Carter your match, Young tells S.A.

Press, 24 May 1977, Page 8

Carter your match, Young tells S.A.

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg The United States Ambassador to the United Nations (Mr Andrew Young) has compared United StatesSouth African relations to those of a parent with a polio-stricken child who begs the father to take off the painful braces. But the father said that he really had to keep the braces on because the child would walk only if he was tough enough to apply the pressure, the black Ambassador said. The United States did not have any plan of pressure in mind, “But I do think there are pressures that are impacting on this society and I think they ought to be part of the he'aling process,” Mr Young said.

The black U.N. Ambassador expounded and argued these and other views on South Africa, race relations, and economics with groups of students, professors, editors and publishers — most of them liberal whites —- invited for breakfast and lunch at the palatial estate of Mr Young’s host, the multi-millionaire, Mr Harry Oppenheimer. NZ P A-Reuter reported that Mr Young also said in his luncheon address that South Africa could well be ahead of Britain on race issues within 15 years. He said this in urging the students to lead the drive to abolish South Africa’s policy of racial separation as American students had helped end the Vietnam conflict by their opposition. Mr Young also told both the university gathering and the earlier breakfast session that the South African Government might be able to "out-tough some of these British liberals,” but that in President Carter it had met its match.

Mr Young’s remarks about Britain’s involvement in South Africa, where British industry has an estimated SSOOOM, in investments, were his first during his two-day visit. But he is known to have repeated privately the view about the British being “a little chicken on race,” which he expressed in a recent British Broadcasting Corporation interview, and for which, along with more critical remarks about what he termed British racism, he later apologised. Mr Young also said that the United States and South Africa were the only places in the world where race was constantly discussed. “The very fact that we are talking about it, and accepting it as a problem that we can’t escape, means that we are more likely to come up with relevant solutions than, say, the Russians, who are racist and don’t admit it,” he said.

Mr Young is expected in London on Thursday for meetings with the British Foreign Secretary (Dr David Owen), who is leading a new initiative aimed at resolving the Rhodesia problem with American support. Mr Young, whose theme throughout his visit was that South Africa risked economic ruin if it did not bring its non-white citizens into the mainstream, and that Western business was increasingly reluctant to invest in South Africa, said he was not advocating any confrontation by the United States. The United States was not going to give up on South Africa, although it had nothing to win for itself and not much to lose since there was no major American business that depended on South African investments, Mr Young said.