In Rightist Area, Botha Defends Policies

President Pieter W. Botha, under increasing criticism from conservative whites for step-by-step reforms that are eroding their privileges, traveled to the bastion of the far right in northern Transvaal province on Thursday to defend his policies and preach the need for further political, social and economic changes.

“We must remove the hate, prejudices and pettiness from our national life and also from our politics,” Botha declared, pledging new efforts at “reform and negotiation” with South Africa’s different racial groups to “find ties that can bind us to our country and to one another” and to develop a formula for sharing political power.

“Life as a whole is reform and progress,” Botha told an enthusiastic rally of 2,000 National Party loyalists. “Without it, death sets in.”

Botha Posters Defaced

It was Botha’s first trip north of Pretoria in four years, a period in which the conservative white backlash against even his moderate reforms has grown in the region.

Botha, whose picture on hundreds of posters around Potgietersrus was defaced with a big red “V” for “traitor” in Afrikaans, was given unprecedented security measures to protect him from the violent right-wing protests that have disrupted other National Party meetings in recent months in northern Transvaal. Security here was greater than when he recently visited black townships outside Port Elizabeth.

The sports stadium where he spoke was surrounded by about 400 riot police armed with rifles and shotguns and ringed with coils of razor-sharp barbed wire. Eight-man police squads patrolled the town on foot, truckloads of combat troops were held in reserve and a police helicopter kept watch overhead through much of the day.

Armored Vehicles Used

Armored police vehicles, normally used to patrol black townships, were also brought to this quiet farming center about 170 miles northeast of Johannesburg, along with a water cannon. The unusual show of force was a demonstration of police loyalty to Botha after accusations that they support the far right.

“Shocking, simply shocking, that the National Party has to meet behind barbed wire,” a middle-aged woman said to her husband as they went into the stadium. “And to think the threat comes from our own people, not from the blacks or the Communists. It’s a shame, truly a shame.”

Alluding to his right-wing critics, Botha said they “accept superiority and skin color as the main criteria for exclusion (from political power). From those quarters, we mostly find destructive criticism without serious attempts to offer meaningful solutions.”

The National Party, he said, seeks to occupy the middle ground between the white-supremacists on the right and those on the left advocating “a non-racial democracy--an idea that is truly nonsensical in a country as diverse as ours.”

But the Nationalists, Botha continued, would never accept political changes that put the country’s white minority of 5 million at risk or sacrifice what he termed “white rights.”

Across town, the ultrarightist Afrikaner Resistance Movement drew fewer than 800 people at a counter-rally that Eugene Terre’Blanche, the group’s leader, had boasted would demonstrate both its strength and the depth of white anger with Botha’s policy of gradual reform.

Sees Danger in Policy

“The Afrikaner Resistance Movement wants to avoid war and revolution,” Terre’Blanche said, “but we know that P. W. Botha is leading us there because the blacks will never agree to share power. They will try to seize everything, and for the white man it then will be a fight to the death.”

The Afrikaner Resistance Movement, already known for its heavily armed and khaki-clad paramilitary unit, the Storm Falcons, is prepared to “take over the enforcement of law and order, if necessary by force” from the police, Terre’Blanche said, if the government does not take much tougher action to end the country’s continuing civil unrest.