Word: botha
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...unusually friendly meeting, considering the coolness that South Africa generally displays toward the U.N. After several talks, including a long working lunch accompanied by vintage South African wines, U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar and officials of Prime Minister P.W. Botha's government announced that they had hammered out a detailed agreement on long-deadlocked negotiations over one of southern Africa's most intractable problems: achieving independence for the South Africa-controlled territory of Namibia. Declared Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha: "We have today resolved all the outstanding issues...
Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said nothing new when he called South Africa's system of apartheid morally wrong [July 4]. But then he had the audacity to reaffirm the U.S. position of encouraging the Botha regime to make "small reforms" instead of advocating economic sanctions against the government of South Africa. If the Reagan Administration had any foresight, it would be devising a plan to put the U.S. on the side of those working to free South Africa from apartheid...
...Reagan Administration has rarely had much to say about South Africa's official policy of racial discrimination, known as apartheid, but its attitudes toward the country have often seemed sympathetic to the government of Prime Minister P.W. Botha. Last week the State Department moved to counter criticism that the U.S. is too closely aligned to the all-white regime. In what was billed as a major policy speech, Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger firmly denounced South Africa's political system as "morally wrong." Said he: "We must reject the legal and political premises and consequences of apartheid...
...clarity in spelling out the U.S. position than for any bold departures from past practice. Endorsing a policy that has been pursued consistently by previous Administrations, Eagleburger rejected economic sanctions as a way to influence the South African government. Instead, he reaffirmed the U.S. goal of encouraging the Botha government to make small reforms, in the expectation that they will lead to larger ones. Said he: "U.S. interests are best served by encouraging the change that is now under way in South Africa...
Signs of improvement, Eagleburger noted, include the South African government's 1979 decision to grant blacks the right to form trade unions, a court ruling earlier this month that enabled some blacks to become permanent residents in urban areas, and Prime Minister Botha's plan, announced last year, to grant Asians and mixed-race "coloreds" a limited role in a white-dominated Parliament. By contrast, Eagleburger charged, any campaign to encourage U.S. companies to divest themselves of their holdings in South Africa would only "assure America's irrelevance to South Africa's future...