Botha Offers to Talk With ANC but Sets Tough Terms

President Pieter W. Botha told the South African Parliament on Friday that his government is willing to discuss a new political system for the country with the outlawed African National Congress.

But he set tough conditions, including an end to the group’s 25-year armed struggle against minority white rule.

Although again blaming the African National Congress for much of the violence that has swept South Africa over the past 2 1/2 years, Botha cautiously reopened the possibility of negotiations with the group. He had virtually rejected such talks when they were proposed last May by a Commonwealth commission attempting to mediate between Pretoria and the ANC.

“Discussions with the ANC are possible,” Botha said, “only if it severs its ties and terminates its subservience to the South African Communist Party, abandons violence and participates, as peaceful South African citizens, in constitutional processes in South Africa.”

A senior official said here later that despite these conditions the government is “very interested in exploring every possibility of a peaceful resolution of South Africa’s problems.”

“Our door may not be wide open to the ANC, given its commitment to violence and terrorism and communism,” the official said, “but it is open to those within the ANC, our fellow citizens, who are willing to talk about the future of South Africa.”

Botha, in his state-of-the-nation address opening the annual session of Parliament, also announced that the planned elections for the all-white House of Assembly in the tricameral legislature will be held May 6. On the subject of talks with the ANC, Botha made it clear that this apparent overture did not mean any relaxation of the government’s effort to curb political violence or an early lifting of the state of emergency, now in its eighth month, that has put much of the country under what amounts to martial law.

“I must warn those who have committed themselves irrevocably to the violent overthrow of the state and the disruption of society that the government will not for a moment hesitate to act decisively against them,” he said to the unusually subdued Parliament, which applauded him only at the end of his 30-minute speech. “The government would like to lift the state of emergency, but it will maintain its basic responsibility to uphold law and order purposefully at all times.”

Acceptance Unlikely

The African National Congress, which has been as dubious about early talks as Pretoria has, seems certain to reject Botha’s conditions for negotiations, at least in their present form. ANC President Oliver Tambo has declared repeatedly in the course of his current visit to the United States that the ANC regards its “armed struggle” as giving it much of its present political leverage and as a “just response” to what the country’s black majority sees as government repression.

The ANC, according to senior officials in the group, believes that its alliance with the South African Communist Party over the past 60 years has given it important political depth, ideological perspective and organizational strength, and the group has rejected past attempts by Pretoria to divide it into African nationalist and Communist factions.

But the timing and phrasing of Botha’s remarks appeared to be intended as a response to Tambo’s recent declarations that the ANC wanted to discuss terms for a cease-fire in its long guerrilla war with the government and that it was prepared to consider multilateral negotiations, in which the ANC, the government and other major political forces would participate, on a democratic political system for South Africa.

Critical of Proposal

“We make a few conciliatory shifts, and they get tougher,” an ANC official at the group’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, said. “This is not the kind of dialogue that will get very far.”

However qualified and limited, the overture will still appeal to many of Botha’s domestic and foreign critics, including the Reagan Administration, since his conditions are the same conditions that they themselves might impose on the ANC.

The result, diplomats here said after Botha’s speech, could be an increase in pressure on the ANC, “at least to talk about talks,” as one ambassador commented.

The elections to the all-white House of Assembly, according to government officials, will amount to a vote of confidence in the 71-year-old president’s leadership and his policies of gradual political reform and will also be an effort to bring younger, more liberal members of the ruling National Party into Parliament to speed those reforms.

Botha Repeats Stand

But Botha, fearful of attacks from the right and of rejection by blacks, disclosed no new reform plans and merely repeated his government’s commitment to “political power-sharing” with blacks some time in the future.

The government’s basic concept continues to be the development of a “national council” that would become the forum for negotiating a new political system and perhaps later become a supreme “state council,” supplanting Parliament, to give blacks equal political rights on a “group basis” with whites, Indians and Coloreds (those of mixed race).

Little progress is expected on political reform, however, until after the election, in which the National Party apparently hopes to win a broad but vague mandate from white voters to proceed. Botha’s speech should not be read as “a reduction in the government’s commitment to reform,” Stoffel van der Merwe, the deputy minister for information, told foreign correspondents.

“Reform has proceeded at a certain pace, and then it has leveled off,” he said, because black leaders, put off by what they regard as unacceptable conditions, have so far been unwilling to join in what the government calls the “constitutional process.”

“To a large extent, the ball is in the other court,” he said. “We cannot proceed until they come forward.”

Strategy on Reform

During the three-month election campaign, “reform will have to be kept vague,” Van der Merwe added, so that it does not become a victim of heated political debate. Later, he said, the government will return to the key items on its reform agenda--amendment of the Group Areas Act, which segregates residential neighborhoods according to race, and a new constitution that will “share power” according to “groups.”

“The two are intertwined and should be treated as a package deal,” Van der Merwe, a leading National Party liberal, said, expressing his personal opinion rather than that of the Cabinet. “Short of this, there are no major reform issues that can be resolved.”

The most likely resolution of the highly emotional issue of racial integration in residential neighborhoods will be to make it a matter for local option, Van der Merwe said, adding: “Clearly, the total abolition of ‘group areas’ is not in the cards.” Reforms will be aimed at adapting “group areas to get rid of the sharp edges where they hurt people.”

Opposes One Man, One Vote

Botha, referring to a far-reaching proposal for merger of Natal province with the Zulu tribal homeland of Kwazulu, said his government would not object to “joint executive authorities” but is opposed to any form of “one man, one vote” because it would lead to majority, or black, domination of minority groups.

“The demand is often made here and abroad that South Africa should adopt a so-called one-man, one-vote, non-racial democracy,” Botha said. “In our circumstances, this demand cannot lead to a just dispensation in a multicultural society.”

Speaking of the proposals for qualified majority rule in Natal, Botha declared, “The government believes that any constitutional dispensation for our multicultural society must, at all levels of government, meet the requirements of protection and self-determination for minority groups, power-sharing among the groups in respect of matters of common concern and the prevention of domination by any group of the others.”

Meanwhile, white anti-apartheid activist Valence M. Watson, 34, was sentenced Friday to 2 1/2 years in prison by the court in Port Elizabeth where he was convicted Thursday of arson and insurance fraud in the 1985 burning of the family home. His lawyers said they will appeal. Two brothers, Daniel and Ronald, were acquitted.