Black Caucus raps foreign policy

The Congressional Black Caucus challenged President Reagan's foreign policy as treatening to put America "on the wrong side of history," and it said UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick should be fired. The entire US foreign policy should not be based only on an "East-West confrontation," as it appears at present, the caucus said.

It said Mrs. Kirkpatrick should lose her job one grounds that her March 15 meeting with South African military officials "has removed any effectiveness Ambassador Kirkpatrick might have had at the United Nations."

Ambassador Kirkpatrick personally defended her controversial meeting with South African Lt. Gen. P. W. van der Westhuizen, saying, "The meeting in question was simply a routine application of my general policy of seeing a lot of different people and listening to the opinions of different kinds of people."

hird-world and African delegates to the United Nations, also alarmed at the Kirkpatrick meeting, have asked Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to protest any softening of US policy toward the South African. government.