Word: bothas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pretoria government's first reaction was to recall U.N. Ambassador Roelofse F. ("Pik") Botha home for "urgent consultation." Foreign Minister Hilgard Muller announced that South Africa-a charter member of the U.N. and one of the few African nations that pays its dues-will freeze its annual $1.1 million contribution to the U.N. budget. The possibility of withdrawing from the U.N. was being debated in Pretoria last week, but the consensus seemed to be that such a move would be self-defeating. As one Johannesburg newspaper put it, as long as South Africa's enemies can shout...
During the Security Council debate last week, South Africa gave several indications that it is indeed willing to bend on three specific issues that bother the black nations. Botha's mission issued a press release announcing that the Pretoria government will cut back the South African police contingent that has been propping up the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia's Premier Ian Smith against attacks from Zambia-based black nationalist guerrillas...
...Botha also announced a slight change of policy on the issue of South-West Africa. South Africa has administered the area under a League of Nations mandate since 1920, but the U.N. revoked the mandate in 1966, renamed the area Namibia, and is training nationals in exile for eventual independence. Until last week Vorster had maintained that self-determination for the region would take another ten years. Now Botha concedes that "this stage may be reached considerably sooner...
...Veto. The most significant of the policy reversals was Botha's promise that South Africa will "do everything in our power to move away from discrimination based on race or color." That may be a difficult promise to fulfill. It seems unlikely that the ingrained traditions of apartheid can be altered quickly and dramatically enough to assuage Black Africa's decades of accumulated rage...
...been for the vetoes, South Africa would have been a victim of the U.N.'s peculiar double standard-racism practiced by white regimes is bad, but the racism of black governments is somehow permissible. In his address, Botha suggested that some morally righteous U.N. countries might profit from closer scrutiny of their own recent histories. Explaining the U.S. veto, Ambassador John Scali argued that the expulsion of South Africa would create "a shattering precedent" that might be invoked against any U.N. nation out of political step with majority sentiment. According to diplomatic sources, the possibility of an Afro-Arab...