Africa: A Vote on Apartheid

Since its installation in the funereal Peace Palace donated by Andrew Carnegie shortly before World War I, the World Court in The Hague has been a graveyard of political illusions. Lacking an effective executive to enforce its decisions, hamstrung by conflicting bilateral treaties, and limited to advisory opinions on issues of worldwide import, the Court of International Justice is like a traffic cop without a whistle.

Yet nations with grievances still flock to it in hopes of getting moral backing for their causes.* In 1960, Liberia and Ethiopia asked the court for a judgment on South Africa's repressive racial apartheid. Last week, after six years of painful deliberation, 6,000 pages of evidence and a legal cost to all sides of almost $18 million, the court decided not to take up apartheid at all, dismissed the case on a technicality.

No Legal Right. The case centered on a mandate conferred on South Africa by the League of Nations in 1920. South Africa was to oversee the neighboring former German territory of South West Africa, subject to the approval of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. As "interested parties" representing the 36 in dependent states of black Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia claimed that South Africa had violated its mandate by imposing racial separation on the territory's 400,000 nonwhites. A victory for Liberia and Ethiopia would have paved the way for an appeal to the United Nations and possibly sanctions against South Africa. Instead, the court ruled by an 8-7 vote last week that the two countries had no "legal right or interest" in their claim and therefore were not eligible for a judgment. Two members of the court, Nigeria and South Africa, were appointed for the case. Their votes were predictable. But the permanent judges voted without political pattern. In favor of dismissing the case were Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Greece and Australia (whose representative, as the court's president, voted twice to break a 7-7 tie). Against: the U.S., the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, Mexico, Senegal and Japan.

The verdict was a landmark decision for the whites in southern Africa. South Africa can continue to go its apartheid way in South West Africa. Rhodesia's Ian Smith can take new heart in his independence fight against Britain. And the Portuguese can rest easier about their white-minority rule in Mozambique and Angola.

For black Africans, the effect was traumatic. At the U.N., Ghana Ambassador F. S. Arkhurst, chairman (for July) of the bloc that speaks for much of black Africa, named a subcommittee to explore the group's next action. "It is evident that no reasonable accommodation is possible," Arkhurst warned. "Violence cannot be ruled out." In Kenya, President Jomo Kenyatta's party called for "militant and violent" revolution in South West Africa. In Tanzania, Political Exile Peter Nanyemba, the bearded, fiery-eyed chief of the South West Africa People's Organization, told newsmen that his country had no alternative "but to rise in arms and bring about our liberation."