Listening to the silent majority

[65]

Mrs Helen Suzman further wrote in the New York Times: ‘It is estimated, that some 2 million people are presently in 1987 unemployed in South Africa. They are mostly unskilled black workers. By the year 2000 this number will have risen to nearly 8 million without sanctions and to almost 10 million with sanctions.’ Mrs Suzman further underlined that no dole and no food stamps had as yet been introduced in South Africa. She concluded, ‘The Western democracies, whose basic values are freedom and human rights, should continue to protest long and loud against all miserable practices of apartheid and to use all positive measures to speed its demise. But moral indignation should not lead them to impose punitive measures that will wreck the economy of the country in which black South Africans will eventually share.’

The argument of the white lady from Johannesburg reminds me of a similar statement of the Minister of Education of Inkatha, when Mike Stroh and I filmed him in his office in Ulundi. Dr Oscar Dhlomo summed the same argument up as follows: ‘Why destroy South Africa, because we want to destroy apartheid?’

To illustrate the functioning of closed minds, this time in the realm of serious journalism I must mention NRC-Handelsblad, the most prestigious newspaper in Holland. I began my work as a foreign editor there in 1953. Wout Woltz, the current editor-in-chief is a long-time colleague of mine. When Mrs Helen Suzman published her article I was in New York and mailed it to Woltz with the suggestion that it could be translated and published on the editorial page as presenting another view on South Africa. It was not done. And why? Probably, Woltz passed the material on to the editor of the editorial page, whom I know and who is entirely ignorant on the subject of South Africa. He has a friend, Sietze Bosgra, a leading anti-apartheid activist in the Netherlands. So, Mr Bos-

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gra is allowed to express his views on South Africa at least a half dozen times a year on the editorial pages of NRC-Handelsblad, thus actually monopolising the best editorial page in the country for the anti-South Africa movement. After Bosgra had launched another irrational attack on Chief Buthelezi and Inkatha, the representative of Inkatha in Holland, Reina van Steenwijk, wrote a calm and reasoned rebuttal, which of course was also not published by NRC-Handelsblad. What is the use of an editorial page, when only one side of an argument is presented, because the editorial page editor doesn't agree with opposing views? In this respect, NRC-Handelsblad can still learn much from the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times.