S. Africa Will Bar Meetings of Whites and Apartheid Foes, Botha Says

President Pieter W. Botha, denouncing recent talks between white South Africans and the outlawed African National Congress as unpatriotic and dangerous to the country’s security, said Thursday the government will take steps to prevent “collaboration with South Africa’s enemies.”

Although the government allowed the meeting of 50 white liberals with the African National Congress in Dakar, Senegal, to proceed last month, Botha said it will act to stop such meetings in the future because they threaten white unity in resisting what he called the ANC’s “violent revolution” and enhance the group’s prestige and political power.

Botha told Parliament in Cape Town that the government is considering withdrawal of its critics’ passports, restrictions on foreign funds given to political groups seen as “undermining the state,” a parliamentary investigation into the activities and finances of anti-apartheid organizations and curbs on diplomats believed to be “acting off-limits” and interfering in South African affairs.

Ridicules ‘Dakar Safari’

But Botha, while ridiculing what he called the “Dakar safari” for its naivete, also renewed the government’s offer to negotiate with the ANC on a new political system for the country, although he said he doubts that it would agree to abandon its 26-year “armed struggle” in return for such negotiations.

“The international community and the ANC are painfully aware of the fact that the contribution of whites in the solution of the South African problem is of crucial importance and that a mandate has been placed in the hands of the government by the white electorate,” Botha said. “Whites in South Africa are regarded as a problem by our enemies, but the fact is that whites, and in particular the Afrikaner, constitute a great part of the solution.

“Logic dictates that any party, and that includes the ANC, that wants to bring about change in South Africa will have to negotiate with the legally elected government. However, for the ANC, under its present South African Communist Party leadership, there is no question of negotiation as a process of settlement, compromise and give and take.”

The government is trying to promote “orderly and democratic change by a process of negotiation in which all interested parties can be involved,” Botha said. “But the government will not go and sit at the negotiating table at the point of a gun with the handing over of power to revolutionaries as the main item on the agenda.”

Sees Task Complicated

Those who “wooed” the African National Congress and held talks with it “behind the government’s back,” Botha argued, were prolonging the task of getting the ANC “as an accountable and responsible party” to join negotiations on the country’s future and were encouraging it to pursue “an all-or-nothing result.”

Organized by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, former leader of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, the delegation of academics, businessmen, clergy, politicians and journalists proved themselves “useful idiots” to the ANC, Botha said. Some even sought the ANC’s instructions on the role they should play as “democratic patriots” and members of the “progressive forces” working for change in South Africa, he charged.

“For the ANC and South African Communist Party alliance, such talks are only a means to an end--the revolutionary takeover of power,” Botha said.

To political observers, Botha appeared to be reiterating the government’s desire for negotiations, although on its terms, while attempting to discourage private groups from talking to the African National Congress.

May Free Rebel Leader

And in a potentially conciliatory gesture that could have considerable importance, Botha said the government is considering the release of Govan Mbeki, a key ANC leader who is now 76 and nearly blind. Mbeki was jailed for life in 1964 on charges of helping launch the rebels’ campaign of sabotage in an attempt to overthrow the minority white government here.

Botha told Parliament that the government’s previous requirement that political prisoners renounce violence as a condition for their release would not be the sole factor to be considered by advisory panels reviewing the cases of individual prisoners.

Most of the imprisoned ANC leadership, including Nelson Mandela, have refused to forswear violence and have rejected Botha’s earlier offers of freedom, and the apparent policy shift might lead to the release of some of them on humanitarian grounds in view of their advanced age and declining health.

Black politicians, including moderates who generally cooperate with the government, have said repeatedly that they cannot enter into real negotiations on a new constitution for the country while so many veteran leaders are still imprisoned. They would be seen as usurpers and collaborators, they maintain, and any agreement they reached would be rejected by the black community.

Could Ease Impasse

The release of Mbeki might be intended as the first step toward ending this impasse. He was one of the ANC’s most effective organizers in the 1940s and 1950s, and he remains a legendary figure in eastern Cape province. He is also the father of Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s information director, one of its most influential leaders in exile, and the chief of the ANC delegation at Dakar.

Botha said the government is amending legislation creating a national council that would be the forum for preliminary talks on a new constitution so that the representatives of urban blacks would be elected in the first such poll. Other changes might follow further discussions with black leaders, he said, adding that he hopes Parliament will approve the legislation by the end of this year.

Legislation will also be introduced, Botha said, to amend the three-year-old constitution to allow separate elections for the different houses of the tricameral Parliament. The intention is to put off another white election until 1992, although the mixed-race Colored and Indian houses will hold elections next year as scheduled. In an election last May, Botha’s National Party increased its seats in the white chamber.

The president said that the national state of emergency, declared 14 months ago to cope with the country’s continuing civil unrest, will remain in effect “as long as revolutionaries continue to try to create trouble.” He said that it will not be lifted until calm prevails throughout the country and the security forces feel they no longer need the additional powers.