SASC

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Damon Silvers' "Divestiture A History" is an example of the kind of politics that decimated the South Africa Solidarity committee in 1979 and 1980. In one essay, Silvers has managed to gut the essentials of what SASC stood for from 1981 to 1983.

In its work in 1982, the South Africa Solidarity Committee explicitly supported the armed liberation struggle of the ANC and PAC, which are recognized by the UN. So did 1500 students who signed a petition proclaiming that support and support for the bank loans ban, In contrast, Silvers talks about guerrilla warfare as "Face warfare" in the exact phrascology one would expect from an apartheid judge condemning a freedom-fighter to death.

Of course, SASC did maintain that peaceful measures would speed up liberation and save lives, but it never tried to "persuade white South Africa". Nor would SASC of 1982 or even 1983 have expected "white society to give up trying to maintain a doomed social order." SASC efforts were aimed at weakening the apartheid state, not getting white South Africa to listen.

Silvers is promoting a very frustrating kind of politics which advocates reasoning with a genocidal and intransigent ruling class. It is therefore not surprising that he calls the Sullivan Principles, "a series of basic humane guidelines." This is perhaps the clearest abandonment of old SASC's basic line. The Sullivan Principles call "for desegregated bathrooms and training programs for token black executives" to quote an old SASC leaflet. In fact, they provide for a total of 96 managers and managers in training in South Africa. Yet, Silvers thinks pure white domination under the Sullivan Principles to be "humane." He does not mention that the Sullivan Principles were created in 1977 to provide a smokescreen for American corporations faced with the very protests Silvers mentions in his essay.

The Sullivan Principles contain no provisions about the arms and military technology provided by the U.S. to the white repressive apparatus that Silvers recommends reasoning with Nor do the Sullivan Principles prevent American corporations from paying three times as much in taxes to the military government than in wages to Black workers. The Sullivan Principles merely contribute to the perpetuation of American support for oppression.

In fact, Silvers accepts without criticism the possibility "that corporations behave progressively" just as Derek Bok does. He does not explain what used to be the SASC belief that it is impossible for a corporation to operate progressively under apartheid laws that call for confiscation of American assets in time of civil war, which according to apartheid generals is already underway and not something of the "horrible" future: Silvers even implies that Harvard now takes ethics into consideration in its investments and say that pre-1972 policies were neutral or "amoral." Some former members of SASC and other anti-apartheid activists ask Silvers whose side are you on? Henry Park '84   SASC   Brad Manl '82   SASC   Raun Rasmussen   Harvard Law School A.B.L.E.   Ibrahim Gassama   HLS Third World Coalition   Matt Kramer   HLS Divestment Committee   Muhammed Kenyatta   HLS Black Students Association   Alan Shaw '85   Black Students Association