South Africa Offers to Hold Talks With Outlawed Black Groups if They Renounce Violence Against Apartheid

Under mounting pressure to talk with the outlawed African National Congress, President Pieter W. Botha said Friday that South Africa’s minority white regime is ready for the first time to deal with such black opposition groups if they renounce violence.

Senior government officials described Botha’s statement in Cape Town as “a significant policy shift,” since it provides the basis for the legalization of the banned groups in exchange for their rejection of violence in the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation.

Black political observers, however, said that the African National Congress, outlawed in 1960, would want more than just legalization in return for ending its intermittent guerrilla war against the regime. At the minimum, they said, it would seek a government commitment to end apartheid, the release of all political prisoners, the return of exiles and a guarantee of free political activity--all conditions cited by the group’s leader, Nelson Mandela, in a recent message from his Cape Town prison cell.

Goes Step Further

The president’s declaration Friday took a step further his offer two weeks ago of amnesty for political prisoners, including Mandela, if they renounce violence.

Mandela has rejected the offer, but Botha declared Friday: “I am willing to go even further. . . . If the African National Congress and other organizations concerned also decide to reject and renounce violence, the government is willing to talk to them, as with any other organization that strives for true peace and development for the peoples of our land.”

Despite black skepticism, the president’s statement encouraged some who are pressing the government for a faster pace of political reform.

“The significance of the current debate,” the liberal English-language newspaper the Star said in an editorial Friday, “is that white and black South Africans are for the first time being seen to attempt resolution through a joint process.”

Opinion polls in December showed that almost half of white South Africans believe that the government should talk with the African National Congress, the strongest of the black opposition groups.

14 Prisoners Accept

Botha also announced Friday that the clemency offered Mandela and other black nationalist leaders serving life sentences would be extended to other political prisoners, who have not been jailed as long.

Justice Minister H. J. Coetsee later said that 14 more prisoners had accepted the government’s terms and that their pledges to reject violence as a means of political struggle would be taken into account with their applications for parole. Four longtime prisoners will be released shortly under terms of the amnesty, officials have announced.

However, three of the African National Congress leaders convicted of treason with Mandela in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment joined with him Friday in rejecting the government’s conditions for their release. In a six-page memorandum to Botha, they endorsed Mandela’s demands and described the government’s conditional offer of freedom as an “attempt to deceive the world that the government is reasonable and humane.”