U.S. Retracts Reagan’s Approval of S. African Meeting

White House and State Department spokesmen, saying there had been a misunderstanding, Wednesday withdrew President Reagan’s day-old endorsement of a meeting between Western nations and South Africa.

At the same time, the hard edges appeared to remain on the President’s expressed sympathy for Pretoria’s white minority government.

According to non-government specialists on Africa, the attitudes expressed by Reagan at his press conference Tuesday night appear to reflect his real sentiments, no matter how much they may be at odds with the rest of his Administration’s version of U.S. policy.

In Reagan’s view, the government of South African President Pieter W. Botha is doing the best it can to solve the country’s problems in the face of a Communist-dominated opposition and tribally motivated violence among blacks. Reagan condemns the apartheid system of racial segregation, but he says that the Pretoria government is trying to get rid of it.

“The (State Department) Africa bureau is much more enlightened than this,” said I. William Zartman, director of Africa Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “There is an absolute block in the President’s comprehension. He is an old man who has gotten some images in the formative point of his life, and he isn’t going to change. The idea that the (black) majority is anything but savages is something he can’t come to understand.”

Reagan was categorical in his rejection of “punitive” U.S. sanctions against South Africa, apparently signaling that he would veto any sanctions legislation to emerge from Congress. The Senate is nearing almost certain passage of a sanctions bill that has drawn substantial Republican support, and the House earlier passed an even more sweeping measure.

For months, the State Department has issued blandly worded “position papers” asserting U.S. opposition to apartheid. Secretary of State George P. Shultz has said that U.S. governments going back to the John F. Kennedy Administration have imposed steadily increasing pressure on Pretoria to end its racial repression and open up its political system.

Shultz and other officials have argued that the Administration is doing everything that it reasonably can do to force South Africa to change. But the President, in his press conference, said that “President Botha himself has said . . . his goal is to eliminate apartheid.” The clear implication was that other countries should support Botha in his policy.

Reagan said that the United States would be “pleased” to participate in a conference on South Africa which Botha, in a speech earlier in the day, had proposed.

“This is what we ourselves have been talking about,” Reagan said.

But Wednesday, White House spokesman Larry Speakes and State Department spokesman Charles Redman said the President had been misinformed of the nature of Botha’s proposal. Reagan thought the South African president was suggesting a conference to help dismantle apartheid while Botha actually proposed limited talks with neighboring countries and the United States, Britain and West Germany on the security situation and economic problems in the entire southern Africa region.

Speakes said the United States would participate only if the meeting concerned apartheid.

Redman added that Reagan’s endorsement of Botha’s proposal was withdrawn “now that we’ve had a chance to study what he (Botha) actually said.”

Redman said that if the South African government suggests through normal diplomatic channels a southern Africa regional security conference, the United States would consider attending. But he emphasized that approval would not be automatic.

Reagan said he found some South African policies to be “repugnant.” But he left little doubt that he accepts the Pretoria government’s explanation of why it does the things it does.

Much of the death and violence in South Africa, he said, “is being inflicted by blacks on blacks because of their own tribal separations.”

Pauline Baker, an Africa specialist on the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said South African government statistics show that, although some violence is tribally motivated, political violence is also prevalent.

“To the outside world, they (South African officials) want to stress tribal violence,” she said. “The fact that Reagan said that shows he is buying the South African government’s line.”

In attempting to explain why Washington has adopted a harsher attitude toward Nicaragua than toward South Africa, Reagan said, the South Africans “are not seeking to impose their government on other surrounding countries.”

Zartman of Johns Hopkins said that the Pretoria regime frequently has sent its armed forces to attack neighboring countries and is supporting anti-government rebels in Angola and Mozambique in an effort to bend all governments in the region to its will. Moreover, as the region’ most powerful nation militarily, South Africa can be virtually certain of winning any military skirmish that it chooses to initiate.

Baker, of the Carnegie Endowment, said that Reagan “was displaying his true sentiments as he often does when speaking off the cuff. I think we will get more of this. The only possibility for a change in policy is if Senate Republican leaders stress to him the political damage domestically that will come from a veto of a sanctions measure.”