TransAfrica News

Contents: CONGRESS OVERRIDES VETO Sanctions: A First Step • UNMASKING THE DISINVESTMENT SHAM • AID TO THE FRONTLINE STATES • GRENADA CONDEMNS COARD AND 13 OTHERS TO DEATH • ACCIDENT OR SABOTAGE • HAITI: RATING THE CNG • HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN LIBERIA: US ROLE • RESETTLEMENT IN ETHIOPIA • ANOTHER DEFEAT ON ANGOLA • PUBLICATIONS OF NOTE • TRANSAFRICA CHAPTER CONTACTS The article about overriding President Reagan's veto of the South Africa sanctions legislation discusses strategy in Congress, especially by Senate Republicans Richard Lugar and Jesse Helms. Recent corporate disinvestments from South Africa may appear to meet demands of the anti-apartheid movement, but they do not meet the immediate goal of disinvestment, which is to cut all technological and economic ties to the apparatus of apartheid. Do the announcements by Coca-Cola, International Business Machines, and General Motors that they are departing South Africa in fact break their economic and technological ties with that nation? Samora Machel, President of Mozambique, died tragically on October 19 when his twin-engine jet crashed in South Africa near the Mozambican border; 33 others also died, including top officials of the Mozambique government. The South African government claims this was an accident due to bad weather and pilot error; the governments of Zimbabwe and Zambia, however, issued statements blaming South Africa for the crash and resulting deaths. U.S. foreign policy has failed in Liberia. Former Sergeant Samuel Doe seized power in a bloody coup in 1980, and the country has moved rapidly into the burgeoning camp of ruthless and corrupt military dictatorships. Despite executions, disappearances, imprisonment, torture, and beatings of Liberians, the U.S. has supported the Doe regime. In 1985, international media coverage of the famine ravishing Ethiopia and other parts of Africa generated an outpouring of aid and concern. dominating the strategic Horn of Africa, Ethiopia remains very much on the agenda of the State Department, though the concern is not primarily humanitarian. The House of Representatives voted to strike the Hamilton Amendment from the Intelligence Authorization Act; the provision, sponsored by Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, would have halted U.S. intervention in Angola unless Congress debated and approved the "covert" program. "KING SOLOMON'S MINES REVISITED: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa" by William Minter is reviewed. The newsletter mentions the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, Congressmen Bill Gray, Ronald Dellums, Claude Pepper, and Bob Stump, Senators Edward Kennedy and Lowell Weicker, U.S. loans to South Africa, imports of South African iron, steel, coal, uranium, textiles and agricultural products, strategic minerals, the U.S. military, landing rights, South African Airways (SAA), deposits from South African government agencies, petroleum products, weapons, the U.S. sugar import quota, South African military, purchasing items from South African government-owned companies, promoting trade or tourism, IBM, GM, Amalgamated Beverages Industries, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, roads, railways, communication systems, regional destabilization, the Limpopo railway line, the Beira corridor, the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), UNITA rebels, the Southern Africa Development Coordinating Conference (SADCC), President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, South African Defense Minister Magnus Malan, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL), the Ethiopian Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), USAID, the African National Congress (ANC), and TransAfrica staff Marguerite Fletcher, Cecelie Counts, and Randall Robinson.