South Africa gets shock batons from U.S.

Before he left office in 1978, Philadelphia's mayor Frank Rizzo repeatedly urged his city council to purchase electric-shock batons for crowd control use by his police force, already under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for alleged brutality. The city council never yielded to Rizzo's demands.

Now South Africa, more infamous for its brutality than Rizzo's police, has been able to purchase 2,500 shock batons from an unnamed United States manufacturer.

The sale -- licensed by the Commerce Department on April 26, but only recently revealed - has kicked up a controversy in the human rights community and in Congress.

"We are appalled and outraged that the Reagan administration would approve this sale. Sending shock batons to South Africa clearly places the Reagan administration on the side of the apartheid regime's growing repression against the majority Black population," protests Jean Sindab, executive director of the Washington Office on Africa.

The 2500 shock batons, valued at $180,000, are frequently used for torturing political prisoners, according to the Washington Office on Africa, a church and trade union-sponsored organization. Although the shock batons were sold to a private South African firm and not the military or police, there were no restrictions regarding resale to a third party, Sindab notes.

With the lack of restriction ' on resale, the Commerce Department's approval of the sale appears to undermine section 502(b) of the Export Administration Act which prohibits the export of "crime control and detection instruments and equipment to a country, the government of which engages in a consistent ' pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights."

The U.S. is "advancing South Africa's repressive capacity" with this sale, says Salih Abdul-Rahim, a spokesperson for TransAfrica, a Black American lobby for Africa and the Caribbean.

"The sale reinforces the notion that we are not opposed to South Africa's apartheid" policy of racial segregation, comments Representative Howard Wolpe (D-Mich.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa.

The Commerce Department is being criticized for its failure to submit an export application for the batons to the State Department. Although it has ultimate licensing authority, the Commerce Department is supposed to consult the State Department on items which may affect U.S. foreign policy. A spokesperson for the State Department's human rights bureau, Paula Kuzmich, said that the State Department would have opposed the sale. Commerce claims the approved export was simply a human error. It was a case of "a staffer mistakenly placing the rejected application in the stack of applications that were approved," says Bo Denysyk, deputy assistant secretary for export administration at Commerce. Denysyk adds that his office processes 80,000 applications per year and his staff is not beyond making mistakes.

Denysyk's explanation has raised some eyebrows. "One must remember that Denysyk was the one pushing for the Commerce Department's loosening of export-controls to South Africa last spring," Sindab says.

This article was written by Jerry McCall, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.