nelson Mandela for the South African government, which sent him to prison. On Wednesday, the same man--only four months after being released--will be given a hero’s welcome with a ticker-tape parade in New York.

Once convinced that Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) was a subversive threat to Western interests, the U.S. government will now try to show him what good friends we can be. And unlike most other international visitors--particularly those from Africa--he starts off as a celebrity of the first rank. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to turn out to see him; millions more will follow his movements in the media.

But those ready to hear unstinting, East European-style praise for the United States and its political and economic system may be surprised.

Mandela and the ANC have a few bones to pick with the United States.

For a start, Mandela might be justified in wondering where we Americans were when he really needed us--during the decades when the white-minority government of South Africa kept him in harsh prison conditions and made him do backbreaking work that it hoped would also break his will.

Rare was the expression of official U.S. concern for Mandela’s well-being, or the request of U.S. diplomats in South Africa to visit him in prison.

Indeed, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last Sunday, it was apparently a tip from a paid CIA informant that led to Mandela’s 1962 arrest--during the Kennedy Administration--and his subsequent prosecution on sabotage and conspiracy charges.

Then, as now, the U.S. government was consumed with the issue of communist influence within the ANC. Through an undercover agent it had placed in the Durban branch of the organization, the CIA was able to trace the movements of Mandela, a fugitive because of his anti-apartheid activities. It must have seemed logical at the time to help the friendly anti-communist government in Pretoria find its most-wanted man--especially since the United States and South Africa had just signed a military cooperation agreement.

Ever since, the zigzags in U.S. policy toward South Africa have been hard to follow, if not downright hostile to black aspirations there.

During the Nixon Administration, for example, a decision was made to soften the pressure on the South African government and other white-minority regimes in the region. Nixon’s ambassador to Pretoria, a Texas oilman and rancher named John Hurd, actually went bird shooting on Robben Island in Cape Town Bay, where Mandela and other political prisoners were held. Black inmates had to retrieve birds Hurd shot.

U.S. assistance to the anti-communist guerrillas in Angola led by Jonas Savimbi originally began in the Ford Administration, as part of a quiet alliance with the South African government.

President Jimmy Carter temporarily turned U.S. policy around. Vice President Walter F. Mondale warned then-South African Prime Minister John Vorster, in 1977, that friendly relations depended on progress toward a fairer political system open to all. Carter was forthright in condemning the mistreatment and even murder of such black leaders as Steven Biko by the South African police.

Under the Reagan Administration, however, the U.S. policy of “constructive engagement” brought an era of closer contacts with, and the loosening of U.S. restrictions on, the South African government. Mostly well-intentioned but naive, that policy gave the white minority the impression that it could buy more time, especially on the international front. In the process, “constructive engagement” may well have delayed the release of Mandela and others and put off the day of reckoning in South Africa.

It was Congress--reacting to TV pictures of violence in South Africa and demonstrations in the United States--that instigated another change in U.S. policy during the 1980s, forcing a reluctant Ronald Reagan to apply economic sanctions against the white minority government. In fact, Reagan had declared apartheid dead in the summer of 1985.

Whether to keep those sanctions in place is now being hotly debated in the State Department and on Capitol Hill, and Mandela can be expected to step into the middle of that dispute.

Many policy-makers are greatly impressed by reforms of the new South African president, Frederik W. de Klerk --including the lifting of a state of emergency in most parts of the country a week ago--and want to give him a tangible reward.

But Mandela will probably argue, during an address to a joint session of Congress, that much remains to be done, and continuing pressure from the international community is needed to force meaningful concessions from the white power structure in coming negotiations over a new constitution for South Africa.

Undoubtedly, Mandela will face many questions here about the ANC’s ideological bent, which some South Africans fear would push their country down an anachronistic road to Marxism.

It is true that the Communist Party of South Africa, recently legalized by De Klerk, may be the only one in the world that is actually growing. It is also true that its membership overlaps significantly with the ANC, and some of its policies reflect more the influence of Leonid I. Brezhnev--if not Josef Stalin--than Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But Mandela can be expected to make the point that the party has drawn much of its strength from being forced underground with the ANC, and that the Soviet Union and other communist governments were steadfast and outspoken in their support of black majority rule over the years--even as the United States and other Western nations were waffling. Indeed, however much their sincerity might be questioned, the Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with South Africa in the 1950s.

In any event, on close examination Mandela could turn out to be a closet capitalist himself, a pragmatist more concerned with how to build a functioning mixed economy in South Africa than with upholding old ANC dogma.

There may be a similar uproar over the ANC’s relationship to Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. It has greatly upset leaders of some American Jewish organizations to see Mandela embracing PLO leader Yasser Arafat on several occasions.

Although Mandela has now apparently satisfied critics that he and the ANC support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders, he may find it necessary to recall that while the PLO was endorsing black majority rule in South Africa, Israel was engaging in a covert arms trade with the white regime and possibly helping it develop a nuclear weapon.

The big challenge for Mandela, though, is to persuade Americans to listen to some of his ideas for South Africa’s future, rather than simply seeing that complex and troubled country as one more place to export our system of government.

There will be plenty of irony in Mandela’s ticker-tape parade. But will there be the patience to recognize that a fair solution in South Africa is still years, not months, away?