If Botha Can’t Win, Can Blacks Lose? : Their Victory Seems Assured, but Coup Could Stall the Day

South African President Pieter W. Botha declared more than a state of emergency last Thursday. He declared the start of the deciding battle for the survival of the ruling white elite in this country.

It is a battle that will not end tomorrow, nor even necessarily next year. But its course in the next two months will be etching the patterns of history long after the echoes of the emergency have died away.

The outcome of the battle--black-majority rule--seems most likely. The chilling questions that remain are: How many more lives will it cost? How much longer will it be? And will a right-wing coup or military takeover lead it first through a bloody gauntlet of attrition?

Botha had five reasons for calling the state of emergency at this time--reasons that go beyond his concern about the Soweto Day anniversary and the threat of so-called communist subversion:

--The president and his government no longer care about foreign censure, believing sanctions to be an inevitability. They would rather be hanged for a wolf than a lamb. Besides, analysts believe that it will take two or three years for sanctions to begin to bite seriously.

--Botha knows that he needs to offer blacks political power as a way of stopping the violence. But he wants to do it without relinquishing control. He believes that he can negotiate power-sharing but cannot do it effectively from a position of weakness. At the same time, no one will negotiate with him in a climate of violence and fear.

--The president needs to act swiftly. Within the next six to 12 months he will have to hold an election or a referendum on the black-rights issue. In the meantime his dithering over the black uprising is losing votes to the right. The issue of black representation in central government will be the focus of an extraordinary congress of the ruling white National Party in mid-August. By this time Botha hopes to have crushed black agitation, or to have subdued it to the point where he can seek a mandate from his party to begin fishing for black moderates to fill his constitutional creel.

--The sudden rise in white-rightist belligerence has shocked Botha and his party rigid. The National Party, which strode the political stage unchallenged for 38 years, now has to skulk behind police guards when it holds political meetings in conservative areas.

--The fifth reason, mentioned last because it is cardinal, is the nature of the black challenge itself. This time it will last forever.

In 1960--after the Sharpeville massacre, the subsequent state of emergency and the suppression of black-liberation groups--anti-apartheid protest was forced into obscurity.

It lasted 16 years--until black Soweto schoolchildren, unable to stomach the inhibitions drilled into their parents, rose in bloody protest against the injustices of inferior black education.

The uprising sent a ripple of blood across the country. It took the authorities roughly eight months and nearly 700 lives to suppress it. But the seeds of ferment remained.

Which brings us to the events of the last 21 months: 1,700 people killed in an orgy of unspeakable horror, thousands detained and a 30-week partial state of emergency, which succeeded as much in politicizing the majority as it did in quelling the manifestation of their outrage.

Now we have a new state of emergency, nationwide, and the government spokesman says, “We’re not kidding, we’re serious about this.”

There is no doubting the president’s assertion that the state has hardly begun to employ the might at its disposal. After all, this is no banana republic. It is, as it professes to be, a regional superpower--even rumored to have the Bomb.

And it would be foolish to underestimate the devilish ingenuity of people who employ surrogate guerrillas to destabilize hostile governments or vigilantes to crush domestic uprisings of radicalized blacks.

But the black struggle in South Africa now has become a different game. Based on the concept of civil disobedience, it has matured, has wide support and will not easily be suppressed. The government has realized this too late, and has responded in panic with a state of emergency.

But even if the government succeeds in temporarily driving the black opposition underground and Botha steps forward with his carefully prepared plan for power-sharing under white control, black leaders have already rejected this option.

And even if they agreed to it, their supporters are no longer prepared to accept the rule of a government insensitive to black desires.

Violence would break out again, and the result could be a perpetual state of emergency, with accompanying economic recession and social disintegration.

The white electorate would not tolerate this for long. For the first time the government would be threatened by its own power base.

The scenario has played itself out many times before: A powerful military elite becomes alarmed at the civilian government’s inability to cope politically with civil disorder.

In South Africa’s case the accumulation of international sanctions has already reduced the influence of foreign powers in the government’s internal policy-making. Conservative pragmatists in the military hierarchy, once wary of provoking international isolation, make a deal with right-wing extremists and seize power.

Oppression of the population is magnified, and the country degenerates into civil war--a bloody conflict with time on the side of the majority.

It might be a worst-case scenario, but does it seem less logical than a direct transition from Botha to black-majority rule?