Halt Crackdown, U.S. Tells S. Africa : Botha Offers to Talk With Tutu, Moderate Blacks

President Pieter W. Botha, after imposing virtual martial law on many of South Africa’s black townships last weekend, opened the door Friday to talks with moderate black leaders on ways to end the country’s widespread civil unrest.

Botha, who has come under strong domestic and foreign criticism since his declaration last weekend of a state of emergency in 36 cities and towns, expressed willingness to meet with Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and said that a committee of Cabinet ministers is ready to negotiate with any black leader who “does not propagate violence.”

But Botha said that black leaders must take the initiative for such discussions, and he made it clear that any such talks would be on the government’s terms--conditions that blacks have rejected in the past.

‘Sincerely Interested’

“Anyone is free to approach the Cabinet committee (on black affairs) or myself to make appointments for discussions,” Botha said through a spokesman. The spokesman added that the president is “genuinely, sincerely interested in opening such a dialogue” with black leaders.

On Thursday, Tutu told reporters that he “would be prepared to talk to the president, provided it was not something he was doing to have a kind of talk-shop.”

The two men, who have been equally critical of each other in recent months, last met in 1980, and a Botha-Tutu meeting now would be seen as a significant step toward a white-black dialogue intended to reach a political accommodation in this white-ruled, black-majority nation.

Botha was strongly urged Friday by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party, to open such a dialogue as part of a five-point plan “to stabilize conditions in the (black) townships and enable the government to catch up with pressures for change.”

910 Being Detained

Meanwhile, police announced Friday that the number of people detained without charge under the emergency regulations had risen to 910, an overnight increase of 114. Civil rights groups asserted that the actual number is well over 1,000 and that the police are trying to minimize the numbers.

Only “a very few incidents” of unrest were reported by national police headquarters in Pretoria. In the most serious, police arrested 214 high school students in Oudtshoorn, near Cape Town, on charges of intimidating other students to enforce a boycott of classes there. Six thousand students at the University of the Western Cape, a school for Colored (mixed-race) students outside Cape Town, held a daylong rally protesting the state of emergency, but police did not intervene.

In Durban, 700 striking bakers, all of them black, marched through the city demanding higher pay. The march took on strong political overtones as the bakers sang protest songs and raised their fists in the black-power salute. Other black workers left their jobs to join them, increasing white fears that a general strike may be coming.

Share Prices, Currency Fall

Share prices on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the South African rand took another beating Friday as investors moved millions of dollars out of the country in the wake of France’s announcement that it was imposing economic sanctions, including a ban on new investment, because of the state of emergency.

Over the past week, the rand has declined more than 9% in value, dropping to 47 cents to the U.S. dollar for a time Friday from nearly 55 cents to the dollar a week ago. Share prices were also down 9% to 10% on average compared to last week, largely because of the withdrawal of foreign funds from the market, stockbrokers said.

An 18-month inflow of foreign capital that brought about $500 million here has now been reversed, analysts said, and as much as $75 million a month is leaving as investors see prolonged unrest further damaging an economy that has yet to recover from a deep recession.

Slabbert, speaking at a political rally in Cape Town, called not only for government talks with Tutu and other leading black churchmen on how violence can be reduced but for their appointment to a national commission on the causes for the unrest, in which nearly 500 people have been killed during the past year.

Basis for Dialogue

This dialogue, Slabbert said, must be based on an unequivocal pledge to repeal the country’s segregationist laws, particularly those that regulate where blacks may live and work, and on a white willingness to negotiate a political compact for the country that will provide for “one constitution, one citizenship, one South Africa.”

Slabbert called for the unconditional release of Nelson R. Mandela, the jailed leader of the African National Congress, and other political prisoners.

Unless the ruling National Party moves quickly and boldly, Slabbert added, its reform attempts will continue to follow a pattern of “too little, too late.”

The Methodist Church of Southern Africa urged the government to call a “national convention” to resolve the country’s future, declaring that the emergency powers given to police and other security forces to restore order cannot deal with the roots of the unrest.

‘Continue to Ferment’

“Unless (Botha) combines this drastic step (imposing the state of emergency) with the equally dramatic action of calling for a national convention and talking and negotiating with all leaders of the people of South Africa, including those leaders at present in prison, the dissatisfaction of people who have been denied fundamental human rights for so long will simply continue to ferment beneath what may appear to be a superficial calm,” the statement said.

Further protests over the emergency regulations, particularly the powers of arrest and detention given to the police and the army, came from the South African Council of Churches, the South African Assn. of Law Societies and several civil liberties groups, all of which called for an early end to the state of emergency.

Protesting widespread detention of civic, labor and student organization leaders, as well as clergymen, the council of churches said:

‘Disastrous Aftermath’

“The long-term effects of (police) actions in this regard spell disaster for the future of South Africa. Levels of resentment, long over the danger mark, will sooner or later boil over in a disastrous aftermath for all of us.

“The detentions (have) in some cases taken from our townships the restraining hand of mature leadership. The violence we all deplore may become more acute because of this action by the authorities,” the church council said.

The Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, which monitors security detentions, expressed “great fears for the safety of those in detention.”

“The authorities have even greater powers of arrest and detention than before, and there are fewer safeguards to protect detainees,” the committee said in a statement. “We fear, and predict, the inevitability of deaths in detention.”

Gen. Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner, said in Pretoria that the higher number of detentions under the emergency regulations reflect police efforts to arrest those suspected of murders, assaults, arson and other crimes in recent unrest--not just people regarded as political activists.

Police praised the assistance they said they are getting from black residents around Johannesburg and in the Vaal River region, 50 miles south of here, and Louis le Grange, minister of law and order, Fridayvisited the Johannesburg towns now under the state of emergency.