Head of Outlawed Group Challenges S. Africa to Create Climate for Talks

President Oliver Tambo of the African National Congress challenged the South African government Friday to take concrete steps to create a climate for negotiations on the country’s future, implying that the ANC wants to be convinced of the government’s sincerity before joining any talks.

Tambo, skeptical of recent government offers to negotiate but conciliatory toward the white minority, called on Pretoria to lift the state of emergency in South Africa, to release political prisoners and to legalize the ANC, which was banned in 1960, as steps to lay the basis for talks on a new political system for the country.

He also challenged the government, as another test of its sincerity, to explain to whites the need it apparently now sees to negotiate with the ANC, which it continues to attack as a Communist-led group of terrorists.

“If attitudes have changed, the Pretoria regime should go back to the electorate and say the ANC is not really the monster we told you it was,” Tambo told reporters pressing him for the ANC’s reaction to recent government overtures.

“The road to negotiations begins with the acceptance that we are one people in South Africa, not blacks versus whites. We want to create a society in which we live together as fellow South Africans.”

Cites Commonwealth Proposals

Perhaps the best path to negotiations, Tambo indicated, might be the proposals last year by a special Commonwealth commission, which also called for a suspension of the ANC’s armed struggle of the past 26 years to end apartheid.

Those proposals were rejected by the government, which wanted as a minimum a renunciation of violence by the African National Congress. They also unsettled the ANC, which saw itself being drawn into prolonged negotiations with limited prospects of establishing a new political system based on the principle of one person, one vote.

“If the regime looked at those (Commonwealth) proposals again and found them acceptable as a basis for talks, then we might, too,” one senior ANC source said later, offering what he described as a “personal view.”

“But the first question, before we even get to such preliminaries, is whether the government is serious, or is this just talk, some sort of tactical feint or maybe an out-and-out trick. We don’t know, and we want a demonstration of its sincerity.”

Tambo confirmed that the government had recently made secret approaches to the ANC with offers to open talks with it, but he said there has been no reply to ANC requests for details on the proposed discussions and consequently no further contacts.

The ANC is committed, Tambo said, to open negotiations with the full participation of its supporters inside South Africa.

Recent rumors in the black community, largely spread by the rival Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania and apparently by the government itself, have implied that the ANC was already negotiating with the government on Pretoria’s proposal for political “power sharing.”

Confusion Charged

These and other suggestions of imminent talks are intended “to confuse our people,” Tambo said, sensitive to criticism that the government might try to exclude such organizations as the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions from the negotiations as more militant and less pragmatic than the ANC.

“The ANC is very sensitive about secret talks and contacts with the Pretoria regime,” Tambo added. “We have always told our people the truth about whom we have met and what we have discussed. . . . We will make sure that nothing goes wrong to affectthe confidence people have in the ANC.”

Within the ANC, many leaders of which are attending an international anti-apartheid conference here, there are many questions about recent government overtures to the group: How serious is the government? What is its motivation? Why has there been a “quick switch” from the strong attacks of April and May to the conciliatory approaches of recent months? Where does the government believe negotiations would take it?

With such questions and the deep suspicions of the government that have grown over three generations, Tambo said the ANC leadership believes it should “watch and see where these maneuvers are starting from and where they will lead.”

There is considerable speculation within the African National Congress’ top ranks about the recent overtures of Stoffel van der Merwe, who as the deputy minister for constitutional development and information, is the government’s principal negotiator.

In recent statements and interviews, Van der Merwe has emphasized the government’s desire to bring the ANC into negotiations on a new political system for the country, provided it ends its armed struggle, and he has said the government would strive to remove any political or legal barriers that stood in the way of ANC participation.

Wants Proof of Sincerity

But the ANC wants clearer, firmer proof of government sincerity, according to senior ANC officials, and Tambo’s press conference comments appeared to be almost a reply to previous statements.

“I cannot say that the Pretoria regime, in our experience of it, is seriously trying to make contacts with the ANC or to improve relations with the ANC,” Tambo said.

“When I travel abroad, South African embassies take out full-page advertisements in local papers portraying the ANC in the ugliest possible ways. . . . It’s difficult to reconcile that attitude . . . with any attempt to have relations with the ANC.”

But Tambo took a conciliatory line toward whites in the country, reiterating the African National Congress’ position that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”

Asked if white officials might be tried under Nuremberg-type laws in a post-apartheid South Africa, he said, “Much depends on what happens between now and the time we raise the flag of freedom.”

“It may be possible to say then, ‘Let’s bury the past and build on the past, on the ruins of apartheid.’ We don’t want to promise rewards to people perpetrating crimes. . . . However, this is something that can be left to the future and to the people in a free South Africa.”