Falling Short

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British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who is undergoing travails at home over South Africa similar to those faced by Reagan, was gratified that her American friend stood with her. Her long-standing refusal to consider sanctions, which she has termed "utterly repugnant," has infuriated her parliamentary opponents, divided the Commonwealth and distressed moderates within her Tory ranks. Last week her Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, embarked on a mission to South Africa in an attempt to find some thin reed on which to base hopes for future negotiations.

He failed. Indeed, he was humiliated. Howe, who was representing the nations of the European Community, sought to meet with both government and black opposition leaders. The rather retiring diplomat was greeted frostily by the former and shunned by the latter. In his round of talks with President P.W. Botha, Howe was bluntly informed that South Africans, not uitlanders (a derogatory term for outsiders), would deal with the country's problems. South African officials lectured Howe on the extent of suffering that sanctions could inflict on surrounding black states.

The black opposition leaders treated Howe as if he were a despised enemy. Nelson Mandela refused to see him, as did Mandela's wife Winnie. She dismissed the Foreign Minister as "that clown." Bishop Tutu rejected a meeting with Howe as "a waste of time." The United Democratic Front, the major umbrella organization for antiapartheid groups, declared Howe persona non grata and forbade any representative of the U.D.F. to see him.

Howe's rebuffs did not end when he left South Africa. Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda agreed to meet with him in Lusaka, and then delivered a public dressing down. Kaunda, regarded as a moderate African leader, accused Britain and the U.S. of being in a "kind of conspiracy" to preserve apartheid, and admonished the British emissary, "Sir Geoffrey, you people will not be forgiven by history, because South Africa is about to explode. And that you should encourage it to me is incomprehensible."

Howe will report back to other European Community Foreign Ministers sometime in the next few months. They will then consider the question of a joint policy on sanctions; a decision is expected by the end of September. The possibility of unified action with the allies would allow Reagan, and perhaps Thatcher, to modify past opposition to sanctions.

One document the European nations will rely on is the report of the Eminent ( Persons Group, a committee that does in fact consist of prominent Commonwealth figures. Some of the group's members recommend sanctions as the only way to promote change in South Africa, a course that was rejected last month by Thatcher. The co-chairman of the group, Malcolm Fraser, a former Prime Minister of Australia, attacked Reagan in a Washington Post article last week. "If the United States and the United Kingdom persist in policies that have patently failed over the past five or six years, the black South Africans will take irreversible decisions to fight for political participation and freedom," he wrote. "The emerging government would be pro-Soviet and anti- West."