South Africa: Opprobrium from All Sides

For a moment it seemed that the South African government had made a significant concession to world opinion. State President P.W. Botha had partly lifted the state of emergency that for the past three months has suspended civil liberties in some of the areas hit by protest. But it turned out that Botha's order affected only six districts, all relatively rural and quiet, of the 36 areas given emergency status. Then Botha took away with one hand what he had given with the other: he extended the emergency measures to eight more districts, including, for the first time, riot-racked Cape Town.

Rock-throwing black and mixed-race protesters fought pitched battles with police in the southern city all week. The authorities responded with two new weapons. One is a water cannon that spews purple dye onto demonstrators so they can be identified later and arrested. The press immediately dubbed the substance purple rain. The second is more lethal: a rapid-fire gun mounted atop an armored personnel carrier that shoots potentially deadly rubber bullets.

The Cape Town disturbances culminated in a chaotic riot in the heart of the city's white sector. Bewildered lunchtime shoppers there dived for cover as police launched an assault on a group of blacks outside a courthouse in which three men were on trial for murdering a police officer. Hundreds of bystanders of several races were caught up in the fray as security officers used truncheons and whips in their efforts to clear the streets. In predawn raids the following day, police arrested more than 60 activists, including leaders of the multiracial United Democratic Front, 16 of whose members are now on trial in Pietermaritzburg for treason.

There was thus little reason for the critics of apartheid, South Africa's system of racial separation, to moderate their tones as they continued last week to shower opprobrium on the Botha regime. At the United Nations' 40th anniversary celebration, high officials from at least a dozen nations stood to denounce the Pretoria government and demand measures against it. "If you don't apply sanctions," President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia warned the leaders of developed nations with investments in South Africa, "hundreds of thousands of people will die and the investments will go up in flames."

Meeting in the Bahamas, 46 countries that are members of the British Commonwealth did impose sanctions, though British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made sure they were much milder than originally proposed. The Commonwealth's declaration threatened stronger action--for example, the prohibition of new investment--by individual countries if Pretoria did not begin moving toward the abolition of apartheid within six months. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada threatened to sever all his country's diplomatic and economic ties with South Africa if the dismantling of apartheid did not begin soon. Mulroney told the U.N., "This institutionalized contempt for justice and dignity desecrates international standards of morality and arouses universal revulsion."