South Africans Worried at Reported Resignation of Swiss Mediator in Debt Talks

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — A report that the Swiss banker who has been mediating between South Africa and its international creditor banks had resigned to protest the government’s national state of emergency stirred up concern and confusion Thursday in the South African business community.

A man in Zurich who said he was a spokesman for Fritz Leutwiler, former chairman of the Swiss National Bank, said that Leutwiler had quit his mediator’s role, saying South Africa had squandered the time for reform that he had gained from the creditor banks when they agreed to postpone repayment of part of the country’s $24-billion foreign debt.

However, Leutwiler later denied the report in an interview with Reuters news agency, saying, “It must have been a misunderstanding. I am not active for South Africa and the banks. I concluded my mandate in February. There is nothing to resign.”

Leutwiler said the spokesman had acted for him in the past but had not done so for several months. He declined to say how the misunderstanding had arisen.

Adding to the confusion, a spokesman for Finance Minister Barend du Plessis did not deny the resignation but said that it had no political significance since agreement had been reached on deferred debt repayments and new negotiations would be held in a year.

Gerhard de Kock, governor of South Africa’s Reserve Bank, also confirmed Leutwiler’s resignation. In addition, sources here said Leutwiler had been scheduled to be chairman at a meeting next month of South Africa’s major creditor banks.

The contradictory reports raise doubts about the fate of that meeting and about who will mediate the next round of negotiations, six months away, on further debt repayments.

Business executives said that a resignation by Leutwiler would shake business confidence in the country, for over the past nine months he had become the principal gauge of political, economic and social reform here for international banks and investors.

“This is a really major blow,” said Johan van Zyl, chief executive of the South African Federated Chamber of Industries, at the initial report of Leutwiler’s resignation. “Leutwiler had become the barometer of progress, the measure of hope, and that barometer just fell through the floor. . . . I fear the country may now be moving economically into the worst-case scenario.”

Another South African business executive, an avowed supporter of the National Party government, said a Leutwiler resignation would be likely to promote severe international sanctions on the country and presage “the onset of the siege economy” that would make whites even less likely to agree to reforms and blacks all the more insistent on them.

Leutwiler, now chairman of an international engineering and construction company, had assumed the mediator role last year after South Africa had frozen repayments on its foreign debts in the wake of widespread civil unrest. In January, following talks with President Pieter W. Botha, he declared that the country had “one hell of a reform program” and became one of its strongest advocates internationally.

“No one had greater faith in what Botha was trying to do do than Leutwiler,” one international banker said here Thursday. “He was as strong a proponent of step-by-step reforms as anyone in the government.”

South Africa’s many creditor banks, owed more than $24 billion, agreed in February to defer repayments of $14 billion falling due next year, time that Leutwiler described as “additional breathing room” for the white-led minority government to undertake broader reforms.

Meanwhile, three more blacks died in the country’s continuing civil unrest, and a bomb exploded outside a police station near Cape Town, injuring two policemen.

All three blacks were burned to death with gasoline-soaked tires, apparently as suspected police informers or government collaborators, in separate incidents. Nearly 2,000 persons, mostly blacks, have died in South Africa’s political violence in the past 22 months.

The bomb outside Mowbray police station in one of Cape Town’s white suburbs exploded in the middle of the morning rush hour, damaging the station and blowing out windows of nearby shops. But only two policemen were slightly injured. It was the 12th bomb to explode since the state of emergency was imposed three weeks ago; three persons have been killed and more than 100 injured in the bombings.

In Pretoria, police announced the arrest of four suspected guerrillas of the outlawed African National Congress in connection with a series of attacks around the capital.