Botha Reforms Seem Doomed : Blacks Reject Moves to Ease Apartheid Protests

President Pieter W. Botha now has little hope that his latest reform proposals, centered on a potentially far-reaching offer by the white government to share political power with the black majority, can chart a way out of South Africa’s deepening crisis.

Botha announced the plan Jan. 31 at the opening of Parliament, but blacks--moderates as well as militants--immediately rejected the package as insufficient, even as a beginning.

Botha’s declaration about putting an end to the much-hated “pass laws,” which restrict blacks from entering nominally white areas without government permits, was met with demands for repeal of all the laws enforcing apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation.

The national council that Botha proposed as a multiracial negotiating forum, which would bring blacks into the top levels of government for the first time, is an all but dead issue. Black leaders refused to take part in it.

“Big deal,” Bishop Desmond Tutu commented. “Who wants a statutory council that doesn’t rule the country? . . . I am afraid we are left again with hopes that have been dashed. There ought to have been bold steps. . . . There isn’t any more time left, and black people need to be given signs of hope.”

White liberals have branded the effort another false start. They say that South Africa is now trapped in the “dilemma of diminishing options,” that whatever might have worked a year ago and broken the cycle of political violence now has no chance of success.

The big buildup given the reform proposal, said Colin Eglin, new leader of the Progressive Federal Party, a white opposition group, was “a mammoth confidence trick to create a reality that simply was not true.” As a result, he said, the government and the country are now “in deep, deep trouble.”

The hard-line right, alarmed by the spread of civil unrest, is beginning to form armed commando groups to guard white neighborhoods. Multiplying black attacks on whites and attacks by whites on blacks threaten to bring on the race war that many fear.

Botha’s own National Party is openly and bitterly divided over what to do next--whether to pursue step-by-step implementation of the reforms, to enlarge upon them to meet black demands, or to hold fast until its critics see that, as the government believes, there is “no other workable alternative.”

Stand-Pat Inclination

Botha’s inclination, according to senior National Party members of Parliament, is to stand pat and reunify his divided supporters while waiting for his opponents to accept his reform proposals as the best they are likely to get for some time.

But Botha’s Jan. 31 proposals now appear to have little chance of persuading blacks to choose the path of reform rather than revolution.

One disappointed member of Parliament, a National Party liberal, commented, “In political terms, the crisis is deeper simply because we tried to get out and failed, and we are not prepared, at least not yet, to do what seems to be required to get out.

“We have lost even more credibility with blacks, the political moderates who we believe form a black ‘silent majority’ and whom we must persuade to come with us. At the same time, we have many more whites disillusioned with the reform process and veering to the extreme right or left and opposing us.”

What hope remained for the reform package was extinguished earlier this month by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader and an essential participant in the proposed national council. He said he would not participate in the new forum, despite his earlier praise of Botha’s proposals as “a courageous break with the past.”

An Unmet Call

Buthelezi said Botha has failed to meet his call to spell out the council’s powers, to agree to conduct its deliberations in public and to free unconditionally Nelson Mandela, the jailed African National Congress leader, and other political prisoners so they could also participate.

The Rev. Sam Buti, the mayor of Alexandra, a black township on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg that has been the scene of considerable violence last week, added that any black leader “who served on this body (would) fall into the trap of consciously or unconsciously propagating the policy of apartheid.”

The president also undermined the credibility of his reform package by repudiating liberal interpretations of it by members of his own Cabinet and reiterating “group security”--protection of the country’s white minority--as the basis of his offer of power sharing.

He publicly scolded Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha for saying that, provided there were constitutional guarantees protecting whites’ interests, South Africa might have a black president in the future.

Buthelezi said the president’s humiliating and unprecedented attack on Pik Botha--the two Bothas are not related--left blacks “aghast” and called into question the government’s sincerity in promoting such reforms as power sharing.

‘A Macabre Ballet’

The reform process as a whole was further undercut by the dramatic resignation from Parliament of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, former leader of the Progressive Federal Party. Slabbert called Parliament a “waste of time” and described its debates as “a macabre ballet” that ignored the growing crisis.

Slabbert said he is convinced that reform has to be pursued from outside of Parliament and that prospects for change are very limited as long as Pieter Botha remains in power.

Botha had told Slabbert at a private meeting late last year that while he wanted to move away from apartheid, there were non-negotiable elements in his reform proposals.

“I will not give up self-determination for the whites,” Slabbert quoted Botha as telling him, “and I am not going to tear up the Constitution like you and the (African National Congress) want me to do.”

According to Slabbert, Botha defined self-determination as meaning that whites would retain their “own schools, own residential areas and own way of life.” Then, Slabbert said, he “introduced a new one--’and whites must have the right to maintain control of the wealth they built up with such difficulty over the years.’ ”

When Slabbert replied that such conditions would be a problem in promoting reform through negotiations, Botha reportedly replied: “Well, you must accept it. Nothing will change on those things.”

For Slabbert, this meant that apartheid was to be updated but not abolished.

‘A False Start’

“Apartheid is not up for negotiation,” Slabbert told Parliament in his resignation speech. “It has to go completely. What is up for negotiation is its alternative. . . . What I have seen and heard from all of them, including the state president, is simply not good enough. It is a false start.”

All this leaves President Botha committed to reforms that will not attract most of South Africa’s blacks into negotiations on the county’s future--thus failing to resolve the present crisis--but which he must carry out or lose what credibility he still has as a reformer at home and abroad. For example, he must meet the July 1 deadline he set in double-page newspaper advertisements for ending the pass-law system.

Similarly, Parliament must enact legislation enabling blacks to own their homes, to establish businesses in the hitherto whites-only downtown areas of major cities and to regain the South African citizenship that they lost when the government set up nominally independent tribal homelands.

(The downtown areas of Johannesburg and Durban were opened last week to businessmen and professionals of all races, and authorities promised similar action soon in Cape Town and other cities.)

“We have said we will do these things and we must, because they are right and we have given our solemn word, but we are not going to reap the political benefits we expected,” one top government official, a strong supporter of the reform program, complained last week. “There is no payoff for us. I doubt that the moves will diminish the present unrest, at least not in the short term, and I cannot see Buthelezi or any other black leaders joining broad political negotiations as a result of these measures.”

‘Apprehensive Electorate’

Yet no political observer who knows President Botha and his National Party well can see him moving boldly to regain the initiative and revive his original strategy of reform through negotiations.

“When half of the party and perhaps the majority of the white electorate are apprehensive about what you have already proposed,” a Nationalist member of Parliament remarked, “it is very difficult to go further and faster, even if that is the only thing that might put us on course for peaceful change.”

Some South African political commentators are, as a result of such analyses, coming to the reluctant conclusion that perhaps the only move dramatic enough to revive the reform effort would be the release of Mandela, now serving a life sentence for attempting to overthrow the government.

“The failure of these last reform proposals may have brought us into end-game,” said a political scientist who asked not to be quoted by name because of his role as an occasional government adviser. “As dead-ends are closed, we are propelled forward. . . . Personally, I welcome the dashing of false hopes because realism should follow . . . although this is probably a false hope, too.”