Danish Anti-Apartheid Policy

The fact that a Danish Embassy in South Africa was not established until 1990 did not mean that Denmark had been complacent about the apartheid regime. On the contrary. Since I joined the Foreign Service in 1965, I remember how Foreign Ministers Per Hækkerup and later K.B. Andersen formulated an increasingly muscular Danish anti-apartheid policy, which we sought to strengthen through cooperation first with the other Nordic countries and, after 1973, also in the EC circle. I had seen this development from the front row, as I had been involved in the Foreign Ministry’s political department in drafting the Danish position on the expected resolutions against the apartheid regime at the UN’s annual general assemblies in 1966 and 1967. That year I was a young secretary in the Danish delegation to the autumn session in New York.14