Posted on 22 March 2013
The United Nations failed to effectively support the African National Congress (ANC) in its campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, a speaker at an EUI conference on international institutions said earlier this week.
Speaking at the ‘From the League of Nations to the United Nations: new approaches to international institutions’ conference on 21 March, Simon M Stevens from Columbia University argued that the ANC turned away from the UN around 1965 due to its failure to take action against the South African government and implement sanctions.
“It was only a very brief period, between 1960 and 1965, when the combination of the situation in South Africa and the perception that the UN had been transformed by decolonisation, that the UN played a major role in the struggle against apartheid,” he said.
After focusing on internal campaigns during the 1950s, the events of 1960 led to a period of ANC engagement with the UN and the belief that white minority rule could be brought to an end with its support: “In the 1950s the UN had been the bastion of the colonial powers, but in 1960 it became a stronghold of anti-colonialist forces that could play a significant role in ending apartheid in South Africa.”
Seventeen states joined the UN in 1960, the majority African countries that had recently gained independence.
On 21 March 1960, 69 protestors were killed by police in South Africa. The Sharpeville massacre brought apartheid to the international arena and gave the ANC new hope that the UN would take decisive action, Stevens said: “An ANC emergency committee immediately issued a statement, calling on the United Nations to ‘quarantine the racialist Verwoerd government by imposing full economic sanctions against the Union of South Africa’. In the subsequent months congresses outside the country made that the centrepiece of their activities.”
Stevens said the ANC felt Western states would be compelled to comply with sanctions if approved in the General Assembly, yet he added that the passing of a sanctions resolution in 1962 was widely ignored by South Africa’s major Western trading partners.
Despite the ANC turning to violent resistance in 1961, Stevens argued that this change did not reflect an abandonment of economic sanctions at the UN: “They [sanctions] were no longer seen as being persuasive or educative, but were seen as a crucial offset of the many difficulties of launching a guerrilla war inside South Africa. By introducing splits within the ruling class and forcing the state to rely exclusively on its own resources to resist a guerrilla onslaught.”
A UN Special Committee on apartheid was formed in 1963, yet its approach differed from that of the ANC. Enuga S Reddy, the committee’s first principal secretary, “was sceptical that armed infiltration would lead to the end of apartheid in South Africa. But the ANC was similarly sceptical of his initiatives and of all UN activity during this period,” Stevens said.
The failure to implement sanctions through the UN led the ANC to abandon the organisation, Stevens said, stepping up its campaign of violence and aligning itself with movements such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The ANC was not granted observer status until 1974, while it was a further 17 years before apartheid was dismantled in South Africa.
(Text by Rosie Scammell)
Simon M Stevens was speaking at a session on security dilemmas and peace-making, alongside EUI Researcher Giorgio Potì. The conference was sponsored by the Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies; the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies’ Global Governance Programme, the Department of History and Civilisation and the Historical Archives of the European Union.
Photo: Special Committee against Apartheid observes International Day of Solidarity with the Struggling People of South Africa, 15 June 1979. UN Photo by Yutaka Nagata.