Botha Plans Early Vote on New Reform Proposal

President Pieter W. Botha announced Wednesday that he will call parliamentary elections in the first half of this year to seek a new mandate from South Africa’s white voters for the broadest political, economic and social reforms yet undertaken by his government.

Although he gave no details of his reform plans, Botha indicated that they will go substantially beyond the measures undertaken in the last three years and deal with the central issue of political power-sharing between the country’s ruling white minority and its still voteless black majority.

“The time to consult the white electorate on a number of fundamental issues is fast approaching,” Botha said in a nationally televised New Year’s message, reiterating his commitment “to dialogue to broaden democratic institutions in South Africa through an evolutionary process.”

“We will have certain proposals to put to the voting public,” Botha added in a subsequent television interview. “Those (would be) things which we intend to further the reform process, and on that subject we will speak to (the voters) clearly and distinctly and give them a chance to accept or reject it.”

April Vote Expected

The date for the election will be announced when Parliament reconvenes in Cape Town on Jan. 30, Botha said, but most political observers expect it to be held in mid- or late April, the traditional polling time here.

The last white parliamentary election was held in 1981, and the government has been under increasing pressure, particularly from its critics on the far right, to seek a new mandate from the voters before proceeding with further reform of the apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

Botha’s National Party, which has been in power since 1948, is generally expected to retain a large majority--it now has 127 of the 178 seats in the House of Assembly--and his term as president runs until 1989.

But both the liberal opposition Progressive Federal Party, which has 27 seats, and the two smaller right-wing parties, which together have 19 seats, have ambitious plans to capture as many as 50 or 55 constituencies each and then to force the National Party into a coalition government.

Only White Chamber

Voting will involve only the white House of Assembly in the three-chamber Parliament. Members of the Colored (mixed-race) and Indian houses were elected to five-year terms in August, 1984, amid anti-government protests and boycotts by more than 80% of the voters. Colored and Indian members of Parliament do not want to risk a new election now.

The Nationalists plan to campaign, party sources said, on the basis not only of “numerous specific reform proposals” but with “a major new national initiative” intended to bring blacks into serious negotiations on a new political system for the country.

“We have ideas, many of them, that we believe the nation is ready for and will welcome enthusiastically,” a senior National Party official commented. “We are not bankrupt politicians from the past, as we are often portrayed, and we are confident that voters will give us an impressive new mandate. . . . Reform is not dead, and with this mandate from the white electorate we hope to have made very significant progress by the end of next year.”

State-run Radio South Africa in a commentary this morning asserted that “the perception of reform having become bogged down and of there having been a retreat into the laager (encircled wagons) is a false perception created and nurtured by elements politically hostile to the government.”

“It is common cause that a major initiative that must be taken concerns the future political dispensation for black citizens,” the commentary said.

Black Response Sought

It called for “an active and positive response from those black leaders who reject revolution as an answer to this country’s problems and are prepared to negotiate and reach consensus with other population groups on future political structures and institutions.”

Botha made clear, however, the limits that he places on further political, economic and social changes here: All reforms would be gradual, they must not jeopardize the country’s stability, 1952998777that he and his fellow Afrikaners--descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers--feel they have in South Africa.

“We dare not yield to the irresponsible and often superficial demands that will destroy everything created over so many decades by so many generations,” Botha said, once again rejecting demands for majority rule and a system of one man, one vote, in which blacks would outnumber whites by 5 to 1.

“The Afrikaner and all other white language groups have, as South Africans in this our only fatherland, a task to assist in developing our brown and black communities,” he went on. “At the same time, we are not prepared to sacrifice our right to self-determination in our fatherland. We will in the future, as in the past, take account of the multicultural composition of our country.”

Defends Curbs on Protests

Botha defended the tough measures taken recently to curb two years of unprecedented and increasingly violent black protests.

“The best results (in reform) can only be achieved if the spirit of revolution and violence, fanned from outside our country, can effectively be kept at bay,” he said. “That must be achieved by security measures as well as economic and political measures.”

The other major element in the Nationalist campaign will apparently be resistance to foreign pressure for faster change here, and Botha sought to rally voter support with attacks on the United States, the European Communities and others that have imposed economic sanctions on South Africa in the last year.

“The obstacles placed before us by the opportunistic and selfish considerations of international organizations and governments must inspire us to greater determination and a national will to overcome,” he declared.

‘Too Little, Too Late’

“It is ironic and disturbing that all this came about while we were in the very process of moving forward with our reform program and had registered significant further progress in our policies of development and upliftment of the underdeveloped population groups and areas of our country. Now, suddenly, it is ‘too little, too late.’

“The tragedy is that, while we in South Africa have taken strides ahead, compared with other African states, these negative actions by some foreign governments and their local fellow travelers served only to frustrate our attempts to reach our goals. The actions taken against us have been totally counterproductive.”