Botha’s Party Assailed by S. Africa’s Far Right

President Pieter W. Botha’s ruling National Party on Wednesday came under attack, quite improbably, for being soft on communism and weak in curbing South Africa’s civil strife and for risking white control of the country with its plans for limited political reforms.

Andries Treurnicht, leader of the far-right Conservative Party, which is now the largest opposition party in the tricameral Parliament, launched a broad assault on the Nationalist government, accusing it of selling out white interests in an attempt to appease the country’s black majority.

“The weakness of the present white government is an invitation to blacks to take over power, and that is what is happening now,” Treurnicht declared, calling Botha’s proposals for a new “power-sharing” constitution “not democracy but the loss of white control and the start of black domination.”

For the first time since they came to power nearly 40 years ago, the Nationalists now face a sustained attack from a parliamentary opposition that advocates policies more conservative than its own. This appears to have made the government apprehensive, although it still has an unchallengeable majority of 133 seats in the 178-member House of Assembly, the white chamber of Parliament.

“The Afrikaner people and the broader white community refuse to be treated as a minority in our own fatherland,” Treurnicht said as he opened a “no-confidence” debate with the themes that won his Conservative Party 23 seats in this month’s whites-only parliamentary elections and enabled it to replace the Progressive Federal Party as the official opposition. “We are a separate community that is entitled to full political self-determination.”

What the Conservative Party wants is partition of South Africa into 13 racially or ethnically based mini-states, which would be politically independent but would remain economically interactive in a common market arrangement.

Cornelius P. (Connie) Mulder, a former National Party member and former Cabinet minister who was forced from power in a political scandal a decade ago and who was reelected to Parliament as a Conservative, told foreign correspondents earlier Wednesday that whites would probably keep much of the mineral-rich Transvaal province, the Orange Free State and parts of Natal and Cape provinces, but would give blacks more than the 13% they now hold.

All political power in the new white republic, perhaps called “Southland,” would be held by whites; blacks would be permitted to work their land but not to become citizens, to vote or to have labor unions. If the West imposed sanctions in an attempt to prevent this calculated return to the strict apartheid of the late Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd, then “Southland” would halt export of strategic raw materials.