S. Africa Offers to Limit Resettlement of Blacks

The government said Friday that it will partially suspend one of the most hated policies of apartheid, the forced resettlement of black communities to tribal homelands away from South Africa’s white population.

The announcement was the climax of a week in which President Pieter W. Botha offered terms for the release of imprisoned black leader Nelson Mandela, and South Africa’s new, three-chamber Parliament conducted its first working session.

Botha’s National Party, which has controlled the white-minority government since 1948, said it is offering the 24 million-member black majority a new deal.

Gerrit Viljoen, minister of cooperation and development, said the government will review the planned resettlement of hundreds of thousands of blacks who are to be moved to tribal homelands and off land set aside for whites.

Under South African law, blacks are considered citizens of 10 homelands, with political rights there rather than in South Africa.

Viljoen, one of the National Party’s leading theorists, said the government would continue resettling black communities if their leaders agreed.

The practical effect of the review remained unclear because the government often is accused of appointing black leaders who go along with its wishes and who lack support from their own people.

The review will include 25 to 30 rural “black spots,” villages in white areas, and about the same number of urban black townships, Viljoen said. He said he was not sure how many people were involved, but it was at least in the hundreds of thousands.

Viljoen mentioned, in particular, Kwangema and Driefontein, two rural black areas in the eastern part of South Africa that have been the targets of foreign critics. The review of the policy was initiated because “the government is sensitive to the general critical attitude toward resettlement,” he said.

An estimated 3.5 million blacks and a handful of whites have been moved during the 30 years since the policy was implemented.

On Monday, Botha said the government would consider giving blacks property rights in their townships near major cities. Currently, South Africa owns all the property and blacks may only rent.

During debate Thursday in the white chamber of Parliament, Botha offered to release Mandela if he renounces the use of violence. Mandela, 66, leader of the outlawed African National Congress, has served 20 years of a life term for sabotage.

Pretoria Must Act First

The African National Congress, echoing remarks by anti-apartheid groups in South Africa, criticized the condition Botha set and said the government must renounce violence first.

Mandela, a former policeman, boxer and lawyer, is imprisoned near Cape Town and could not respond publicly to the offer.

However, the African National Congress, in a statement telexed from Lusaka, Zambia, to the Associated Press in Johannesburg, vowed to continue its armed struggle.

“The ANC will talk to the government only if the regime gives up its violence,” it said.

The congress, for generations a peaceful organization, turned to armed resistance in the 1960s, and two years ago began using car bombs.

Mandela’s Special Niche

Its strength is difficult to assess because it has been banned and operates out of other countries such as Zambia. However, newspaper polls have shown that Mandela--as titular leader of the ANC and as the country’s most respected black nationalist leader--would be elected the country’s leader if blacks could vote.

The United Democratic Front, a multiracial, anti-apartheid umbrella group, said: “For Mandela to make such a pledge (of non-violence) would mean he must distance himself from the ANC and his entire political struggle. . . . The offer will not be acceptable to the man.”