Waiting in the Wings: Economic Apartheid : South Africa: Eliminating law-based racism isn’t enough. Sanctions must hold until whites end their monopoly on industry.

Cape Town, South Africa, bears more than a passing resemblance to Southern California. Towering mountains, ocean waves, sunshine and eclectic architecture are just a few of the commonalities.

If the white-minority regime in Pretoria prevails, the resemblances between South Africa and America will be carried a step further. For just as America moved from de jure to de facto segregation after Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, South Africa now seems to be moving from de jure to de facto apartheid: Race-based laws will be removed from the books but horrendous inequalities will remain. This presents a formidable challenge to the Bush Administration, which is moving to lift sanctions and to the anti-apartheid movement in this country, which is resisting such a move. The question is: Were sanctions aimed simply at removing certain racist laws, or were they designed to have a wider, transforming impact on South Africa?

These were some of the concerns raised during debate by a 30-member delegation of American lawyers and legal scholars invited by the National Assn. of Democratic Lawyers in South Africa and the African National Congress to consult in Cape Town on a post-apartheid constitutional order.

We were invited to South Africa because of our unique perspective and experience in grappling with de facto segregation. Certainly, the analogy between American segregation and South Africa apartheid is strained. Martin Luther King Jr. was the apostle of nonviolence; Nelson Mandela, while jailed for 27 years, stoutly refused to repudiate armed struggle. Yet the post-apartheid constitutional order envisioned by President Frederik W. de Klerk bears more than a coincidental similarity to the kind of legal obstacles that have ensnared the civil-rights movement in this nation.

Take the recent white paper on land reform. It would abolish the Land Acts and the Group Areas Act and eliminate all racial restrictions on land tenure. Such measures--combined with fraud, force and intimidation--have given the white minority control over about 87% of the land and dispossessed the black majority.

Just as King complained bitterly about African-Americans gaining the right to eat at a lunch counter but not necessarily having the money to buy a hamburger, the De Klerk plan does not envision assistance to an overwhelmingly penniless black majority in regaining control of what once was theirs. Indeed, the land proposal sets the tone for most of De Klerk’s “reforms” (that is, “let bygones be bygones”) and does not really address the ravages of 40 years of apartheid and 350 years of racism.

The De Klerk regime does not envision “affirmative action” to redress discrimination. This is even more ironic in light of the fact that after World War I, his “tribe,” the Afrikaners, enacted one of the most successful affirmative-action plans in history in an attempt to catch up with white South Africans of British descent.

This involved the building up of one of the most formidable state sectors in the world--including broadcasting, an arms industry and an iron and steel industry--and placing Afrikaners in key areas of government and the economy.

But now Pretoria is engaging in born-again Reaganomics and busily privatizing the state sector, which could mean that a black-majority government will not have the resources to address the needs of a long-suffering population.

This is designed to lead to a post-apartheid scenario in which economic power is concentrated in the hands of a few whites and political power is fragmented to the point that a strong central government would be unable to redistribute the wealth through confiscatory taxes and other means, as promised by the ANC.

Moreover, it seems that the post-apartheid legal order will involve some of the same sticky legal questions and prolonged battles that have consumed American courts for the past 35 years. For example, with the demise of the Separate Amenities Act, which facilitated apartheid in public accommodations, many towns in South Africa are now charging fees to use libraries and swimming pools, among other things. Again, the poverty-stricken black majority still does not have the means to use these facilities. In effect, de jure apartheid has been replaced by de facto apartheid, exclusion on the basis of race has been replaced by exclusion on the basis of economics.

There are those in Pretoria who would like to imitate the United States. The lifting of sanctions by the European Community on Tuesday (and the rush to do so by International Olympic Committee and, presumably, the White House) suggests that Pretoria’s plan may work. But Pretoria has to contend with a population that has been thoroughly radicalized by the degradation of apartheid and a leadership loath to accept half a loaf. This may ultimately derail the plan to install de facto apartheid.