Time to Negotiate, S. Africans Told : But Botha Won’t Spell Out Reforms, Dashing Hopes for Early End to Strife

President Pieter W. Botha told South Africa’s whites Thursday that they will have to negotiate the country’s future with its black majority, but he refused to spell out the reforms he envisions, dashing hopes that he would declare the government’s intention to end the apartheid system of racial separation and white-minority rule here.

“I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on a road to abdication and suicide,” Botha told the Natal province congress of his ruling National Party. “Destroy white South Africa and our influence in this subcontinent of southern Africa, and this country will drift into factional strife, chaos and poverty.”

Tough and combative, Botha warned that he is prepared to take much sterner measures to end the country’s continuing civil unrest, in which more than 620 people, all but a few of them blacks, have died in the past year.

‘Don’t Push Too Far’

“Our readiness to negotiate should not be mistaken for weakness,” Botha declared. “I have applied much self-discipline in the past weeks and months. I have been lenient and patient. But don’t push us too far.”

Botha’s warning was underscored by the imposition of a 10-p.m.-to-4-a.m. curfew on Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling black sister city, on Alexandra, another black ghetto suburb of Johannesburg, and on the troubled black townships around Port Elizabeth in eastern Cape province after demonstrations earlier Thursday by hundreds of rampaging youths in the townships.

The immediate reaction from anti-apartheid leaders was negative, as many complained that Botha yielded nothing to blacks and dismissed many of their grievances without a serious attempt to resolve them.

Tutu’s Disappointment

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, expressing disappointment in the speech, said in an interview with Cable News Network that it is “going to be very difficult to know who will avert the catastrophe that I believe we are on the brink of.”

Even before he spoke here, Botha was warned by Winnie Mandela, the wife of the imprisoned African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela, that if he offered little, “It will simply plunge this country into the worst violence any nation has ever seen.”

Five more people died in the unrest Thursday--four of them blacks shot by police dispersing mobs in the small Transvaal province towns of Witbank and Bethal and a fifth, a 16-year-old Colored, or mixed-race, youth who died from shrapnel wounds after a grenade attack on the home of a Colored political leader outside Cape Town.

Botha’s intention here Thursday was not so much to threaten blacks with harsher action as it was to tell whites that profound and far-reaching changes must come, that they can no longer dictate to the rest of the country, no longer prescribe its political course but must negotiate a solution to South Africa’s problems with the black majority.

“Today, we are crossing the Rubicon in South Africa,” he declared. “There can be no turning back.”

This did not mean black majority rule--Botha again rejected any political system based on one-man, one-vote in a unitary state--but it did mean by implication an eventual end of minority white rule.

Reform or Bloodshed

Describing his pledge to work out a new political system with black leaders as “my manifesto for a new South Africa,” Botha told blacks and whites that they must accept negotiations and gradual reform.

“The alternative is bloodshed, the alternative is murder, the alternative is gunpowder, the alternative is a thief who wants to get control of power in South Africa so he can ruin our country and way of life,” he said.

The government is preparing, the president said, for open-ended discussions with “elected black leaders” on the country’s political future, including specific issues such as a common South African citizenship for both blacks and whites, an easing of the laws and regulations restricting where blacks may work and live and an end to the resettlement of blacks in rural tribal homelands and perhaps an end to the homelands themselves.

“Any future constitutional dispensation providing for participation by all South African citizens should be negotiated,” Botha declared, in what government officials said was the first formal government pledge to resolve the country’s future through interracial negotiations, rather than simply white decisions.

“The overriding common denominator (in these talks) is our mutual interest in each other’s freedom and well-being,” Botha said. “Our peace and prosperity are indivisible. The only way forward is through cooperation and co-responsibility.”

In Pretoria, Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha described the president’s speech as unprecedented. “It is the first time in our history that this (commitment to negotiate with blacks on the country’s future) has been suggested by a white government,” he said. “We are very serious about this.”

Among the implications of the president’s speech, senior government officials said, were the abolition of those tribal homelands that had not been granted “independence” by Pretoria, the possible reabsorption of the four nominally independent homelands by South Africa if their residents wish, and an urbanization policy that accepts blacks as permanent residents of the country’s cities. The cities are reserved for whites under present laws.

President Botha, however, announced no specific new initiatives along these lines, no starting date or agenda for the proposed negotiations on South Africa’s future, no lifting of the 3 1/2-week-old state of emergency and no freedom for Nelson Mandela.

Changes Outlined Earlier

The policy changes he did allude to--the relaxation of controls on where blacks may live and work, a common citizenship, an end to resettlement of blacks in nominally independent tribal homelands and broad discussions on the country’s future--were first outlined in a speech to Parliament in January and reiterated in subsequent speeches in April and June.

What appeared to be new was the strength of Botha’s commitment to pursue this course despite the sustained civil unrest and the rising white backlash against any sort of compromise that would weaken white rule here.

Only on Wednesday, Andries Treurnicht, leader of the right-wing Conservative Party, which broke from the Nationalists several years ago on the issue of reform, warned Botha: “You are awakening the tiger in the whites. . . . You underestimate the dormant objection among the whites to the path of integration.”

Botha risks being “crushed between black radical demands and whites’ resistance . . . to being co-governed by nonwhites,” Treurnicht said. “No nation can be great if it seeks to be all things to all people.”

Although many black leaders, including such moderates as Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the chief minister of the Zulu tribal homeland in Natal, have asked Botha for a “declaration of intent” that would pledge an end to apartheid and set out his vision of South Africa’s future as a starting point for the negotiations, the president refused. He said such a pledge would prejudice those discussions, discouraging some blacks from participating and locking the whites into immediate concessions.

“I am not prepared to make it, not now and not tomorrow,” he said. “I am not going to walk into this trap. I am responsible for South Africa’s future, and I am not going to walk into this trap.”

He was equally adamant in his rejection once again of one-man, one-vote as unsuitable for South Africa with its black majority of 25 million, a white minority of 4.9 million and smaller Colored and Indian groups.

“Such an arrangement would lead to domination of one group over the others, and it would lead to chaos,” he said. “Consequently, I reject it as a solution.”

Botha did not say which black leaders he would talk to, but implied that they would be the leaders of the rural homelands and those elected to run the country’s black townships--virtually all of whom are regarded by most urban blacks as collaborators in the apartheid system.

Conditions on Mandela

Discussing the release of Nelson Mandela, imprisoned in 1961 and serving a life sentence for sabotage and subversion, Botha said the black nationalist leader would be freed only on condition that he renounce violence in the struggle against apartheid.

Mandela has refused to accept that condition, arguing that “only free men can negotiate.” His wife reiterated his position at her news conference Thursday in Johannesburg. “That is the end of the story,” Botha declared, dismissing calls here and abroad for Mandela’s unconditional release.

The president expressed considerable chagrin at the international speculation that surrounded his speech, complaining that his critics had sought to force him to make concessions and to limit his freedom to maneuver politically. Expectations were raised beyond the government’s ability to meet them, he said, and this created inevitable disappointment that could prove very dangerous.

He also stressed several times that his government will not yield to foreign pressure, including economic sanctions like those proposed by the U.S. Congress, in working out South Africa’s future.

Tells of Displeasure

Buthelezi, who was visiting Jerusalem, said Botha’s speech disappointed him because he found too little in it to stem the tide of violence sweeping South Africa. He said he was displeased that the president did not propose “the participation of black people in one government” and agree to release Mandela unconditionally.

C.F. Beyers Naude, the white secretary general of the South African Council of Churches, said Botha had lost the opportunity “to respond as a true statesman in a moment of crisis.”

“I am afraid that the reaction of the majority of the people of our country is going to be one of deep disappointment and anger and that of the world outside one of severe disillusionment,” Naude said.