23 October 19851
A happy conjunction of circumstances sets me here before you today. The Commonwealth Summit just ended in Nassau and the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations had a hand in it to be sure. But just as important is my Government's wish to establish its own credentials and develop its relationship with this Committee. Our invitation to General Garba to visit New Zealand earlier this year set these wheels in motion. We wanted him to come and meet and talk with as many ordinary New Zealanders as possible. That he did and I think he enjoyed doing it. We certainly enjoyed having him and his colleagues from the Secretariat.
His invitation to come and address the Committee delivered as we cruised in a boat on the choppy waters of Auckland Harbour was irresistible. The question was when. And, when we thought about it, when better than now, immediately after a very significant Commonwealth Accord on apartheid and at a moment of reflection for the United Nations itself on its own role in world affairs, not least on the question of apartheid.
So here I am and I am honoured to be here because I know how symbolic this body is of the international front of resistance to apartheid.
It is all the more pleasurable in the circumstances to be able to bring good tidings from Nassau and I would like to open by reflecting a little on the outcome of that meeting. You will all, I am sure, have seen the Accord that the Commonwealth has been able to reach and you will all know that it was not easy to reach it. The fact that the Commonwealth has reached this Accord, however, is of very considerable significance to the future of the international fight against apartheid. It marks another step towards the full harmonization of international action against the political and economic bulwarks of Pretoria. It signals in no uncertain terms that the Commonwealth means business on the imposition of sanctions. It does not go as far as many of us would wish right now but it sets out a timetable for some immediate action and the prospect of the screw being tightened if Pretoria fails to deliver.
There is no question that a threshold has been crossed in a number of important respects. The Commonwealth has accepted the principle that escalating economic pressure must now be applied until Pretoria takes the steps we all implore of it. And we have, at the same time, recognized that what we seek through a programme of graduated sanctions is the dismantling of apartheid, not the wholesale destruction of South Africa's economic potential. In 1961, the Commonwealth lit a candle for South Africa that still burns. We have now begun to examine in practical terms how best we can stimulate the rapid evolution of South African society towards genuine democracy and, ultimately, to open the way for South Africa's return to the Commonwealth fold and to respectability within the wider United Nations community.
The importance of this Accord rests on the signals it sends to South Africa: a signal to Pretoria that the whole Commonwealth, including Britain, is resolved to take positive economic action and that it can no longer expect even Britain to lend support to the economic structures underpinning apartheid. Equally important, however, is the signal it has sent to the leaders of the black majority in South Africa that the Commonwealth stands firmly behind them in their efforts to secure peaceful, negotiated change.
The declared willingness of Britain to cross this threshold is of course of particular significance and will, I know, be welcomed by all here today. What we have seen in Nassau is not dissimilar to Britain's historic decision taken 150 years ago to support the abolition of slavery, to opt for principle, even though its immediate economic interests suggested otherwise. Perhaps the combination of subjects - the liberation of black peoples - and setting - the Caribbean destination of so many of those so cruelly abducted - had something to do with that.
Whichever way you look at it the Commonwealth has provided a valuable psychological boost to the cause of liberation in South Africa: a boost that will be welcomed here in New York and will not be lost on the wider international community as it again explores its collective conscience over apartheid.
But I have come to talk to you not just about Nassau but also about where New Zealand stands on apartheid and what my Government has done and will in future do to help bring about its eradication. To start with, let me tell you a little about the nature of New Zealand's relationship with South Africa, itself something that has been the subject of some misunderstanding and not a little misrepresentation over recent years.
It is not a relationship that is close or has much substance. It never has been. That may not be obvious to those - and they exist - who have the impression that New Zealand competes regularly against South Africa in sports and who assume that that is only the most visible aspect of a deeper and more active relationship. The truth is very different.
New Zealanders have no community of interest with the Afrikaner. They have no cultural links with that minority in spite of the kith and kin mythology. Our own is not a perfect multiracial society - whose is? - but we place paramount importance on the quality of our race relations in New Zealand. When New Zealanders, whatever their colour, learn of the realities of apartheid - as they are now doing - they are astonished that such brutality could still persist in the late twentieth century; Some, quite frankly, are openly disbelieving. That all this is not better known is perhaps a reflection of the fact that we don't allocate the sort of resources to advertising the truth about ourselves that the South Africans do to persuading others to see themselves as they want to be seen. New Zealand in that regard has been a prime target for Pretoria's disinformation machine.
There seems to be a steady supply in South Africa of people who can make wrong appear right. They find their way into the information and foreign services of their Government, which they serve with a skill and inventiveness that few other countries or organizations can match. The succession of South African Consuls-General sent to New Zealand are a particular case in point. There is an old adage that a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country. Over the years, South African representatives in Wellington raised that particular vocation to an art form. Directly and indirectly they contributed to the bitter controversies that divided New Zealand society in 1981 and again this year, over the issue of rugby competition with South Africa. Those controversies, I would emphasize, were not of national, but of international, origin. South Africa's desperate battle to defy the international sporting boycott was being fought out in the living rooms and streets of New Zealand.
There is only one country in which the game of rugby arouses greater passion than it does in New Zealand, and that country is South Africa. Whatever the strength of rugby elsewhere, New Zealand and South Africa came to know - as surely as ever Muhammed Ali knew - that they were the greatest; and that when the All Blacks met the Springboks they were battling for the rugby crown of the world. It was a fierce but compulsive rivalry.
That is why this contact came to assume such importance to so many New Zealanders. It is why many New Zealanders who are repelled by apartheid nevertheless want the tours to go on.
It helps to explain why rugby, as your Sporting Register shows, is the only major New Zealand sport that has persisted with sporting competition against South Africa. But it is also one of the reasons why this single link - which is of such importance to the Afrikaner's mistaken image of his acceptability to the outside world - is also so important to you.
This year, as you all know, the New Zealand Rugby Union had planned that the All Blacks should tour South Africa. And this in spite of the efforts of the Government, of the New Zealand Parliament, of the anti-apartheid movement, of this Committee, and the strength of New Zealand public opinion on the matter. In the end, however, they called the tour off. They called it off because two rugby players argued in the courts that the decision to tour did not comply with the objectives of the Rugby Union, as set out in its constitution, that it promote, foster and develop the game in New Zealand.
The plaintiffs were granted an interim injunction and the 1985 tour was cancelled. I hope that this will mean the end of this contact which has caused New Zealand so much anguish over the years. The Government has made it plain that it will not allow the Springboks or any other representative South African teams or players into New Zealand. But the Government cannot itself prevent the All Blacks or any New Zealanders from going to South Africa. To do so would be inconsistent with our international legal obligation to protect the freedom of our citizens to leave the country and to return home.
We will not shirk the job of persuading the Rugby Union and its supporters that there are things more important than competing against South Africa and good reasons why rugby should follow the example of other New Zealand sports and sever its contacts with South Africa. I am in no doubt that the appalling events being shown almost daily on our television screens will have led many to reconsider their attitude.
Our job, and yours, is to expose the truth about apartheid. I believe that the most effective way of countering South African propaganda is by presenting the facts and letting them speak for themselves. Facts can be more persuasive than rhetoric; truth has its own eloquence; and truth is beginning to get the upper hand as Pretoria unmasks itself by its daily brutalities. As South Africa becomes more desperate, so its diet of disinformation will increase. I welcome the joint efforts of this Committee and the Commonwealth Secretariat. They are a valuable service to a wider community that is in such need of information as a counter to the massive propaganda campaigns mounted by Pretoria.
One of the most remarkable developments of the past 40 years has been the transformation of the international legal order. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the field of human rights, where the United Nations has adopted a series of standard-setting instruments that have clearly established it as the organization for the promotion and protection of those rights. Regrettably, it cannot be said that changes in the law have brought about a notable increase in respect for human rights around the world, or that the benefits of the treaties are always evident to the people whose rights they are intended to protect. Those, of course, are good reasons for us to make greater efforts to encourage respect for the law.
Inevitably there are difficulties in meeting the standards of the law. They are greater for some countries than for others. In a few cases observance of the full range of established rights could, in the short term, be detrimental to national security. In others, at this stage, protection of some rights could be divisive. But I have no respect for those tyrannies around the world whose leaders are more concerned to hold on to power and the fruits of office than to meet their obligations to the people whose interests and rights it is their responsibility to safeguard; or who, in placing the lives of their people in the service of ideology, neglect their welfare and deny them freedom. If we profess to believe in the law, we must be prepared to abide by it. Otherwise we undermine it, and in doing so dilute the efforts of those who are trying to build societies in which the whole range of human rights is protected and who are working for greater respect for those rights throughout the world.
If some Governments disregard the law, that of South Africa acts as if it believes itself to be above it. The apartheid system is there for the express purpose of discriminating against, suppressing the majority and preventing black South Africans from becoming participants in the government of their country. It involves the consequential and persistent commission of many other grave violations of human rights. Its injustices are not, as in other countries, the unintentional outcome of social structures that offer insufficient protection to minorities or those who are disadvantaged. They are the deliberate result of a racist system administered in their own interest by people who know exactly what it is they are doing.
External and internal pressure has extracted some concessions from the South African Government. That we acknowledge. The impression has been created that the Pretoria Government is committed to reform and to peaceful change in South Africa. Yet the South African Government has so far refused to enter into a genuine dialogue with representative black groups on a future political settlement; instead, it has detained many of them and declined to meet others. There are few signs that it is ready to contemplate extending to blacks the right to participate equally in the political process. Its limited reforms have signalled no change in the basic racist philosophy of the State. That continues to be embodied in the law and backed by force - which has been used relentlessly at home to suppress demands by the blacks who seek no more than the right to have their say in the government of their country; and against its neighbours to weaken them and establish its military dominance in the region: all to reinforce white domination and the Government's capacity to resist change.
It is for all these reasons that the world is united in its determination to bring about the end of apartheid as it has probably not been united since the campaign to end slavery.
I want you to know that New Zealand stands full square behind that effort and will work with others of like mind in the United Nations, the Commonwealth and elsewhere towards the end we all seek and which is now so clearly attainable. Let me turn therefore to the question of practical action; putting one's money where one's mouth is; and what we in New Zealand can do to help shift Pretoria to a sense of reality and to begin the process of negotiation with black leaders and the dismantling of apartheid.
I have already spoken of our policy with regard to sports contacts. It may seem odd but it is a fact that we in New Zealand can do more by severing the international rugby link with South Africa than by any other measure or sanction in any other field. We shall do our utmost to achieve this; to continue to live up to both the letter and the spirit of the Gleneagles Agreement. The Commonwealth Accord of Nassau asks this of the whole Commonwealth and I have no doubt that the whole Commonwealth will honour it.
The question of economic sanctions as evidenced prior to Nassau and for so many years here in New York is one on which there is often bitter disagreement.
Many member countries have had doubts about the efficacy of such sanctions. Some, New Zealand included, while fully prepared to support mandatory economic sanctions if the Security Council so ordained, were not sure whether they would work in practice. Others have made the argument - and still do - that such sanctions would hurt most those who they were designed to help and do damage to the economies of those front-line States caught within the South African economic web. The Commonwealth Secretary-General will, I know, have echoed the feelings of many who are in favour of comprehensive mandatory sanctions when he suggested earlier this year that "resistance to sanctions lies in the cold unfeeling calculus of money and profit and returns. And it is bolstered here and there by the self-deception … that South African society is inherently decent, and that if matters are out of hand occasionally, they cannot be substantially to blame. This stubborn sympathy defies the facts and it comes from countries that, by having enjoyed lengthy social and economic ties with South Africa, are the very economies that have benefited most from the economic deprivations inherent in the apartheid system".
New Zealand is not in that particular camp. I have already mentioned that our links with South Africa are few and insubstantial. We don't have diplomatic relations with them. We have never had a diplomatic or consular office in South Africa. They closed their consular office in New Zealand last year so that we couldn't do it for them. We have no military contact with them, or contact in the nuclear field. There is no New Zealand investment in South Africa. We have attracted very little from them. The New Zealand Government doesn't lend South Africa money. Nor do our banks. We have no procurement arrangements in South Africa. Our trade with South Africa is insignificant, less than half a per cent of the total. It is by no means essential to us, and the Government doesn't promote or encourage it. It could thus never be said that New Zealand has benefited from the economic deprivations inherent in the apartheid system, or that our political, social or economic ties with South Africa are such as to influence our attitude to the imposition of sanctions against them.
The fact is that we are in favour of immediate, carefully targeted and meaningful economic sanctions. Before I left Wellington to attend the Commonwealth meeting, my Cabinet colleagues and I agreed that New Zealand would strictly comply with each of the economic sanctions that the Commonwealth decided should be applied immediately. And we can go further than that. If and when the Commonwealth judges it necessary, we shall be ready to play our part in moving to the next steps outlined in its Accord:
A ban on air links with South Africa;
A ban on new investment or reinvestment of profits earned in South Africa;
A ban on the import of agricultural products from South Africa;
The termination of double taxation agreements with South Africa;
The termination of all government assistance to investment in, and trade with, South Africa;
A ban on all government procurement in South Africa;
A ban on government contracts with majority-owned South African companies;
A ban on the promotion of tourism to South Africa.
New Zealand will be prepared to honour those as well. And if the South African Government still remains obstinate, New Zealand will be prepared to join others in further collective efforts, even comprehensive mandatory sanctions if that is what it takes to achieve peaceful change in South Africa.
I somehow doubt that it will come to that. I have a feeling, particularly if this Commonwealth game plan can be replicated by the wider membership of the United Nations, that Pretoria will begin to blink, to accept that it must yield the reins of power and to trust in the faith that all of us here have in the healing qualities of dialogue, negotiation, accommodation and settlement, an end which this Committee has for so long and so honourably striven.
I am happy to have had an opportunity to share my thoughts with you at this particularly significant moment in the history of South Africa. I thank you for that and wish the Committee well in the completion of its mission.
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