Botha Charges U.S. Sanctions ‘Fan Violence’ : Kremlin’s Work Done for It by Washington, S. Africa Leader Says

President Pieter W. Botha, campaigning for his embattled National Party, scathingly attacked the United States on Wednesday for imposing economic sanctions on South Africa and declared that white voters here will show the world in the coming parliamentary election that they are unwilling to capitulate to international demands for black majority rule.

The limited American sanctions, imposed by Congress last year, had “the direct result of fanning violence,” Botha asserted, and discouraged “many responsible and peaceful (black) leaders from coming forward to negotiate” with his government.

“The Kremlin has had its work done for it in Washington,” Botha said, arguing that the U.S. congressional action last year advanced the Soviet Union’s efforts to dominate southern Africa. “South Africa is the scapegoat for America’s bad conscience on race relations,” he said.

Botha’s blistering attack on the United States and other countries pushing South Africa to end apartheid, the system of racial separation and minority white rule, appears likely to develop into a major Nationalist theme of the whites-only parliamentary election on May 6, just as it was a decade ago when Prime Minister John Vorster used it to score a major electoral victory.

‘Blind to Reality’

“These people are not only blind to reality,” Botha said of congressional supporters of sanctions, “but they will be satisfied with nothing less than total capitulation to the revolutionary forces in South Africa. . . . But we are not prepared to surrender.”

Botha was speaking in Lichtenburg, a farming community about 125 miles west of Johannesburg, where many whites have been critical of even the government’s limited attempts to end apartheid. But he received a warm welcome from enthusiastic National Party supporters who hope to recapture the constituency from the ultrarightist Conservative Party.

Recent public opinion polls show the Nationalists, who have held power here since 1948, in danger of losing important constituencies to both the left and the right, although the party’s control of the white House of Assembly, and thus of the tricameral parliamentary system, remains assured.

Botha, in calling the election, wanted to consolidate his right flank against attacks by the Conservative and the Herstigte Nasionale parties, whose bitter squabbling has prevented them from joining forces to campaign together against the Nationalists.

Challenges From Left

Greater challenges have instead come from the left--from the Progressive Federal Party, which boasts that it will gain as many as 20 seats this election and could even oust the National Party in the next election in two years, and from disgruntled Nationalists who have broken with Botha over what they regard as the slow pace of reform in order to run as independents.

In his first speech on behalf of the Nationalists in this campaign, Botha nonetheless sought to preempt the main right-wing issues, particularly that of security, in what seemed an attempt to set the topics and tone for the election debates and to recover the initiative lost to the opposition in recent weeks.

Botha said that the Nationalist government intends to retain the present state of emergency, which gives the police and army virtual martial-law powers, until it feels that law and order have been fully restored and the country is no longer threatened by what he called “the Communist onslaught.”

The government would proceed at the same time, he said, with still-undisclosed plans for gradual, step-by-step reforms intended to give blacks a share of political power without “threatening” the country’s white minority.