Siege.

Siege

The threat of economic sanctions doesn't disturb the South African government as much as foreign opinion thinks it does. South Africa has been making preparations for a siege for a long time. In recent months, there has been considerable stockpiling of essential commodities--$750 million worth--especially oil, which is the major natural resource the country lacks. For twenty years, the government has been storing oil in disused mine shafts, and it has developed its own oil-from-coal industry. Plans for substituting home-made products for imports were implemented when the rand, South Africa's unit of currency, took a disastrous tumble on world financial markets last year. To counter a looming airline boycott, South Africa is planning to lease out a portion of its fleet of 747 jumbo jets to the airlines of neighboring African countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique, so that its travelers will continue to have their customary service, albeit with the slight inconvenience of having to change planes. At the same time, British airlines are arranging to obtain landing rights in Botswana, another neighbor of South Africa's. There would be little local interference. Oliver Tambo, head of the African National Congress, the chief opposition organization in South Africa, has said that exceptions to the sanctions would be recognized by neighboring countries because of their trade dependence on South Africa. Assuring airline service is important to South Africa because its low-volume, high-value exports of precious minerals are carried by air freight. These minerals--principally gold, diamonds, and platinum--together account for two-thirds of South Africa's foreign-exchange earnings. Bulk exports like coal, manganese, and chrome might be stopped by a shipping embargo. But the case of Rhodesian chrome, supposedly banned worldwide by a United Nations decree in the early 1970s, reminds us that such sanctions do not always work.