S. African Clerics Ask for Reforms : Meet Botha but ‘Hardly Communicate’

Leaders of South Africa’s multiracial Christian churches met with President Pieter W. Botha on Monday, calling on him to initiate dramatic reforms, including the abolition of apartheid, to end continuing unrest here.

But they said afterward that “we hardly began to communicate at all.”

A delegation representing the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches told Botha that “certain dramatic moves are required to provide sufficient hope for reason to prevail and for violence to diminish.” The delegation conspicuously did not include the bishop of Johannesburg, Anglican prelate Desmond Tutu, who had previously indicated that he would not attend.

Must Take Lead

The churchmen said that unless Botha takes the initiative, the nation’s racial crisis will quickly deepen.

In urging a “significant, substantial move away from apartheid,” the clerics asked the government to immediately abolish the restrictions on where blacks may live and work in urban areas and to overhaul black education.

They also asked Botha to call “a national convention to search together for a constitutional formula” that all groups in South Africa could accept. Political prisoners, they said, should be freed to take part in the convention--including Nelson Mandela, the long-jailed leader of the guerrilla African National Congress.

But Archbishop Denis Hurley, chairman of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, told reporters that “our two perceptions of South Africa were so different that we hardly began to communicate at all.”

“He did not really answer any of the issues we raised,” Hurley said. “We haven’t anything substantial to take with us as a result of this meeting.”

Archbishop Philip Russell, the head of the Anglican church in South Africa, who led the delegation of nine clergymen--including both black and white members--said, “I am not without hope that, on reflection and in consultation with his ministers, something will happen, that the president will act.”

The church leaders’ plea will be hard for Botha to ignore. In a nation like South Africa, which strongly professes Christianity, the moral authority of the clergy is not easily dismissed, and Hurley, Russell and the others in the delegation command public respect as men of peace and of moderation.

Botha--who also met with a delegation from the strictly segregated Dutch Reformed Church, to which he and most of the Dutch-descended Afrikaners belong, as well as with a racially mixed group of theologians--said later that “further talks will follow.”

He said that the clergymen’s allegations of police brutality under the month-old state of emergency will be immediately investigated by South Africa’s minister of justice.

Botha Meets Falwell

The president held a fourth meeting with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, the major U.S. movement of fundamentalist Christians. Falwell said afterward that during a five-day visit here, he has found “a country that is making tremendous progress” away from apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation, and feels that Botha is doing all he can to promote peaceful change.

Falwell also said he will undertake a million-dollar lobbying effort, including two prime-time television specials, to fight proposed U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa. He said he will seek a meeting with President Reagan to discuss ways to defeat pending sanctions legislation in Congress.

To counter those calling for the sale of stock in American companies doing business here and for a ban on the sale of South African Krugerrands, Falwell said, he will ask his followers to join “a reinvestment crusade,” buying the gold coins as well as shares in firms operating here.

In his meetings with the South African churchmen, Botha reiterated a pledge to lift the state of emergency, which covers 36 magisterial districts in and around Johannesburg, the Vaal River region south of Johannesburg and much of eastern Cape province as soon as the violence in those areas diminishes. The interdenominational delegation had asked that the state of emergency be ended and troops be withdrawn immediately from the 60 black townships under restrictions.

But the leaders of the interdenominational delegation, 80% of whose parishioners are black, felt that they had made little immediate progress in their talk with Botha and his senior ministers and expressed fear that the racial strife, in which approximately 630 people have been killed in the last year, will only worsen.

‘Two South Africas’

“There are two South Africas, and there are two clocks running in South Africa, the one at past midnight and the other at long before midnight,” the Rev. Peter Storey, president of the Methodist Church, said. “I think we were trying to represent those for whom midnight has already struck . . . the South Africa where hopelessness and despair have given way to rage.”

In a four-page memorandum to Botha, the church leaders lamented that the president, in a major policy speech last week, did not outline specific political, economic and social reforms and give both blacks and whites confidence that peaceful change is coming.

“Because the hopes (for the speech) were raised so high and because so little specific change was indicated, we fear a further escalation rather than a diminishing of violence,” the delegation said. “We are utterly convinced that unless people see a significant, substantial move away from apartheid to sharing, there will be no end to the unrest in South Africa.”

Bishop Tutu was invited to join the delegation but refused because of Botha’s unwillingness last month to grant him an urgent meeting after the declaration of the state of emergency.

Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent opposition to apartheid and minority rule, said later Monday that he had expected little to come from the session--”it would be the miracle of the century,” he commented. He added that he would still like to meet Botha, one-on-one.

Picking His Own Blacks

The South African president’s refusal to see him last month, Tutu said, means that Botha is unwilling to meet with black leaders not of his choosing and that he does not appreciate the urgency with which the black community views the continuing unrest and the state of emergency.

Meanwhile, the police reported scattered incidents of unrest in more than a dozen black townships east and west of Johannesburg, outside Pretoria, near Cape Town and in eastern and northern Cape province. One person was reported killed in Ciskei, a nominally independent tribal homeland in the eastern Cape.

Outside East London, police said that on Sunday night they used shotguns to disperse mourners at a wake for a youth killed in earlier unrest. Twenty-five people were wounded in that incident. The authorities classified the wake as an illegal gathering.

According to police headquarters in Pretoria, in the month since the state of emergency was declared, a total of 2,024 people have been arrested under special authority to detain anyone without charges for as long as two weeks. Of those, 922 are still in custody--half of them under an extension of their detention orders--and the remaining 1,102 have been released.