Reagan Supports Western Effort to Help South Africa

President Reagan, reaffirming his support for South African President Pieter W. Botha, on Tuesday endorsed a suggestion by Botha that the United States and other Western nations join in talks with South Africa in an effort to help work out that country’s racial crisis.

And, answering questions at a press conference, Reagan mounted an unyielding defense of his controversial South African policies. He attacked the outlawed African National Congress as a Communist-dominated group bent on causing disruption and seizing control of the South African government.

In his unusually harsh comments on the congress, the President appeared to undercut Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s earlier offers to meet with Oliver Tambo, the organization’s leader, to discuss ways of solving the crisis.

Botha, speaking to a political rally in Durban, proposed limited talks with neighboring countries and the United States, Britain and West Germany on economic issues and regional security. Britain and West Germany have opposed severe economic sanctions. Reagan said he would also include France in the talks.

Reagan, touching on a wide range of other subjects at his press conference, also said that he is optimistic about the prospects for a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev later this year and expressed the hope “that we’re going to make more progress than probably has been made in a number of years” because of economic and political problems now facing Gorbachev.

Reagan called on Congress to support his plan for aid to Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista guerrillas, pledged to see American farmers through their present economic troubles and--responding to a question on the 25th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall--declared that the barrier never would have been built if the United States had acted decisively to prevent it.

It was the increasingly violent crisis in South Africa, however, that dominated Reagan’s press conference.

Responding to repeated questions about his policies, the President defended his continued refusal to impose strong sanctions against the Botha government and labeled the African National Congress “the one group” in the country that favors such sanctions.

The ANC “very definitely has been the most radical and wants the disruption that would come from massive unemployment and hunger and desperation of the people because it is their belief that they could then rise out of all of that disruption and seize control. . . ,” Reagan said.

That view of the situation, Reagan said, has been transmitted to him personally by black religious leaders and other South African black leaders, including Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief of the country’s largest tribal group, the Zulus.

Congress reacted coolly last month when Reagan, in a major speech on South Africa, spoke forcefully against major sanctions. But Reagan said Tuesday that regardless of whether members of Congress are ready to accept his arguments that sanctions would only be counterproductive and hurt blacks, communications from prominent black leaders showed they are strongly opposed to sanctions.

He identified one of those expressing this view to him as the leader of “some 4 1/2 million Christians” and said “all of them are deathly, deathly afraid of sanctions.”

Reagan did not identify the leader further, however, and it was not clear to whom he referred; leaders of virtually all the major Christian churches in South Africa oppose the Botha government’s racial policies and most church leaders, such as Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, have called for sanctions.

At one point, in answer to a question, Reagan said that the African National Congress had been “a good organization” when it was founded early in this century, but that it became infiltrated with Communists soon after the founding of the Communist Party in South Africa in 1921. Now, he said, it is dominated by Communist elements and “we’ve had enough experience in our own country with Communist fronts” to understand how they operate.

Several times in the past, Shultz has expressed a willingness to meet with the ANC’s Tambo and has stressed the importance of freeing the organization’s longtime leader, Nelson Mandela, who has been imprisoned for more than 20 years.

But Reagan suggested that any meeting with U.S. officials should be with what he termed “responsible” black leaders.

“Maybe ourselves and some of our allies could be invited to meet with their government representatives and see if we couldn’t bring about some coming together of these responsible leaders of the black community,” he declared.

Asked to defend the imposition of punitive sanctions against Nicaragua but not South Africa, Reagan insisted that “there is no comparison” between the two countries. South Africans, said Reagan, “are not seeking to impose their government on other surrounding countries.”

On the other hand, he called Nicaragua “sort of a vassal of the Soviet Union” that has “made plain in utterance after utterance . . . that their revolution is not going to be confined to their borders, that they intend to spread that revolution throughout Latin America.”

When a questioner listed a series of South African government policies aimed against blacks, Reagan said: “I think that I have condemned publicly all those things you are talking about.” But he stressed the “complexity” of the South African problem, noting that much of the violence in that country has been inflicted “by blacks on blacks.”

Reiterating his opposition to punitive economic sanctions against South Africa, he noted that some companies in that country have initiated more equitable treatment for blacks in regard to “promotion . . . hiring, ignoring racial differences with regard to supervisory positions. This would all be lost if some people have their way with sanctions.

“But nothing like that is going on in Nicaragua,” Reagan continued. “Not when a priest stands up and speaks to his congregation because he says something, protesting the fact that the government has shut down the church’s newspaper . . . seized their radio station, and he’s thrown out of the country for having said that.”

The President said his Administration has not made a decision on a new U.S. ambassador to South Africa, “nor have we made up our minds whether we want to send an envoy or not.”

He said he regretted that Robert J. Brown, a North Carolina public relations executive, had to withdraw his name. Questions had been raised in the press about the legality of Brown’s business dealings.

Reagan, commenting on his own remarks early in the press conference, said he had not meant to associate Bishop Tutu with those “radical blacks” who advocate strict sanctions against South Africa. Saying “that was careless of me,” he added: “But I don’t think he’s right in terms of what he’s advocating.

“Of course, there are individuals that think that’s the thing to do--that there is no other answer except punish,” he said. “Never mind trying to find a solution to the problem.”

On other foreign policy issues, Reagan said that he would have “no hesitation whatsoever” at future meetings with Soviet leaders to press for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, which was built 25 years ago to separate East and West Berlin.

“I think it’s a wall that never should have been built,” Reagan said. He condemned what he described as “a lucrative business in letting people come through that wall, if the price is right, and rejoin their families and friends in West Germany.

“Other people build walls to keep an enemy out,” the President added. “In one part of the world and one philosophy . . . they have to build walls to keep their people in.”

The President categorically defended his new call for drug testing of federal employees, disputing suggestions that a presidential call for “voluntary” tests in the workplace smacks of forced self-incrimination.

Eleanor Clift reported from Chicago, and Jack Nelson from Washington.