When President Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world" most liberals jeered at his "simplistic, Manichaean" views. Liberals know the real focus of evil is South Africa. Randall Robinson recently called it “the most vicious government on earth." Therefore, to touch it is to be tainted. To do business with it is to prop up a satanic regime. Such is the rationale for the all-out economic sanctions bill just passed by the House and being debated in the Senate.
While some supporters of this economic warfare call it a "peaceful alternative," Jesse Jackson has let the cat out of the bag. He wants us to go beyond sanctions and give military assistance to the African National Congress (ANC) and its communist-controlled guerrilla wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, a terrorist group that annually receives $80 million in military supplies from the Soviets.
It is hard to imagine a more simplistic and indeed Manichaean view of a complex policy dilemma: how to deal with a flawed but friendly foreign government. Since we have faced this dilemma before, experience should teach us caution if nothing else. In the case of China, Cuba, Iran, and Nicaragua, we lent our support to forces trying to topple a friendly but flawed regime. And in every case the revolutionaries we helped bring to power were both hostile to the United States and far more oppressive than the rulers they replaced.
But as Walter Kansteiner documents in his well-researched book, South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation (IRD Press, 1988), influential cadres of lobbyists and publicists, both here and abroad, have for some time been openly supporting armed revolution against the South African government. Frank Chikane, secretary general of the South African Council of Churches, puts it badly: " As far as I am concerned, peaceful change is out." The Rev. Alan Boesak agrees.
Sadly, many American church officials have taken up this line. Kansteiner notes that at a 1986 ecumenical service, the only South African speaker was Alfred Nzo, a man who has openly supported "necklacing," the hideous practice of murdering nonrevolutionary blacks by burning them to death with gasoline-soaked tires. Nzo, a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the general secretary of the ANC, received a glowing introduction by Damy Smith, head of the Washington Office on Africa--an outfit funded by the National Council of Churches.
The failure of sanctions to spur reforms or help blacks does not seem to trouble many of those who promote them. Perhaps that's not what they had in mind. They see sanctions as a way to increase black discontent, spark greater state repression, and hasten the day of the final bloody uprising. Theirs is a "crusade mentality," Kansteiner says, and "it is clear that at least some religious leaders actually favor the total destruction of the South African economy, followed by an ANC revolutionary victory," An American United Methodist minister, the Rev. Joseph Agne, concurs: "The purpose of sanctions is to shorten the period of armed struggle."
Criteria For 'just war'
Kansteiner tests the morality of this position against the classic criteria for the "just war" and finds it wanting. According to well-established Christian tradition, war
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