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By Root 2899 0

Mulroney and Hawke. I found no support. Their proposals went well beyond what had been proposed the previous year. At Nassau they had wanted to cut off air links with South Africa, to introduce a ban on investment, agricultural imports, the promotion of tourism and other measures. Now they were demanding not only that these sanctions go ahead, but a whole raft of additional measures: a ban on new bank loans, imports of uranium, coal, iron and steel and the withdrawal of consular facilities. Such a package sacrificed the living standards of South Africa’s black population to the posturing of South Africa’s critics and the interests of their domestic industries. I was simply not prepared to endorse it. Instead, I had a separate paragraph inserted into the communiqué detailing our own approach which noted our willingness to go along with a ban on South African coal, iron and steel imports, if the European Community decided on it, and to introduce straight away voluntary bans on new investment and the promotion of tourism in South Africa. In the event we in the Community decided against the sanctions on coal, to which the Germans were particularly strongly opposed, though the other sanctions proposed at the Hague were introduced in September 1986.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of these discussions was that they seemed to be carried on without regard to what was happening in South Africa itself. P. W. Botha’s Government was unimaginative and inflexible and the nationwide state of emergency had been imposed. But, as I was informed by our excellent new ambassador, Robin Renwick, and by others who had dealings with the real rather than the bogus South Africa, fundamental changes were taking place. Black trade unions had been legalized, the Mixed Marriages Act had been repealed, influx controls had been abolished and the general policy (though not without exceptions) of forced removals of blacks had ended. So had job reservation for whites and the very unpopular pass laws. Still more important, there was a practical breakdown of apartheid at the work place, in hotels, in offices and in city centres. The repeal of the Separate Amenities Act had been proposed and seemed likely to be implemented. In all these ways ‘apartheid’, as the Left continued to describe it, was if not dead at least rapidly dying. Yet South Africa received no credit for this, only unthinking hostility.

I was less prepared than ever to go along with measures which would weaken the South African economy and thus slow down reform. So as the 1987 CHOGM at Vancouver approached I was still in no mood for compromise. In some respects the position was easier for me than it had been at Nassau and in London. Events in Fiji and in Sri Lanka were likely to occupy a good deal of attention at the conference. My line on sanctions was well known and the domestic pressure on me had decreased: I had made headway in winning the sanctions argument at home during the London conference. But it would not all be plain sailing. It seemed to me that the Canadians, our hosts, wanted to be more African than the Africans — particularly since countries like Zimbabwe knew that they could not possibly afford to implement full-scale sanctions themselves and hoped that we would do it for them. Brian Mulroney was keen to gain agreement for setting up a committee of Commonwealth Foreign ministers to monitor events in South Africa, which seemed to me not just a waste of time but counterproductive — as I told Mr Mulroney at a meeting with him on the eve of the conference. I said that its only purpose would be to satisfy the ego of the Commonwealth heads of government and I would criticize it publicly and strongly.

I also had a talk with President Kaunda who was under some pressure to set his own country’s economic affairs in order to meet the requirements of the IMF. Our views were no more similar on South Africa than they had been. At one point I said that I regretted that I had not yet been able to visit Africa, apart from my attendance at the Lusaka CHOGM in 1979. Mr Kaunda said that