Sanctioning Apartheid - KORA

272 Snnching Apartheid
humiljating was the need to appeal to Pretoria in early December
1986 for 34,aOO tons of petroll, diesel, a d aviation hd to ease the
sudden shortage that hit the country as a result of the calculated
hostility of the South f i c m government Not only did ite
surrogates sabotage the h-Feda oil pi-e and Beira's
ekhidty supply, but it hurriedly d e d its locomotives and
rolling stock on loan to the National Mway of Zimbabwe, thw
crippling efforts to dktrhte existing mppliexS To! compound
Mugabe's troubles, Zambia's desperate er?onomic plight, dramatized
by the bloody food riots that swept the Copperbelt in
tkmnba 1986, gravely weakened Kaunda's domestic padti~n,~
What finally enabled Mu* to climb down with scme
semblance of dignltr was, mom than anything else, the timely
visit of Canadian Prime Mhkkr Brian Mulroney in late January.
His message, alluded to in public and expwnded at length in
private, was that no one in the West expected the Frontfine States
to commit national suicide. In this, he dwd the arguments of
the British and the Americans who had seized every opportunity
to hammer the point home. However, unlike them, Mulroney
went on to insist that sanctions were first and foremost the
responsibility of the wider international community. ''The onus
is on the industrialized countries who can afford the burden
somewhat better," hl; declared, "to provide a greater degree of
leadership than the Frontline States whose economies are
relatively hag& and effectively subjugated [to] the economy of
South Africa"" What made Mulronefs plea for rskiht
palatabie and pasuasive was the high personal regard in which
he--in marked contrast to Reagan and Thatcher-was held in
Harare.
Despite periadic asations that implementation of the
Nassau package had not been shelved but merely delayed
pending cempletion of consultations, consideration of the
question had efkiively been erased hm the active political
agenda It did expieme a brief revival in late April 1987 when,
following the South Akhn comnando raid on Livingstone,
economic retaliation was one of the options Zambia entdahed
but quickly Fdy, in July, Lusaka and Hamre
offidally conceded that the search for agreement on an air ban