The International Status of South West Africa

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T | 1HE South African Government's mandate in South West Africa has been a subject of discussion at the United Nations for twelve years, and the International Court of Justice has pronounced three advisory opinions about it. Now Britain, the United States, and Brazil have agreed to form a Good Offices Committee I to try, with South Africa, to find a formula agreeable to all concerned that will accord 'international status' to South West Africa. Behind all the political and legal dispute lies a long history, in which Western standards of international law and justice have been put to the test. The tribes of South West Africa, some 330,000 people, live in a land about the size of France. The Herero, Nama, Berg Damara, and Bushmen who once inhabited the southern part of the country are today either living in eight separate reservations, requiring passes to go from one to another, or are segregated in 'locations' in towns. Their menfolk work on the white man's farms and in his mines. It has been so with them for many years. The African inhabitants of South West Africa have experienced both the harshness of German rule and the severity of the South African administration's segregation policies. Their story illustrates the growth of the concept of accountability to an international authority in a period which has seen two World Wars, the birth and defeat of Nazism in Germany, and the rise of Communism in one of the great underdeveloped countries and its spread through a large part of Eastern Asia and Europe. The fate of all these peoples is, humanly speaking, in the hands of the United Nations. For twelve successive years a member State, South Africa, has refused to submit a Trusteeship Agreement for the administration of this territory under the United Nations, as all other nations have done which held a territorial Mandate under the League of Nations. The issue is not merely a legal one. It is no mere abstract point of law whether South Africa has an obligation under the Mandates Treaty of the League or under the Charter of the United Nations. Whether the League Mandate 1 The Good Offices Committee established by the United Nations at its Twelfth Session (A/RES/i I43 of 25 October I957) consists of the following representatives, appointed by the Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Brazil: U.K.: Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, formerly Resident Commissioner in Bechuanaland and first Governor General of Ghana; U.S.A.: Mr Walter N. Walmsley, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, State Department; Brazil: Sr Vasco T. Leitao do Cunha, Ambassador to Cuba. 3I8