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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 2, 1985
coalition, known as the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM), is
spearheaded by Randall Robinson's TransAfrica, a lobbying organi
zation. They have made clear their commitment to the ANC and to
other revolutionary movements and regimes sponsored by Moscow in
Africa and the Caribbean. Since then, Mr. Robinson has given the
national media a daily, carefully orchestrated "story."•••
The polite dignitaries on the picket line, knowingly or unwit
tingly, are acting to transform South Africa into an Ethiopia, a
Uganda, [ or] an Angola.... That is the ultimate purpose of the
economic warfare campaigns to end economic relations and isolate
South Africa from the United States. TransAfrica's FSAM crusa
ders are not fazed by the fact that such economic measures would
force America to depend on the Soviet Union as the sole alterna
tive supplier of a variety of strategic minerals we now buy free
ly from South Africa••••
Does it matter particularly whether South Africa is ruled in five
years time by a government allied with the Soviet Union?
The
answer is yes, because ultimately our continued freedom depends
on it. South Africa is essential to the strategic survival of
the United States and Western Europe•••• South Africa is the sole
source in the non-Communist world of a multitude of rare minerals
which are critical to the industrial and military strength of the
West--among them chromium, platinum and vanadium.
These and
other rare metals form the exotic alloys that enable rockets and
jet engines to withstand intense heat, and which strengthen sub
marine hulls against the enormous pressures of the deep oceans,
-and have many specialized func·tions in our high technology.
There is one alternative source for those minerals--the soviet
Union.
Furthermore, geography has placed South Africa astride the ship
ping lanes traveled by the oil tankers carrying crude oil from
the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of
Good Hope into the Atlantic. The government which rules South
Africa can control the tanker traffic carrying the Gulf's petro
leum to Western Europe, Latin America and the United States.
The leaders of the Soviet Union obviously are aware of this. In
sum, the blunt fact remains that South Africa represents the
jugular vein of the West, and that even if South Africa hadrw
controversial""and unpopular racial and ethnic regulations, that
country would be a target of Soviet imperialism•••• Without South
Africa's minerals, America's high-technology defense industries
would have to depend on the Soviets for those rare strategic
minerals. If America did not buy minerals from South Africa,
what price do you think the Soviets would set?
There is also a moral irony in this•••• Soviet gold, as Alexander
Solzhenitsyn told us, is the product of the Soviet forced labor
camps which comprise the Gulag Archipelago. Forced labor ac
counts for nearly all of Soviet mining operations. How the Sovi
et cynics must jeer to see America and Europe urging abandonment
of trade with South Africa when their only alternative must be to
line up at the Soviet trade counter and, therefore, to encourage