U.S. Meets With S. Africa Rebel Leaders : Talks With ANC Seen as Attempt to Push Pretoria to Negotiate

The United States on Wednesday opened its first high-level discussions with the African National Congress, the principal guerrilla group fighting minority white rule in South Africa, in what appeared to be a new move to push Pretoria into a political dialogue with the country’s black majority.

The U.S. ambassador to Zambia, Paul J. Hare, met for 90 minutes with three members of the ANC’s policy-making national executive committee at the organization’s headquarters in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, according to American and rebel spokesmen.

An African National Congress spokesman described the talks, an American initiative, as friendly and said they focused on U.S. policy in South Africa. Jan Zehner, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka, said the talks were “the first acknowledged government contact at this level,” but he declined to characterize them any further.

Possibility of Cease-Fire

Diplomats in Pretoria and Lusaka speculated, however, that the discussions may have gone well beyond a review of the situation here to focus on possibilities for a cease-fire and other preconditions for a political dialogue between the South African government and the guerrillas..

The United States is actively supporting the efforts of Britain and other members of the Commonwealth to secure the release of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned ANC leader, as well as the restoration of the organization’s legal status and a government commitment to negotiate in return for a suspension of violence and a matching commitment to negotiate.

Geoffrey Howe, the British foreign secretary, said here earlier this week at the end of his mediation mission on behalf of the European Communities that the United States was also trying to bring about the “key moves” by the South African government that are necessary to create conditions for this dialogue. For this reason, Washington intended to increase its contacts with the African National Congress, Howe said.

‘Time Is Short’

“To the extent that it has leverage, or at least influence, over Pretoria, Washington will be pressing President (Pieter W.) Botha to make these key moves,” a West European ambassador said in Lusaka, “and to do this effectively it needs to be able to provide convincing assurances that the ANC will reciprocate. . . . Time is short, prospects are slim and the Reagan Administration must move quickly and directly if it has any chance of success at all.”

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Mary Swann said the meeting with members of the rebel leadership was intended to “elevate our dialogue with the ANC as part of our effort to promote negotiations among all the parties concerned with a peaceful outcome in South Africa.”

Only last week, however, President Reagan had denounced the ANC in his White House speech on South Africa for using “terrorist tactics” to promote its “goal of creating a Communist state” and declared that Pretoria, as a result, need not negotiate with it.

But a senior Reagan Administration official, briefing reporters in Washington, contradicted the president on the ANC’s importance and urged the South African government to meet with the group, which was outlawed here in 1960, and other black groups fighting to end the apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he hoped to arrange a meeting soon with ANC President Oliver R. Tambo to press the need for a peaceful resolution of South Africa’s problems.

Despite Communist influence in the ANC and the organization’s tendency to “imitate the South African government’s preference for violence and intimidation rather than dialogue with its opponents,” Shultz said that the organization “has emerged as an important part of the South African political equation.”

Aim for Authoritative Views

“There is a compelling need to ensure that the ANC’s leaders, like other opponents of apartheid, hear an authoritative statement of U.S. policies and interests and that we have equally authoritative insight into theirs,” Shultz told the committee.

Tambo is expected to meet Howe in London shortly, perhaps before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets with six other Commonwealth leaders there this weekend. The U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester A. Crocker, is also in London to confer with Howe, and diplomats in Pretoria and Lusaka said Hare may have arranged a meeting between Tambo and Crocker.

Hare, according to a guerrilla spokesman, met in Lusaka with Ruth Mompati, Simon Makana and Anthony Mongalo, all members of the ANC’s national executive committee but generally not regarded543257376was accompanied by Roger McGuire, an embassy political officer.

The United States has maintained intermittent, informal contacts--sometimes in Washington and New York, sometimes in London and Lusaka--with the ANC for more than a decade.

Not even the Carter Administration, however, was prepared for such a public acknowledgement of the ANC’s importance here. The American concern has been not only fear of offending Pretoria, according to U.S. diplomats, but uneasiness over the group’s alliance with the South African Communist Party and its extensive ties with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington also contributed to this story.