Why sanctions would be ‘immoral’

Press, 21 July 1986, Page 20

Why sanctions would be ‘immoral’

The steadfast refusal of the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, to impose economic sanctions on South Africa has been used by some Commonwealth countries as a reason to boycott the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. Mrs Thatcher’s resolution seemed to increase in the face of mounting pressure last week. In this exclusive interview, which will be run in two parts, she explains to HUGO YOUNG, of the “Guardian,” London, why she is convinced that sanctions are immoral and would be ineffective. ■

Margaret Thatcher, it turns out, is not entirely without firsthand experience of South Africa. She went there once, as Secretary of State for Education and Science, to open an observatory.

She does not make too much of this distant episode, but-it has left a vivid impression and remains in the present tense. Could she say I asked her after she had sent Sir Geoffrey Howe, the British Foreign Secretary on his way to South Africa that she had seen apartheid in operation? “You have to be very careful in saying that just because you’ve been to a country, you’ve seen it,” she replied. “But I’ve seen the operation of apartheid in a number of respects. The first thing you see when you get off at Johannesburg airport is that you go into a hotel which is totally non-colour-conscious. You go into a dining room and there’s all colours and backgrounds. So your first impression of South Africa is rather different from what you’ve been led to believe.”

Soon, however, you came across other things, which were different from Britain. Mrs Thatcher had not been to Soweto or any other township. But she had seen both sides of South Africa, including the part where apartheid apparently did not exist.

“I’ve seen it on occasions where there’s no apartheid, and I’ve seen it when there is apartheid. And I don’t like apartheid. It’s wrong. “Let me make that clear, apartheid is wrong. It has to go, and it is going.” The question is how to speed its departure. In spite of the events of recent weeks and months, the Prime Minister is an unswerving believer in the virtues of contact, dialogue, persuasion.

She had made a start, she reminded me, when she had received President Botha at Chequers last year and told him that forced removals of black communities were “totally and utterly and particularly repugnant to us.”

Their meeting and subsequent correspondence had been fruitful. "Those have been stopped now. Things are coming in the right direction. Naturally one wishes them to come faster.”

I suggested that this process might now have come to a halt. “What leverage do we have through mere persuasion, particularly when the main characters in the drama won't even see our Foreign Secretary?” Mrs Thatcher deployed the quiet voice of incredulous affront “I’m sorry, that’s absolute nonsense. President Botha’s seeing the Foreign Secretary. He was always going to see the Foreign Secretary.” “But Sir Geoffrey had wanted to see him this week.”

“You have to try and arrange a date. I run eight, nine, sometime 12 engagements a day. I can’t just fit people in. Let’s look on the positive side, and not try to make every single difficulty in this country, difficulties which don’t exist. Mr Botha will see Sir Geoffrey Howe. Course he will. The question is aranging a date which is mutually convenient.” “But wasn’t it a bit humilitating that the trip was set up so publicly and then Botha said he wouldn’t be available?”

Mrs Thatcher said it might have been better if they could have arranged the whole thing more quietly. But there would certainly be a meeting, and we should meanwhile look on the positive side, which consisted of fulfilling the terms of the last E.E.C. communique outlining the need to get negotiations started between the South African Government and black political leaders. Negotiation, not sanctions — the Rhodesian way. “But Rhodesia survived sanctions only because it had South African support. Surely there is no South Africa to support South Africa?”

“South Africa x has colossal internal resources. A colossal coastline. And whatever sanctions were put on, materials would get in and get out. There’s no way you can blockade the whole South African coastline. No way.” So, I asked, was there no economic pressure which, in the Prime Minister’s view, would have any effect? The banks, she thought, who had pressed for repayment of the South African debt last year, had had some effect. But the main influence came from people inside South Africa who

were fighting apartheid. And who were these? Above all, industry, “and some of the political parties.”

“But the question is whether Governments, your Government, can and should add to that pressure?” ‘You’re talking about economic pressure,” said Mrs Thatcher, “I’m talking about how to bring about negotiations.”

Here she launched ino an attack on past policies. South Africa should never have been isolated by the world. “I think we should have had more contact. We would have influenced her more. She would have been able to see that multiracial societies do work in- other countries. They do, of course, have certain problems. We’ve seen the problems in Kenya and Uganda. But South Africa would have been much more influenced to come our way.” As it was, even the moderates, black and white, would respond badly if they saw the West just hitting out at their country. "So are you saying there is no form of hostile pressure which is appropriate?” “Let me say what I’m saying,” she responded, in a voice which had now long assumed the deliberate and emphatic timbre familiar at Prime Minister’s question time. "There is no case in history that I know of where punitive, general economic sanctions have been effective to bring about internal change. “That is what I believe. That is what the Labour Party in power believed. That is what most of Europe believes. That is what most western industrialised countries believe. If that is what they believe there is no point in trying to follow that route.”

So sanctions, first of all, would ' not achieve the desired effect But that was only the beginning of the case against them. We now approached the central thurst of the Prime Ministerial argument that part of it which elicited her most withering scorn. But there was a moment of calm, before the storm, even a brief, flickering line of self-doubt concerning a point over which “people, if I might say so, seem to me confused — although they might make the same allegations about myself.” The matter in question was the moral case for sanctions. “I must tell you I find nothing moral about people who come to me, worried about unemployment in this couritry, or about people who come to us to say we must do more to help Africa — particularly black Africans. “I find nothing moral about them, sitting in comfortable circumstances, with good salaries, inflation-proof pensions, good jobs, saying that we, as a matter of morality, will put x hundred thousand black people out of work, knowing that this could lead to starvation, poverty and unemployment, and even greater violence.” I tried to intervene. “So the black leaders who ...”

But Mrs Thatcher was thumping the table. “That to me is immoral. I find it repugnant. We had it at the Community meeting. Nice conference centre. Nice hotels. Good jobs. And you really tell me you’ll move people around as if they’re pawns on a checkerboard, and say that’s moral to me it’s immoral.”

“So how do you read the motives of the black leaders in South Africa, Bishop Tutu and

many others, who are actually in favour of economic sanctions?” “I don’t have to read them. I can tell you there are many, many people in South Africa, black South Africans, who hope to goodness that economic sanctions will not be put on.” “How do you know, that?” “Huh. You’ve heard Chief Buthelezi say that. He said it in this room.” “That’s one.” > “But seven million Zulus. He said it on the doorstep of Downing Street I’ve heard it, too, from some of my .. .from some other people, here in this room. Here in this room.” “All right. But Tutu, Mandela, the A.N.C., the U.D.F., also represent a large segment of opinion — which you reject” “I totally reject it Because I find it very difficult to know how they can turnaround and say ‘Put our people into acute difficulty. They’ve got good jobs. They’re looking after their children. But pursue a. policy which can lead to children being hungry.’ I find it very difficult indeed.” So sanctions, far from being moral, were positvely immoral; and, as we have already seen they would be ineffective. A third objection could also be made, and here one suddenly became aware of scores, nay hundreds,, of unseen visitors who have passed through Mrs Thatcher’s drawing room and had some of the elementary facts of life explained to them, particularly the dire occasions for retaliatory action which are afforded by the geography of southern Africa.

“I sometimes get the map out and say look at it. Have you looked at how goods are going to get in and out of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Close Beit Bridge and how are you going to do it? That’s the maize route. When there was drought, that’s the route through which maize went to keep people alive. “I ask them, have you looked at it? Have you looked at the poverty and hunger and starvation — just when we’re after all trying to give things to Africa, to see she doesn’t suffer in this way?”

The voice was shaking now, at this spectacle of a continent which displayed such inexplicable moral inconsistencies.

“I find it astonishing, utterly astonishing, that on the one hand we’re doing everything to help Ethiopia, everything to relieve poverty and starvation, everything to get the right seeds, the . right husbandry. And at the same time we’re suggesting that you turn people who are in work, out of work. And add to the problems you’ve already got.’ when people call that moral. I just gasp.” Tomorrow: “Signs and gestures.”