Reactions mixed

Press, 11 September 1985, Page 10

Reactions mixed

NZPA-AP New York Mr Reagan’s order imposing sanctions against South Africa has drawn mixed reactions. The Soviets called it cosmetic and the British Government said that it still opposed such measures. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said that Mr Reagan “announced the introduction of so-called ‘economic sanctions’ against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The proclaimed measures are purely of a cosmetic nature and can be simply ignored by Pretoria.” A spokesman for the British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, said, “there’s no doubting our revulsion at the policy of apartheid,” but “we judge sanctions as likely to be counter-productive.” There would be no change

in Britain’s opposition to sanctions, he said. Mrs Thatcher’s political opponents said Mr Reagan’s action had isolated her Government.

Denis Healey, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, said, “it’s a staggering reversal of the position Reagan’s taken until now. I think Mrs Thatcher really must recognise that she’s on the wrong course.” The leader of Britain’s Centrist Social Democratic Party, Dr David Owen, told his party’s annual conference in Torquay, “Mrs Thatcher, by clinging like a limpet to President Reagan, by behaving as if we are the fifty-first state, has led us to one of the most humiliating foreign policy rebuffs” since World War 11. “Mrs Thatcher is a pup-

pet whose strings have been ruthlessly cut even by President Reagan,” he said. The Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sir Shridath Ramphal, issued a statement in London saying that the American sanctions “are a small step, but in taking them the U.S. Administration will help the world to make a major leap forward toward justice and human dignity in southern Africa.” South Africa was expelled from the Commonwealth in 1961 because of its refusal to grant equal rights to its black majority. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr Joe Clark, said that he approved of the sanctions and that they were “by and large” the same as those Canada had imposed in July.