President Ronald Reagan Issues Executive Order Against Apartheid (1985)

Funding is also provided by this station and other public television stations, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. - After months of saying he was opposed to any form of economic sanctions against South Africa, President Reagan today did an about face. He announced he was imposing a package of sanctions designed to punish the regime's policy of racial discrimination known as apartheid. - I am signing today an executive order that will put in place a set of measures designed and aimed against the machinery of apartheid without indiscriminately punishing the people who are victims of that system. Measures that will disassociate the United States from apartheid, but associate us positively with peaceful change. The steps ordered by the President include a ban on loans from U.S. banks to the South African government unless the money is used to help Blacks, a ban on computer exports to South African military and law enforcement agencies, blocking the sale of nuclear technology, except under certain circumstances, and a proposed ban on the importation into the U.S. of the gold coin known as the Krugerrand. Secretary of State Schultz explained what the sanctions are supposed to achieve.

- These are actions that are designed to register our view against apartheid as distinct from actions designed to have an effect by depriving people in South Africa of economic livelihood, particularly Blacks, of course. Today's announcement was a last-minute move by the administration in the face of almost certain action by the Congress to impose sanctions under even stiffer terms, but it was enough to satisfy a number of Senate Republicans, including Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, who earlier had preferred a Congressional sanctions bill. - The second-best situation is one in which, by his own option, he adopts most of the things that we want to do, but for the moment, the South African government and the world must know that Americans speak with one voice. - Most Democrats, however, were not placated, including one of last year's candidates for President and House Speaker Tip O'Neill. - Faced with bipartisan repudiation of his construction engagement policy towards South Africa,

the President now says that he will take action by executive order. Unfortunately, the proposals announced this morning are chock full of loopholes. This package may play in Pretoria. It will be seen for what it's worth by the people suffering under the yoke of the government of South Africa. - There has been no definitive move by this President today to use the levers of our country to get the appropriate leaders at the table there to negotiate the right to vote, or to free a Mandela and Boesak, or to end the influx laws in that country. In a real sense, the President had a press conference today to end protests, not to end apartheid, to divert Congress, not to divest from South Africa. Late this afternoon, the Senate voted to sidetrack legislation imposing sanctions on South Africa, conservative senators who had been filibustering or blocking the sanctions bill since before the summer recess, today in an attempt to end that filibuster, failed by a vote of 53 to 34.