Sanctions against South Africa: Some Issues and Implications

Two diametrically opposite views hare been advanced on the subject of sanctions against South Africa. One supports sanctions on the ground that, 1. sanctions will facilitate the end of apartheid and 2. timely imposition of sanctions can avoid an all-out racial blood-bath in Southern Africa. India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has been the foremost advocate of this argument. In his address at the Harare Summit of the Non-aligned Movement, 2–6 September 1986, he reiterated that‘sanctions could yet bring a relatively peaceful transition to racial equality and majority rule. Else, unprecedented violence would mow down a multitude of the finest flowers of South Africa.‘ 1 Opposing this view others argue that, 1. sanctions are immoral; 2. they will hurt South Africa's blacks more than the whites and 3. that at any rate sanctions are impracticable. The champ ionof this “no-sanction-business†is Britain's Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who observed towards the close of the Commonwealth Meeting that sanctions would only harm the blacks and frontline states and so she would not like to be accused of causing‘greater hardship to the people of South Africa.’ 2 Mrs Thatcher also warned that imposition of sanctions would hurt the British economy as well as render some 250,000 British workers jobless. In addition to giving a new angle to the sanction debate, she obviously picked up this theme to impress the British voters.