It doesn’t make any policy sense or political sense. So why is President Carter persisting in his useless, hurtful, expensive economic sanctions against Zimbabwe-Rhodesia? Even Senator Paul Tsongas, who supports sanctions, stated, “I can’t imagine that, given the limited ‘ammunition supplies’ the White House has, they will spend it on Rhodesia.”
Economic sanctions on Rhodesia were dictated by the United Nations in 1966. The United States acquiesced in this UN order even though Rhodesian chrome is one of our most essential imported materials and, with Rhodesian trade cut off, we were forced to buy an inferior grade from Russia. From 1971 to 1977, the sanctions were lifted under the Byrd Amendment to the UN Participation Act.
Right after Jimmy Carter entered the White House, the sanctions were reimposed. The Case-Javits Amendment to the international Security Assistance Act of 1978 requires the President to lift the sanctions against Rhodesia if that country negotiates in good faith with all parties and installs a new government after free elections in which all political and population groups are allowed to participate.
Those requirements have been complied with, but Carter stubbornly continues the sanctions. In the national elections on April 17-21 of this year, 64.5 percent of the total electorate voted. All foreign observers reported the elections were fair and free. Even Bayard Rustin, a black liberal, said, “I think this election was more fair than any I have observed in Africa.”
The other black African governments certainly don’t offer any model which holds out more promise for future freedom than Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Freedom House classifies the majority of African countries as “not free” and most of the rest as “partly free.” They are plagued by totalitarian one-party control, tribal wars, terrorist attacks, unspeakable atrocities, Soviet aggression, and even the selling of young blacks into Cuban slavery (as reported by Clay Claiborne, director of the U.S. Black Silent Majority, in a national speech broadcast July 15, 1979).
The Carter Administration argues that the new Rhodesian Constitution is unfair in that it allows for overrepresentation by the white minority and ensures continued control by the whites. An examination of the Constitution does not support this claim.
On March 3, 1978, Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia and the three principal black leaders signed an “Internal Settlement” which pledged peaceful cooperation for an elected government under a new constitution. The whites by national referendum on January 30, 1979, accepted the new constitution to set up a black majority government.
In the new Rhodesian government, it takes 51 votes to pass laws in the Assembly, but the Constitution provides for 72 black seats out of 100. It takes 16 votes to pass laws in the Senate, but the blacks have 20 seats out of 30. Of the 20 Cabinet members, 14 will be black. Blacks can easily elect a black President, and he will surely appoint a black Prime Minister.
It takes a 2/3 vote in each House to pass constitutional amendments, and the blacks have that margin. Amending the Rhodesian Constitution is much easier, incidentally, than amending the U.S. Constitution, which not only requires a 2/3 vote of each House of Congress, but ratification by 38 state legislatures.
There are some “entrenched clauses” which require 78 Assembly votes during the next ten years. But Americans should view this in the same spirit as the Great Compromise between large states and small states which enabled the U.S. Constitution to be adopted.
Our Constitution does not give a simple majority the power to make all decisions, nor is it based on one man, one vote. “We have an ingenious system of interlacing checks and balances, staggered and indirect elections, a bicameral legislature with different electoral bases, a bill of rights and other restraints to protect individual liberties.
Likewise the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian Constitution needs institutional mechanisms to protect the white minority from the tyranny of the majority and to protect the nation from having the whites vote with their feet by leaving the country.
