Reagan Imposes Limited Sanctions : Pretoria Will Not Be Coerced, Botha Replies

President Pieter W. Botha declared Monday that his government will not be coerced into broader or faster reforms by the economic sanctions imposed by President Reagan.

“South Africa’s decisions will be made by South Africa’s leaders, and the leaders of South Africa will themselves decide what is in our interests,” Botha said in Pretoria, the capital. “Reform can only be retarded by outside attempts to interfere.”

But Bishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, dismissed Reagan’s measures as ineffectual and questioned his motives in “supporting a system that is racist.”

“Reagan is bending over backwards to save the South African government from the consequences of its actions,” Tutu said at his home in Soweto, Johannesburg’s black suburb. “This government is generally acknowledged as vicious, immoral and evil, and yet we get all this wonderful sophistry about ‘constructive engagement’ turning into ‘active engagement.’

“I can only say that if you are supporting a system that is racist, what does that make you? If Reagan is supporting a racist policy, doesn’t that make him a racist?”

Like many anti-apartheid campaigners here, Tutu had hoped for much stronger American action to force the government to accelerate the pace of reform, and he was bitter Monday that Reagan’s measures fell so far short of that goal.

“If he were my president, I would be very ashamed of him,” the South African cleric said.

After months of congressional debate and public discussion in the United States, most South Africans had come to expect some American economic sanctions, and the only question here was how severe they would be.

Reagan’s actions in themselves were regarded as mild because major U.S. banks have already stopped lending money to the South African government, nuclear sales were already tightly restricted, if not prohibited, and computer sales to the police and army had been halted.

The great fear here earlier this year was that the 300 U.S. companies doing business here would be forced to withdraw, throwing tens of thousands of whites and blacks out of work and cutting off the flow of American technology and business know-how into South Africa’s depressed economy. The second fear was that new U.S. investment would be banned, stunting the recovery of the economy and slowing its long-term growth.

Both of these concerns were overtaken, however, when international banks, led by several American giants such as Chase Manhattan, reduced or cut off their short-term loans to South Africa last month. This precipitated a major financial crisis and caused Pretoria to suspend repayment on the principal of its $22 billion in foreign debts for at least four months.

The worry in the business community now, according to Raymond Parsons, executive director of the Assn. of Chambers of Commerce of South Africa, is that American sanctions will be copied by South Africa’s other trading partners and that this will set a precedent for further action by the United States. (France, Canada, Australia and several Scandinavian countries have already acted.)

Some Pleasure in Pretoria

But the Botha government was quietly pleased about some aspects of the Reagan action.

“The suspense is over,” a senior government official said. “We have been living with this sanctions threat for a year, and it has put tremendous pressure on us--not only to try to meet the expectations of foreign governments but also to show our resoluteness at home because our people do not like to be pushed around.

“The prospect of sanctions has paralyzed us in many ways, rather than pushing us forward, and that has not helped reform,” the official continued. “We don’t like what Reagan has done, but we understand why he acted the way he did and the pressure he has been under. Our hope now is to move on with reform, in our own way and at our own pace as the state president (Botha) said. The commitment to reform is there, but it is very hard for him to operate under such tremendous pressure.”

Another South African hope is that the U.S. decision to adopt largely symbolic sanctions will discourage other countries from trying to be tougher and that the return of Herman W. Nickel, the U.S. ambassador, will bring back the envoys of the European Community, Canada, Australia and other countries that withdrew them in protest in July and August.

Botha reiterated his government’s commitment to gradual political, economic and social reform, noting that it recently rejected “political domination by any one community,” “the exclusion of any community from political decision-making” and racial discrmination in any form.

“Despite outside pressures, the South African government will actively pursue its program of reform,” he said. “Our objective remains political participation of all communities up to the highest constitutional level.”

The sanctions, Botha added, will actually diminish American influence here, presumably because the United States can no longer pretend to be a disinterested party, and yet not achieve the stated goal of quickly ending apartheid.

‘Punitive’ to Blacks

Although recognizing that Reagan’s actions are “less harmful” than legislation proposed by Congress, “the effect nonetheless is punitive,” Botha said, adding that South African blacks are bound to suffer more than whites from the measures.

Over the last year, however, blacks have reversed their previous opposition to sanctions. According to a newspaper poll, they now favor such steps, even if they result in reduced employment and sharpened conflict with the government in the short term.

Tutu, reporting that perhaps as many as 1,000 blacks have died in the sustained civil unrest of the last year--although government officials put the number closer to 700--said he has been amazed at the “White House equanimity” at so many deaths and wondered whether this would be true if the victims were whites.

“We are basically being told that black people are expendable,” Tutu charged.

The measures imposed Monday by Reagan, the bishop went on, have the appearance of toughness but are, in fact, “not very onerous.”

“The President, for me, is more interested in avoiding embarrassment and humiliation of his veto (of the proposed legislation) being overridden than in the victims of the vicious policies of apartheid.”

The liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party accused the government of having “squandered the borrowed time” that President Reagan’s policy of constructive engagement had given it to enact reforms. The opposition urged the government to begin the “swift dismantling of apartheid and the negotiation of a new deal in which all South Africans can participate.”

Incidents of Violence

Meanwhile, anti-government rioting continued Monday in seven black and mixed-race townships around the country. The burned body of an unidentified man was found in Zwide, outside Port Elizabeth. In Queenstown, a black local official shot and killed a man in a mob that was stoning and trying to set fire to his house. And in Guguletu, outside Cape Town, the death toll rose to four from Saturday’s riots.