Peace Hopes Fading Rapidly : Pretoria’s Curbs, Pledges Fail to Halt Deadly Spiral

The efforts of the South African government to end a year of civil unrest with tough police action and a promise of political reforms appear to have failed, and many here, blacks and whites alike, now see their country trapped in a spiral of violence that could take hundreds more lives.

Neither the state of emergency, which imposed virtual martial law on scores of South Africa’s black ghetto townships a month ago, nor President Pieter W. Botha’s renewed pledge last week to negotiate political changes with the country’s black majority has brought peace.

Both have, in fact, increased the sharp polarization that stems from apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation and minority white rule. More than 630 people, all but a few of them blacks, have died since the current unrest began last August with the implementation of a new constitution giving Coloreds--those of mixed race--and Indians a limited voice in the central government but excluding blacks.

This polarization, which is quickly foreclosing opportunities for compromise and chances for peace, is the reason why Bishop Desmond Tutu, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is now warning that South Africa is on the “brink of catastrophe” and “in imminent danger of a bloodbath on an immense and truly terrifying scale.”

And the foreboding and sadness that white liberals like the Rev. C.F. Beyers Naude, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, felt six months ago as the crisis deepened significantly is now close to despair with their assessment that a solution is further away, not closer.

Even the commentator on state-run Radio South Africa, which reflects government thinking, acknowledged this week: “The action taken so far in the state of emergency has evidently had little effect (in reducing unrest) . . . . Whatever the reasons may be, the protection that people are entitled to under the law is still inadequate. . . . “

At the same time, the commentator continued, “the demand for concrete action (to resolve black grievances) is insistent and rising . . . (and) is widespread in all communities in South Africa.”

But the Botha regime’s attempts to bring blacks into the political system without sacrificing white control have been repeatedly rejected by even the most moderate blacks. Their disillusionment after the president’s failure last week to announce specific reforms, let alone announce the dramatic initiatives that most believe are needed, was total.

‘Back at Square One’

Tutu said the prospects for peaceful change in South Africa now are “virtually nil,” and Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the leader of the country’s 6 million Zulus and the most moderate of black leaders, said the Botha speech “put us back at square one . . . without the least hope of progress.”

At the same time, the minimum demands of blacks--a declaration of intent on ending apartheid, the immediate repeal of restrictions on where blacks may work and live, the release of political prisoners and the return of those in exile and a national convention on a new form of government--are adamantly opposed by conservative whites, who have formed the core of Botha’s ruling National Party since it came to power in 1948 with a pledge to establish apartheid.

Botha’s fear is not so much the loss of whites to the ultrarightist Conservative and the Herstigte Nasionale (Reconstituted National) parties in upcoming parliamentary by-elections, a junior Cabinet minister said over the weekend, but a violent white backlash, including armed white vigilante attacks on black townships that would set off a race war.

“The day that the Afrikaners feel seriously threatened by the blacks,” the minister said of the 2.7 million Afrikaner descendants of Dutch, French and German colonists who hold most political power here, “they will take their guns from the closets, form themselves into commando groups and fight for their lives. Bloodbath does not begin to describe what will happen; holocaust would be better.”

Intransigence Charged

But South Africa’s 25 million blacks, and increasingly many English-speaking whites as well, view such arguments as an unacceptable excuse for what they take as the government’s political intransigence--and this has added to the already intense polarization here.

“Are we being made to understand that, rather than look for policies that can address the demand for change, the government has decided that it will shoot its way out of trouble?” Percy Qoboza, editor of the black newspaper City Press, asked after Botha’s speech last week.

Qoboza, like Tutu and other black leaders, is gravely concerned that the few remaining restraints on radicalized, alienated black youths will be lost and that violence will increase with many more deaths and will quickly spill out of the black townships in a major escalation of the unrest.

Until now, they point out, middle-class, middle-aged blacks have been able to intervene at crucial times to calm explosive situations, always using the underlying argument that liberation was coming and violence should not be used.

Moderates Undermined

The moderates say their position within the black community, especially with angry black youths, has been greatly undermined by Botha’s refusal to declare a basic commitment to end apartheid and his failure to announce any specific reforms last week.

“I am surprised that anyone in the black community will still listen to me,” Tutu said, recounting a story about a young black who questioned whether peaceful protests can work. “This youngster said, ‘Just show me what you have gained with peaceful change, and I will show you what we have gained with just a few stones.’ ”

Such challenges occur now in virtually every black family, with black youths asking their parents why they should go to school, why they should not stone the police, attack shopkeepers and kill suspected collaborators.

“The kids have taken up the slogan ‘Revolution now, education later,’ ” said a black computer specialist, the father of four teen-agers in Soweto, Johannesburg’s sprawling black suburb, “and we have absolutely nothing to say in reply. What little hope I personally had died with Botha’s speech. How can I tell my kids to be patient and work for peaceful change?”

Robert Schrire, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town, said that with recent political developments, “the middle ground has been undercut and undermined” in the black community, and he predicted that the increased polarization “will multiply the levels of conflict and intensify it beyond anything we have experienced here.”

‘Dramatic Moves Required’

Moderate black leaders, including such figures as Tutu, will find it harder and harder, Schrire said, to insist on nonviolence and prevent increasing attacks first on symbols of white domination and then on whites themselves.

Leaders of South Africa’s five major, multiracial Christian churches made the same point in a meeting Monday with Botha in Pretoria.

“We are utterly convinced that unless people see a significant, substantial move away from apartheid to sharing (of political power and wealth), there will be no end to the unrest in South Africa,” they said in a statement. “Certain dramatic moves are required to provide sufficient hope for reason to prevail and for violence to diminish.”

A month after imposing a state of emergency on 36 magisterial districts, each containing two to five black townships, in and around Johannesburg, in the Vaal River region south of here and in eastern Cape province around Port Elizabeth, the government is not much closer to ending the unrest than before, despite the detention without charge of more than 2,000 people.

Unrest Has Spread

Although some townships are significantly quieter now than a month ago, this has been achieved with the heavy deployment of police and troops, tantamount to military occupation. The unrest has spread, meanwhile, to other areas, notably Durban, East London, Cape Town and the nominally independent Xhosa tribal homelands of Ciskei and Transkei, many of which were relatively calm before.

Over the last month, about 160 people have been killed, according to police figures, compared with 475 in the previous 10 1/2 months--roughly three times the previous rate--largely because of the week of rioting in Durban. The number of injuries has also risen proportionately.

At the same time, anti-government protests have spread to university campuses here, in Cape Town and in Durban, bringing white students more strongly into the anti-apartheid movement. Black consumer boycotts are growing around Johannesburg, Cape Town, the Natal provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg and throughout eastern Cape province. And Coloreds and Indians have begun to join the protests in significant numbers for the first time since the elections last August for the Colored and Indian houses in the new tricameral Parliament.

This weekend, the government could face a substantial new challenge if the country’s largest black labor union, the 230,000-member National Union of Miners, strikes the country’s gold and coal mines in an attempt to demonstrate its strength and win increased pay and benefits for its members.

“The government’s strategy appears to have been to buy time with the state emergency in order to put some reforms into motion,” a member of Parliament for the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party said, asking not to be quoted by name. “But this was flawed from the outset because it was based on a wrong analysis of the causes of the unrest and on a determination to do what was necessary to retain power. That is not really a prescription for reform because it simply encourages the forces of revolution, and that is what has happened over the past month and the past year.”