Botha Denounces Pressure on S. Africa to Talk With Rebels

President Pieter W. Botha sought Tuesday to rally his beleaguered National Party with a strong denunciation of international efforts to force South Africa into negotiations with the African National Congress but with a pledge as well to continue his step-by-step reforms of apartheid.

“The international campaign against South Africa, especially from the ranks of certain leftist Western leaders and countries, is one of the most extreme forms of political fraud of the 20th Century,” Botha told a special party convention here. “We are probably no better, but certainly no worse than the rest of the world.”

Botha, invoking the intense nationalism of his Afrikaner people and their fears for the future of the strife-torn country, again declared South Africa’s readiness to bear punitive international sanctions rather than capitulate on what it sees as issues not only of principle but determining the Afrikaners’ fate.

‘Will Emerge Stronger’

“We do not desire sanctions, but if we have to suffer sanctions for the sake of maintaining freedom, justice and order, we will survive them,” he said to the applause of 3,000 party delegates and guests here. “Not only will we survive them, we will emerge stronger on the other side.”

Botha also proposed limited talks with neighboring countries and the United States, Britain and West Germany. These Western countries have opposed severe economic sanctions. He said the talks could cover economic problems and regional security.

Botha’s hard-line speech, intended to consolidate the ruling National Party after months of attacks from both the left and the far right, provided no new details on the government’s reform program and made clear that no major concessions are contemplated soon.

“Our policy is one of orderly, evolutionary change in contrast to the so-called liberation of violent revolutionaries,” Botha said. “In Africa, we have repeatedly seen the consequences of premature liberation without proper preparation and planning.”

Committed to Dialogue

His government remains committed to opening a political dialogue with the country’s black leaders, Botha said, but only on its terms, including a renunciation of violence as a means to end apartheid.

But Botha was scathing in his denunciation of the country’s anti-apartheid movement, warning that “the freedom of one person so easily becomes the oppression of another (and) why a freedom struggle, especially if accompanied by violence, so often ends in tyranny.”

“The struggle to enslave people politically is called a ‘freedom struggle,’ and the condition of political enslavement is now termed ‘freedom,’ ” he said. “South Africa today stands in the front line of this struggle.”

Freedom, Botha suggested, has “through corruption . . . become a heresy that leads humanity to oppression, endless terror, tribal strife and even to the chaos of despotism.”

The government has come under increasing pressure internationally and from its domestic critics on the left to negotiate with the African National Congress, the principal guerrilla group fighting white rule, and to free Nelson Mandela and its other imprisoned leaders.

Will Resist Pressure

Botha, defensive but not belligerent through most of his two-hour speech, seemed intent on reassuring the National Party that he would not yield to that pressure and that his own program of step-by-step reforms remains necessary.

“I wish to appeal to you to shed the spirit of defeatism and doubt about the future of our country,” he said.

Botha had originally called the two-day party congress, however, to increase the pace of reform, particularly to get a mandate for negotiations on a new constitution that would for the first time share power with the country’s black majority.

However, no black leaders have been willing to join a proposed national council without Mandela’s release and an independent charter for the body, and Botha complained that “malicious attempts” were being made to discredit the council even before it was formed. Under Botha’s proposal, the council would have policy-making powers and might be given authority to write a new constitution.

Botha renewed his pledge to white voters to seek their approval for a new constitution either in a referendum or by calling a new general election. He said such an election could come sooner than most people expect.

Autonomy for Ghettoes

His only new idea was a suggestion that the black ghettoes around South Africa’s major cities be given autonomy, even independence, so that they might become “city-states.”

“I sometimes ask myself the question if a state such as Luxembourg can be independent, why can black urban communities close to our metropolitan areas not receive full autonomy as city-states,” Botha said.

But one of South Africa’s tribal homelands, Kwandebele, which was to receive nominal independence in December, decided earlier Tuesday to remain within South Africa.

Prince Cornelius Mahlangu, the Kwandebele minister of health and welfare, said the homeland’s legislative assembly discussed the whole question again in view of eight months of political violence there and canceled the independence plans.

More than 160 people have been killed there in the past two months alone, according to clergymen in the area, which is northeast of the capital of Pretoria. Two weeks ago, the homeland’s interior minister was assassinated when his car was blown up as he left the government headquarters at Siyabuswa.

In his speech, Botha lamented the lack of understanding for his government’s policies.

“The historical hatred of the Third World and the historical guilt complex of the First World interface in the vendetta against South Africa,” he said. “The blood of a sacrificial lamb is sought as penance for centuries of injustice. That sacrificial lamb is South Africa, and more specifically white South Africans.”