Word: rhodesia
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...jobless rate for whites. Another prediction made by opponents of sanctions, however, has proved quite wrong. It had been widely forecast that the embargo would provoke a laager (circling the wagons) mentality among whites, a nose-thumbing determination to defy world opinion. That happened in Rhodesia in the late 1960s, but exactly the opposite seems to have occurred in South Africa: the | shock of finding themselves moral outcasts stung many of the nation's whites so deeply that they went along with a faster and more thorough dismantling of apartheid than they might have countenanced otherwise. "It was the feeling...
...unfortunate, and as hypocritical as it is either. Conservatives have found plenty of pragmatic reasons to overlook human rights abuses before. We stood off with the Soviet Union for 45 years without resorting to war; the costs simply would have been too immense. We maintained sanctions against Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for 12 years before they worked. We have applied sanctions against South Africa for four years and against Cuba for 31 years and counting. Is one year so long to wait before we commit ourselves to certain bloodshed...
Fortunately for analytical purposes, there is a historical example nearly identical to South Africa--the case of the white-supremacist government of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In a groundbreaking study of the Rhodesian case, economic historian Johan Galtung concludes that 12 years of total economic embargo--the strongest international sanctions ever imposed before the Iraq-Kuwait crisis--not only failed to break the regime's resolve, but actually solidified...
...white population of Rhodesia "rallied 'round the flag" against "foreign interference" and learned to evade or endure the hardship brought on by sanctions, much of which they pushed off onto the shoulders of the already-oppressed Black population...
...response to Galtung's book, historian David Baldwin argued that sanctions had been effective in Rhodesia, because many long-suffering Blacks joined the insurgent National Liberation Front, which eventually toppled the dominant regime by military force. Thus, in the relatively short period of 12 years, sanctions were "successful." In fact, many academic proponents of economic sanctions uphold the case of Rhodesia as their single most successful application...