S. Africa Creates Information Unit : Bureau to Direct Campaign on Policy of Gradual Reform

Alarmed by the image that a year of sustained civil unrest has given his government at home and abroad, President Pieter W. Botha is establishing a new information bureau to direct a propaganda campaign on behalf of his policy of gradual reform for South Africa.

The new bureau, which a presidential spokesman confirmed Saturday will be attached to Botha’s office, will focus initially on selling the government’s program of step-by-step reforms to South Africans, hoping to muster enough support among both whites and blacks to ensure that it does not become a victim of the escalating violence and racial polarization.

But over the longer term, the new information bureau under Louis Nel, the present deputy foreign minister and overseer of South Africa’s propaganda efforts abroad, will probably take over the equally difficult task of selling the reforms to overseas critics as major changes in apartheid, the country’s system of racial discrimination.

Restrictions on Newsmen

The move comes in the wake of the regime’s expulsion of a Newsweek correspondent last week, sharp government criticism of foreign coverage of the unrest here as “organized lying,” and increased restrictions placed on foreign newsmen, whose reports many South Africans are now relying on in place of their own self-censoring media.

The impetus for the new department, tentatively titled the Bureau for Internal Information, reportedly came out of the debacle of Botha’s speech in Durban a month ago when the nation and much of the world were disappointed because he failed to announce sweeping reforms that had been expected, lashing out at all his critics instead. The suggestion was made within the secret State Security Council, informed political sources said Saturday, and then approved by the Cabinet after much debate.

The new office drew immediate criticism from the Progressive Federal Party, a liberal white group, which saw it as an attempt to manage the news and stifle political debate. Political commentators said that Botha could be blundering into a replay of the “information scandal” that brought down his predecessor, John Vorster, who was found to be secretly spending large amounts of state money to improve South Africa’s image abroad and at home.

Botha Criticizes Talks

Meanwhile, Botha criticized Friday’s talks in Zambia between a group of business executives and the leaders of the outlawed African National Congress as showing “weakness” on the part of white South Africans.

The unprecedented session at a Zambian game park was widely hailed here as opening a dialogue that could help solve South Africa’s problems. But Botha told the pro-government Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld, “I do not know what they (the businessmen) are going to achieve other than show signs of weakness to the enemies of South Africa.”

He made it clear that the businessmen’s initiative would not lead to a meeting between the African National Congress and his government, which insists that the guerrilla organization abandon violence in its fight against apartheid as a precondition for any official contacts.

Gavin Relly, leader of the business delegation and chairman of Anglo American Corp., a huge mining conglomerate that is South Africa’s largest company, defended the talks as an attempt by South Africans of different political views to “create a more cohesive society and a more equitable one.”

“We are all concerned that the next generation should inherit a viable economic and political system,” Relly said Saturday after returning from Zambia. He added that there are great differences between the businessmen and the congress’ leaders, but that the discussions are worth continuing if the country is to avert a civil war, which many fear is coming.

Two more blacks were reported killed Saturday in the continuing violence. Witnesses said that a youth in Soweto, Johannesburg’s black suburb, was stabbed to death by taxi drivers whose cabs were commandeered to transport mourners to a funeral. The burned body of an unidentified man was found outside the diamond mining center of Kimberly, police reported.

The Soweto killing, which police said they could not confirm, provoked attacks on taxi drivers throughout much of the sprawling suburb as word of the incident spread. Cars and minibuses were stoned, and drivers and passengers were forced to flee as some were overturned and set afire.

Police released 746 black high school students whom they had held since Thursday under state-of-emergency regulations. Police spokesmen said that the youths had been planning a school boycott in defiance of emergency regulations requiring them to attend classes.

Incidents of arson, looting and the stoning of cars, offices and homes were reported around Cape Town, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and East London, but with limited injuries and arrests, according to police headquarters in Pretoria.

Image Improvement

The establishment of the new information bureau is certain to prove controversial, even within the National Party, where Botha’s rivals agreed to its establishment only grudgingly after he placed it under his office rather than that of a senior minister.

There was agreement, however, that the government has to try to improve its image.

“The president must address different communities, different peoples in South Africa plus a broad international audience, and he must do it much more effectively,” one government information official explained. “This, as we discovered, is very, very complex and requires a full bureau to coordinate it. . . .

“To put it another way, when the president speaks to, say, an audience of white Afrikaners, we must make sure we are getting an equivalent message across to English-speaking whites, to blacks, to other communities and overseas as well.”

The announcement about the new bureau nevertheless caused concern that it was an attempt to re-establish the old information department, discredited in 1978 after it was caught channeling millions of dollars into the United States and Western Europe to buy influential newspapers and other media to win support for South Africa, and as it was beginning similar covert operations at home on behalf of Vorster’s National Party government.

But Nel said that the new bureau would be smaller than the old information department. He said it would not undertake secret operations and has as its first priority the promotion of peaceful change.

“This is not a watchdog organization looking at the media,” Nel said. “What I want to do is open up the government to the media and through them to the people.”