Peace, Power Sharing Elusive : S. Africa’s Leader Sees Bright Hopes Fading

When he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first state president a year ago, Pieter W. Botha had a sweeping vision of what his country could be--a place where whites and blacks had finally made their peace, where the old racism had given way to “cooperative coexistence,” where the harmony of so many diverse racial, ethnic and religious groups might even offer the world a lesson in communal harmony.

The chances were good, Botha felt, that he could achieve this under the country’s new constitution, which was based on the politics of consensus, and with a growing realization by whites, including his own Afrikaner people, that in the future, power would have to be shared with other communities.

And the president’s hopes were buoyed by the accelerating pace of reform in most aspects of South African society.

But a year of sustained civil strife, the worst in many years in South Africa’s turbulent history, has shattered that dream, and Botha--who hoped to be remembered as one of the country’s greatest leaders, a man who shaped South Africa’s future into the 21st Century--now seems a tragic figure, clinging to a rejected blueprint for that future and unable to cope with the resulting turmoil.

“He has little idea of what is happening in the country now,” the Rev. Peter Storey, president of the South African Methodist Church, said last week after a meeting of clergy leaders with Botha. “He does not understand what has gone wrong. We had the feeling that, as much as he sincerely wants to get the country out of this increasingly acute crisis, he is not sure what to do, where to turn, how to proceed.”

‘Tragic Figure’ Seen

To Alex Boraine, chairman of the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party, the 69-year-old president, so buoyant when he took office last September, has in the last year become “a tragic figure clearly incapable of meeting the challenge of our times.”

“I have no doubt that Mr. Botha has attempted to act within a moral framework, and in this he is unique among his predecessors,” Boraine said. “Regrettably superimposed over this moral framework, however, is the straitjacket that has been fashioned of a narrow sectionalism and race consciousness (that has left him) temperamentally and historically incapable of introducing the very reforms his moral framework implies and demands.”

Nothing that Botha has done so far has restored order or successfully countered the pessimistic predictions of Bishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, that South Africa is “on the brink of catastrophe . . .of a bloodbath.”

The state of emergency that Botha declared five weeks ago, effectively imposing martial law on scores of black townships, has only brought more deaths, more injuries, more clashes between the police and black youths and among blacks themselves, and the death toll in a year of unrest is nearly 650. Botha’s pledge to negotiate the country’s political future with black leaders who reject violence has been dismissed as less than credible, and racial polarization has increased sharply.

Also, the state of South Africa’s foreign relations is at an all-time low, compounding the crisis, and U.S. and European demands for dramatic political change have put even more pressure on him.

Almost daily, calls are made for his resignation. Most come, predictably, from the left--from members of the Progressive Federal Party and anti-apartheid groups such as the United Democratic Front.

But some have come from the political center that Botha has increasingly depended upon in recent years to protect him from the far right of his own governing National Party as he has tried to move South Africa away from apartheid and minority white rule.

“It’s time for you to go, P.W.,” the influential Johannesburg newspaper Business Day said in a front-page editorial after the president failed in a recent major speech to outline specific political, economic and social reforms.

“With the eyes of the world on him, he behaved like a hick politician,” the editorial said. “He made a mockery of the support that he has received in the past from the business community. He has made fools of our friends abroad. . . . Botha showed the world . . . that he was no statesman.”

Too Early to Judge?

This judgment may be as premature as it is harsh, but pressure on Botha is growing to rescue his reforms and to validate the confidence that was placed in him and his strategy of evolutionary change by many South Africans--including some moderate blacks, Asians and Coloreds (people of mixed race).

“Don’t count P.W. out just yet,” said a veteran South African political journalist who has known the president for many years and sees him regularly. “He is a man of great inner strength and of steadfast conviction, and these have carried him through very rough times before. His critics call it stubbornness, but even they don’t question his determination to carry on with what he believes is right, whatever opposition or difficulties he may encounter. . . .

“You may dispute whether a reformist, gradualist approach is sufficient to South Africa’s needs, whether faster and more dramatic changes are not required now,” the journalist said, asking not to be quoted by name, “but he argues very persuasively that there is no real alternative.”

Botha sees not just the demands of South Africa’s black majority, his supporters explain, but also the fears of the nation’s whites--particularly his fellow Afrikaners, who are descended from Dutch, French and German colonists and who have formed the government here since the National Party came to power in 1948.

“Unless the president can take the majority of whites, including the Afrikaners, with him, we are not going to move forward,” a junior Cabinet minister said recently, “and that means we will move backward.

“What the president has to worry about is not just the black revolution that attention is focused upon, but a white backlash that could be equally as violent and, through attacks by white vigilantes on blacks, lead to a race war. This is not a remote possibility; there are even signs of it now, and frankly we in the government are very worried.”

Doesn’t Satisfy Blacks

Yet, Botha is widely perceived here--certainly by most blacks--as catering far too much to the fears of Afrikaners and not doing enough to force them to accept faster and broader changes.

Although in 1978, when he became prime minister, he proclaimed that South African whites must “adapt or die,” he is seen, even within the National Party, as reformulating the apartheid system, not dismantling it.

“You do not devote your life to a cause, as P.W. Botha has done to Afrikaner nationalism, and change your thinking radically, however dramatic and compelling the country’s situation,” says a National Party member of Parliament who is identified with the party’s more moderate side--the verligte, or “enlightened ones.” This group is eager for reforms, including the dismantling of apartheid.

“He has changed a lot in his six years as prime minister and even in his year as state president,” the party member said, “but underneath he is the same P.W. we had come to know and love--some would say hate--over the previous four decades. He is still committed foremost to serving the volk , the Afrikaner people, and seeing them prosper.”

Botha has been a professional politician since 1936, when he dropped out of college in Bloemfontein, the capital of South Africa’s highly conservative Orange Free State, where he was studying law, economics and politics, to work as an organizer for the National Party.

From his youth, Botha was an ardent Afrikaner nationalist. “We argued politics very much,” he told a biographer, and his political thinking was first shaped at home.

His father, a wealthy farmer outside the village of Paul Roux in the Orange Free State, fought as a commando in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. As a so-called “bitter-ender,” the father never accepted the British victory and the continued political domination it gave the English settlers here until 1948.

“He called himself a wild Boer,” Botha once said of his father. “He was very proud (the British) had not been able to catch him.”

Family Deaths in Captivity

During the war, the bitter aftermath of which still divides South Africa’s whites, his mother was put in a British concentration camp, and two of the three children she had then died in the camp. Her first husband was in a British prisoner installation on the Indian Ocean island of Ceylon, since renamed Sri Lanka, and he died after his return to South Africa following the war.

These family tragedies aside, Pieter Botha--who was born Jan. 12, 1916, the year after his mother remarried--came to enjoy a privileged boyhood. A.C. van Wyk, a schoolmate whose family lived on the Botha farm as tenants and who later became a National Party member of Parliament, recalls him as “a spoiled child who wanted for nothing and was accustomed to getting his own way.”

One incident still rankles Van Wyk--the day Botha came to the Van Wyk home on the Shetland pony he rode to school, banged on the front door and then rode through the house and out the back door while Van Wyk’s father pleaded with his wife to clean up the mess and not make a fuss about the landlord’s son.

As a National Party organizer in Cape province, Botha proved himself a hard worker, a merciless organizer and a strong believer in loyalty and discipline--traits that still characterize him. Many who have known him through his political career attribute his success to the stubbornness, the doggedness with which he bulldozes opponents.

In public, his style is authoritarian and Old World. Even in conversation, he will often follow a reply to a question with a hard glare that defies further discussion. His quick temper is legendary.

But he is also known as a devoted husband and father. He and his wife, Elize, who is nearly as much of a political creature as her husband, have five children--three daughters and two sons--the youngest of whom was born in 1968 after 25 years of marriage.

His deep religious faith is another characteristic of his strong personality. Reflecting his Calvinist upbringing in the Dutch Reformed Church, to which most Afrikaners belong, Botha views almost every political issue from his faith in God and his adherence to a traditional and stern morality. When he speaks, he quotes un-self-consciously from the Scriptures, and he never hesitates to ask for divine blessing on his country.

‘Not One-Dimensional’

“In a modern age, he may seem a paradox--stern but compassionate, a bit of a fanatic but increasingly flexible,” a former aide remarked, asking not to be quoted by name. “He is not the one-dimensional man one sees thundering away on television. He is someone who is trying to do right by God and his people, someone who finds himself beset with the most urgent problems for which there is no quick solution.

“He is also someone who began his career with hopes and ambitions for his people, but who sees, late in his life, that new ways must be found to achieve them, and he is someone who has lived a lot and been shaped by those experiences.”

But Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the official opposition Progressive Federal Party, a liberal group, sees Botha as “a political manager, not a political thinker.”

“He is rather someone who can handle a crisis than someone who has visions,” Slabbert remarked. “I have no idea what his vision for the future is. Where are we headed?”

From the start of his political career, Botha has had few doubts about that: It is recovery for the Afrikaners of the country they founded and fought for, the country they developed and are determined to keep, whatever the means, whatever the cost.

He has been active from his student days in the Broederbond, the right-wing secret society of Afrikaners holding key positions throughout the society and dedicated to gaining and then retaining political and economic power for Afrikaners.

In the late 1930s, Botha helped form the Cape Town branch of the Ossewa Brandwag, the Sentinels of the Ox Wagon, a group that espoused a philosophy close to the national socialism of Germany and openly sympathized with Adolf Hitler. But he broke with the group in 1941, after three years’ membership, calling it dangerous to the “Christian nationalism of the Afrikaner people.”

True Strong-Arm Tactics

As a National Party organizer in Cape province, he proved adept at breaking up the rallies of Gen. Jan Smuts’ then-governing Union Party and of other rivals with the use of gangs of Afrikaner toughs.

“When he talks today about ‘political intimidation’ among the blacks,” says a prominent businessman who worked for the now disbanded Liberal Party, “he is speaking from experience. He knows how to twist people’s arms--literally--and, if necessary, break them.”

Elected to Parliament from the small Cape province town of George in 1948, Botha quickly became known as a savage debater who gave no quarter in his advocacy of National Party policies, particularly those designed to implement apartheid.

“If he were female, he would arrive in Parliament on a broomstick,” opposition lawmaker Helen Suzman once said of Botha, the only member of Parliament who, until he resigned last year to become president, had served longer than she.

Botha was appointed deputy interior minister in 1958, minister for Colored affairs in 1961 and defense minister in 1966 by Prime Ministers Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster. He succeeded Vorster as prime minister in 1978, when that veteran Afrikaner leader was moved upstairs to be chief of state amid a continuing scandal over the misuse of information funds.

As a Cabinet minister, Botha was noted for his administrative ability, his passion for hard work and for the vigor with which he carried out apartheid policies. Despite a professed sympathy for Coloreds--because a Colored family had sheltered his mother for three months during the Boer War--he was in the forefront of the fight to end Colored representation in Parliament. As minister for Colored affairs, he was responsible for the demolition of Cape Town’s main Colored neighborhood, District 6.

In his years as defense minister, he built the South African armed forces into the strongest on the continent south of the Sahara, and he established a weapons industry that enabled the country to not merely survive a United Nations arms boycott but also to become a significant arms exporter.

He also supported the South African invasion of Angola in the mid-1970s, at the height of the civil war there. This was the start of what has become a pattern of military interventions by Pretoria in neighboring countries. His biographers have written that he was troubled by the heavy casualties South African forces suffered, but he has never publicly expressed any regret.

For this battle against what he called Marxism’s “total onslaught” against South Africa, he got the nickname “Piet Wapen,” or “Piet the Gun.”

Rousted Mulder From Office

When Botha became prime minister amid the information scandal, he used the disclosures to oust a key political rival, Cornelius P. Mulder, the information minister and Vorster’s heir apparent, from the National Party leadership. In so doing, Botha was able to consolidate his own leadership position.

As prime minister and in the past year as president, he has surprised many with his “adapt or die” pragmatism. He has signed agreements with Marxist Angola and Mozambique, authorized black labor unions, brought Coloreds and Asians into Parliament and his Cabinet, relaxed many of the racial restrictions implicit in the system called “petty apartheid,” ended bans on interracial marriages and sexual relations, authorized multiracial political parties and, in January, pledged to negotiate with blacks a political system for the country’s future.

But Botha has made it clear that there are firm limits to this pragmatism. White South Africans will not accept a system of one man, one vote in a unitary state, he has declared repeatedly, because this would mean black-majority rule.

The country’s future political system must be based, he says, on group representation--a code phrase here for at least a white veto in a central government--and must ensure the maintenance of “group identity,” another code term that means continued segregation in housing, schooling and other areas that particularly concern whites.

Slabbert, the Progressive Federal Party leader and an Afrikaner himself, grants, as many black leaders also do, that there have been reforms under Botha, but he sees no change in the basic National Party goal of white control.

“He has never lied about what he intends doing,” Slabbert said. “He’s always been straightforwardly honest in saying that he is not scrapping any of his party’s basic principles. Nothing essential has changed, and that is the reason for the current crisis.”

The reforms Botha envisions, Slabbert says, are based on the country’s old apartheid structure of legally defined, classified race groups with separate political institutions and living in separate areas. For Botha, Slabbert says, even with the pledge to negotiate the country’s future with black leaders, “white political control at the top remains non-negotiable.”

Yet the changes that Botha has wrought as prime minister and now president have required courage. They have split the National Party and the whole Afrikaner group in a traumatic schism known as a volkskeuring , or a “rending of the people.” A willingness by whites now to cross the final divide and yield political control, Botha tells the country, is vital for their survival.

“We have many peoples and many communities,” he told a church gathering of more than 2 million blacks at Easter in a theme that he has emphasized to both white and black audiences in recent months. “No single community can be the only winner. We must be winners together, or we shall all be losers. . . .

“There is no more place for hatred and fear. There is no more time for suspicion and conflict. We must obey the word of God. We must live our lives in the spirit of Christ. We must carry out our obligation to love one another and do what is just and good. . . . We must jointly strive to find out what our problems are, and then we must jointly strive to find solutions. There is no hatred we cannot heal with love. There is no fear we cannot change to understanding. We must make a new beginning.”