For most of the country’s finest athletes, the answer is no. Zulu long-distance runner Willie Mtolo made history two weeks ago when he won the New York City marathon. Millions of soccer fans rejoiced last month as the South African eleven defeated the Congo 1-0, the team’s first victory in a long-shot bid to qualify for the 1994 World Cup. As a result of negotiations that ended the boycott, officials in cricket are reaching out to black youths by holding coaching clinics in the townships. But the mandarins of South African rugby have barely budged. Says the Rev. Arnold Stofile, a black official of the South African Rugby Football Union (SARFU): “We made the fundamental mistake of believing that whites are ready for change.”
Rugby always figured to be a special case. For de Klerk’s fellow Afrikaners it is an all-consuming passion, a blood-and-guts appeal to their own brand of machismo. And no sport in South Africa is more lily-white: of the 108 players fielded by the country’s top six clubs, fewer than 10 are mixed-race Coloreds; none is black. The Springboks’ enforced isolation through most of the 1980s was one of the most keenly felt sanctions among South Africa’s elite. So finally, the white South Africa Rugby Board agreed to merge with a nonwhite federation a year ago to form SARFU. That lifted the final barrier to ending the sports boycott.
It was the last time rugby served to unify South Africans. In August, the Springboks’ return to international competition (against a New Zealand team) began on a sour note. Instead of observing a minute of silence in memory of the victims of political violence-as requested by the African National Congress-the Springboks joined the predominantly Afrikaner crowd of 70,000 in roaring “Die Stem,” the anthem blacks despise as a symbol of apartheid. Outraged ANC leaders warned that the scheduled tour of England and France might be called off as a result. When the tour went ahead as planned, the Springboks firmly staked their claim as the bad boys of rugby. During one weekend in the French city of Lille, the South Africans snubbed a prematch reception, blamed their loss to a local club on biased refereeing, walked out of a dinner hosted by their victorious opponents and delivered another lusty rendition of “Die Stem.” Unrepentant, the squad’s 34-year-old captain, Naas Botha, defended his teammates’ “right to sing what they want to.”
Rugby alone can’t halt South Africa’s march toward democracy. But the furor has drawn attention to how difficult the transition will be. Like most “white” sports, rugby has a long way to go before racially skewed inequities are redressed. In the city of Port Elizabeth, the local white population of 150,000 can choose from 50 rugby fields; the million blacks who live in adjacent townships have access to three usable grounds. Nationwide, SARFU has earmarked only $25,000 for improving facilities in black areas. The Springboks’ critics see a pattern of rejection that keeps sports from helping to forge the same kinds of cross-cultural ties that local teams achieve in other societies. Says University of the Western Cape law professor Kader Asmal: “To white South Africans it’s a matter of indifference how well black sportsmen do.”
That attitude cuts both ways. On the same day that the country’s predominantly black soccer team beat the Congolese in a stadium outside Soweto, the French national rugby squad whipped the Springboks 29-16 in Paris. As the editor of a Johannesburg newspaper left his office that evening, he ran into a black colleague and asked him about the outcome of the soccer game. “We won,” the colleague smiled. And the rugby test match? “They lost,” he replied.
title: “Not Ready For Prime Time” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “Ella Nichols”
It might be called the Son of Star Wars, the space-based system championed by former President Ronald Reagan and intended to shoot down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. The system could not be built at the time because the technology could not be developed; and then the “threat” itself disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Soviet Communist era ended in Europe.
Today, with Republican defense hawks driving the cause, the threat has been redefined-not as Russia but North Korea, or some other Third World state that might have a capability of firing an intercontinental missile at the United States in the next five to 10 years. Bush did not say what system he wants built, although it would certainly be far more modest than Reagan’s dream. Yet in his stated aim to abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia and end the cold-war era system of deterrence based on limiting “defensive” weapons, Bush’s plan is highly contentious among U.S. allies, and in the U.S. Congress.
Defensiveness in the face of controversy was the leitmotif of Bush’s address. Using the most conciliatory rhetoric, he urged Russia to cooperate in defining a new strategic relationship-albeit on American terms-and announced he was sending some of the administration’s best-known defense experts to consult America’s allies. “These will be real consultations. We are not presenting our friends and allies with unilateral decisions already made. We look forward to hearing their views, the views of our friends and to take them into account,” Bush said.
Yet a few lines earlier in the speech, he indicated that the decision to deploy would be unilateral and it would depend only on the technology. “When ready, and working with Congress, we will deploy missile defenses….” he asserted. The phrase was buried in a paragraph that made clear the administration had not figured out what it wanted to deploy. “We have more work to do to determine the final form the defenses might take,” he said.
And while promising to consult U.S. allies, Bush left no doubt that, in his view, the ABM treaty is history. “We should work together to replace this treaty with a new framework that reflects a clear and clean break from the past,” he said.
So is this a new policy or a trial balloon? A real plan or a holding action? One clue that the policy is not quite ready for prime time is that Bush described three different approaches to missile defense-limited national defense using a plan devised under former President Bill Clinton for land-based missiles, expanding that system to include sea-based missiles and a plan to intercept missiles in their boost phase-without saying which one he intends to pursue.
According to diplomatic sources, most U.S. allies have avoided voicing their real doubts about Bush’s missile defense plan because a decision on deployment seemed so many years away. A second clue that made it unlike major policy pronouncements was that it lacked the accompanying fanfare. There was no briefing of the news media in advance by a senior official to explain the meaning of the words-the kind Ronald Reagan’s White House provided before his Star Wars speech. There was no briefing of the U.S. Congress-certainly not of Democrats, who comprise half of the Senate.
Bush did telephone Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and the leaders of other major allies, as well as Vladimir Putin of Russia. Bush told Putin he would “love” to meet him in the near future. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota quipped that he was thinking of “creating a hot line to Tony Blair to find out what our foreign policy ought to be.”
Senate Democrats yesterday welcomed what they hope is the kickoff to a national debate on missile defense. They cite Pentagon analysis showing that of all the major threats to U.S. security, ballistic missile attacks are near the bottom of the list. Daschle said there were fundamental problems with the defense system as discussed by Bush. “A missile defense system that undermines our nation politically, economically and strategically without providing any real security is no defense at all,” he told reporters yesterday. In fact, he was assuming that there is a real policy, whereas the only thing that seems to exist at the moment is a set of intentions.
