Editorial

Ottawa and Pretoria

A still confidential 108-page report compiled by the Commonwealth Secretariat and leaked last week charges that South Africa’s destabiliza- tion of its six neighbouring states has cost at least one million deaths and! $35 billion in destruction since 1980.

Country by country, the report is a shocking litany both of direct war deaths and those caused by the destruction and subversion of entire economies. Angola’s losses alone are estimated at $20 billion as a result of. South Africa’s 13-year war. In Mozambique, the report says half of the population is affected by hunger because of Pretoria’s backing of a terrorist army.

The report is intended as a background paper for the eight-member Commonwealth Foreign Ministers committee, chaired by Canada’s External Affairs Minister Joe Clark, which meets this week in Zimbabwe. Set up following the 1987 Vancouver Commonwealth summit meeting, the committee’s task was to examine ways of pressuring Pretoria. Its record has been terrible.

Led by Britain and the U.S., the western industrial states have done little more than pay lip service to the anti-apartheid struggle. There’s a division of labour: while Thatcher and Reagan openly opposed boycotts and isolation of the apartheid regime, Mulroney used apartheid as a

handy whipping boy, an opportunity to play statesman while doing little :

or nothing of substance.

In fact, since Mulroney used the United Nations as a stage four years ago, Canadian economic ties with Pretoria have grown substantially — so much so that an embarrassed Joe Clark last week hinted Ottawa may have to do more about Canada-South Africa trade than simply suggest restraint to greedy corporations.

The latest study is important. It provides more proof that apartheid is just what the United Nations branded it to be years ago: genocidal. But studies are no replacement for action.

It’s time Ottawa’s hypocrisy ended on this issue. It’s time Clark actually used the mountains of proof available. It’s time Mulroney’s pledge was honoured and Canada broke its ties with apartheid — all its ties — thereby putting our government’s policy in line with the feelings of the majority of Canadians.

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In a decision that throws into doubt two _\y SO per cent of Richmond’s population,

decades of progress in civil rights, the U.S. Supreme Court Jan. 24 rejected affirmative action, ruling that a program in Richmond, Virginia which set aside 30 per cent of con- struction contracts for companies owned by minorities was unconstitutional.

The ruling, made possible by the appointment, during Reagan’s term of office, of several right-wing justices to the U.S. top court, threatens similar programs elsewhere in the country and threatens the very notion of affirmative action as a means of redressing historical discrimination against minorities.

The following commentary on the deci- sion was written by People’s Daily World staff writer Ron Johnson.

By RON JOHNSON

Constitutional experts expect the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling Monday against a Richmond, Va., minority set-

aside program to lead to court challenges

against similar programs in 32 states and 160 cities.

Both progressive and ultra-right consti- tutional experts agree that the Supreme Court is now clearly tilted to the extreme right and will reverse many precedents of the Warren court.

Although African-Americans were near-

minority-owned businesses received less than one per cent of the city’s construction contracts until the 1983 ordinance was passed. The ordinance guaranteed 30 per cent to minority-owned businesses.

Laura Blackburn, New York State gen- eral counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, said Jan. 25: “The ruling brings forth some of the more sinister concerns that we’ve had about the shape of the Supreme Court.”

She said civil rights organizations must develop new tactics in this situation, and that includes pressing Congress “towards more vigorous and definitive steps to address just this kind of problem.”

Also on Tuesday, Gus Hall, national

chair of the Communist Party, U.S.A., -

said the ruling was “another racist assault on affirmative action. The argument that was used in reaching the decision on the set-asides in fact wiped out any legal basis for challenging racist discrimination or for affirmative action.”

Hall said the ruling “sends a signal that the struggle (for equality) cannot be won in the courts alone.”

Dr. David Swinton, dean of the School of Business at Jackson State University,

told reporters that people do not appre- ciate the legacy of inequality.” He spoke at a press conference in Washington, D.C. where the National Urban League pres- ented its report on the State of Black America 1989, documenting the widening gap between Black and white Americans.

Swinton said the concept of reparations is a good one, because “‘there is need to bring everybody to a level playing field.” Discrimination has been “tolerated and permitted for over 300 years,” Swinton said. He noted that it is not the responsibil- ity of individual white people, but rather that of society as a whole, to make amends. Swinton said whites who com- plain about affirmative action “would like to continue to profit from this discrimina- tion.”

Bruce Fein, of the ultra-right oriented and big business financed Heritage Foun- dation, said: “It seems to me that the court now has found a working five to six member consensus around a conservative agenda. The court’s opinion is quite broad and quite strong in denouncing affirma- tive action preferences where there is no strong, clear finding of past illegal discrim- ination.”

Fein said: “History will record the court’s decision as one of the court’s finest

Ruling threatens all U.S. affirmative action

hours in harmonizing race relations and celebrating individual liberty.” His com- ments, which were supported by other ultra-rightists, reveal the extent to which the capitalist class will go to keep minori- ties on the outside.

Swinton told the NUL press conference that there are 320,000 minority-owned firms in the nation but that, based on the population, there should be at least two million.

Other studies show that wealthy African-Americans have just as much dif- ficulty as poor white in getting bank loans, Such studies are helping increasing numbers of people reach the conclusion that capitalism has no intention of helping African-Americans achieve equality on any level.

Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his dissenting opinion that the majority of the Supreme Court “today sounds a full scale retreat from the Court’s longstanding solicitude to race conscious remedial efforts ‘directed toward deliver- ance of the century old promise of equality of economic opportunity.’ ”

He said, “the battle against pernicious racial discrimination or its effects is nowhere near wor’ ' must dissent.”

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4 « Pacific Tribune, February 13, 1989