Foreign relations of South Africa during apartheid

[7][8] South Africa's policies were subject to international scrutiny in 1960, when British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan criticised them during his celebrated Wind of Change speech in Cape Town.

The Sharpeville massacre had jolted the global neighbourhood, with the apartheid regime showing that it would use violent behaviour to repress opposition to racial inequity.

In April 1960, the Security Council of the UN settled for the first time on concerted action against the apartheid regime, demanding that the NP bring an end to racial separation and discrimination; but, instead, the South African administration merely employed further suppressive instruments.

In 1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld stopped over in South Africa and subsequently stated that he had been powerless to effect a concurrence with Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd.

On 7 August 1963 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 181 calling for a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa, and that very year, a Special Committee Against Apartheid was established to encourage and oversee plans of action against the regime.

The manifesto's signatories did not want to engage in a military war by supporting the liberation pugilists, because, for one thing, they could ill afford it and, for another, they dreaded retaliation.

The homelands, it argued, were meant eventually to be self-governing, decolonised nations where black people could take part in ballots and be free to live how they wished.

The US even utilised South Africa for its exploration of outer space, setting up a satellite tracking post near Krugersdorp, and building numerous telescopes for lunar probes.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had adopted a policy known as the Tar Baby Option, according to which the US ought to maintain close relations with the Apartheid government of South Africa.

In 1967, Vorster proffered technological and fiscal counsel gratis to any African state prepared to receive it, asserting that absolutely no political strings were attached.

Where Verwoerd had declined to get together and engage in dialogue with such leaders as Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria in 1962 and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia in 1964, Vorster, in 1966, met with the heads of the states of Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana.

Following the Soweto uprising in 1976 and its brutal suppression by the apartheid regime, the arms embargo was made mandatory by the UN Security Council on 4 November 1977 and South Africa became increasingly isolated internationally, with tough economic sanctions weighing heavily.

One of the primary means for the international community to show its aversion to apartheid was to boycott South Africa in a variety of spheres of multinational life.

[citation needed] B. J. Vorster took Verwoerd's place as PM in 1966 and declared that South Africa would no longer dictate to other countries what their teams should look like.

Sporting and cultural boycotts did not have the same impact as economic sanctions, but they did much to lift consciousness amongst normal South Africans of the global condemnation of apartheid.

[21] A divestment movement in many countries was similarly widespread, with individual cities and provinces around the world implementing various laws and local regulations forbidding registered corporations under their jurisdiction from doing business with South African firms, factories, or banks.

[23] The analysis concluded that in many instances sanctions undermined effective reform forces, such as the changing economic and social order within South Africa.

Furthermore, it was argued that forces encouraging economic growth and development resulted in a more international and liberal outlook amongst South Africans, and were far more powerful agents of reform than sanctions.

[citation needed] On 21 February 1986– a week before he was murdered– Sweden's prime minister Olof Palme made the keynote address to the Swedish People's Parliament Against Apartheid held in Stockholm.

[24] Cuba also provided medical staff and assistance to black South Africans,[25] which Nelson Mandela himself acknowledged and thanked Fidel Castro for upon his release.

[29] By the late 1980s, however, with the tide of the Cold War turning and no sign of a political resolution in South Africa, Western patience with the apartheid government began to run out.

By 1989, a bipartisan Republican/Democratic initiative in the US favoured economic sanctions (realised as the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act), the release of Nelson Mandela and a negotiated settlement involving the ANC.

But this conflict deepened after Angola gained its independence in 1975 under Communist leadership, the MPLA, and South Africa promptly challenged them, allying with the Angolan rival party, UNITA.

By 1980, as international opinion turned decisively against the apartheid regime, the government and much of the white population increasingly looked upon the country as a bastion besieged by communism and radical black nationalists.

Negotiating majority rule with the ANC was not considered an option (at least publicly), and it left the government to defend the country against external and internal threats through sheer military might.

A siege mentality developed among whites, and, although many believed that a civil war against the black majority could not possibly be won, they preferred this to "giving in" to political reform.

[41] South Africa, facing a classic Cold War insurgency threat backed by conventional means in the background, followed a military strategy based on offensive area defence, organised in layers.

This strategy was based on a customised format of Counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare, generally accepted in the Western World during the Cold War and beyond, even recently in Afganistan.

In this regard, PLAN perpetually threatened the border regions by insurgent type offensive actions, which included intimidation, extortion and terrorising the local population.

similarly, the South African Army units, organised as described above, countered the threat aggressively and regularly struck deep into Angola to disrupt and destroy SWAPO's logistics and Command and Control and to degrade its fighting capacity.