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Going Beyond Sanctions
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12510 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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7 / 1987 |
2,961 Words |
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Robert I. Rotberg
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The results of South Africa's recent election place ruling whites on an unswerving collision course with the country's vast black majority. An unexpected but clear swing to the far right indefinitely postpones the prospect of a negotiated settlement to the increasingly bitter and bloody conflict that has convulsed South Africa since 1984. Just as white South African voters may have responded to fears of black African political and social gains, so the young black Africans who lead protests in the segregated townships and their exiled allies of the African National Congress (ANC) will react to the election by stepping up their attacks on those who now control South Africa.
The elections have brought little reassurance to South Africa's majority or to liberal whites, and their outcome has compelled Western governments to reexamine their approaches to change in South Africa. Are the limited sanctions now invoked sufficient? Should broader approaches be considered? Or will continued disinvestments suffice?
Slightly more than two million of South Africa's three million registered white voters cast ballots on May 6 and chose representatives in the House of Assembly, one of parliament's three houses. Coloreds (persons of mixed descent) vote separately for representatives in a second chamber; Asians send delegates to a third house. But the chambers are unequal in power; the white assembly dominates the others. Black Africans have no vote and no fourth house. Yet there are 25 million black Africans, 2.6 million Coloreds, 0.8 million Asians, and only 4.7 million whites in South Africa.
Since 1953 the National Party, controlled by Afrikaners, has governed South Africa with large parliamentary majorities. In the country's recent election, however, its percentage of the vote dropped from 57 to 52 percent at the same time that it was increasing the number of its seats from 117 to 123 in an 166-seat assembly. (Another 12 seats are nominated by political parties, 10 by the Nationalists.)
The major gains were made on the far right. The Conservative Party (CP), composed of dissidents who broke away from the National Party earlier in the 1980s, gained five seats - from 17 to 22 - and doubled its proportion of the popular vote from 13 to 26 percent. In a further 10 constituencies in which the CP failed to win, it nevertheless polled impressively. A member of the National Party cabinet and two deputy ministers were defeated by CP candidates. Challenged by the CP, even the leader of the NP in the Transvaal barely retained his own seat.
The new opposition
The Conservatives have become the official opposition in the white parliament, giving them endless opportunities to harass an already right-wing government from arch-segregationist positions. An even more extreme right-wing political party, the Herstigte (Reconstructed) National Party, lost its sole seat in parliament. But that loss hardly undermines the clear evidence that the rulers of South Africa will turn away from even mild reform and attempt to counter the upsurge of voter sentiment on the farthest right by becoming even more reactionary themselves. After all, the National Party came to power in 1948 after splitting away in the 1930s from an Afrikaner-run party that had become too "English," too "soft" on Africans, and generally too "international" in its approach to
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