Release of S. African Called Key to Mandela’s Freedom

Two key South African Cabinet ministers said Sunday that results of the release last week of Govan Mbeki, the chairman of the outlawed African National Congress, jailed nearly a quarter century ago for attempting to overthrow minority white rule here, could determine the fate of Nelson Mandela and other imprisoned black leaders.

Kobie Coetsee, the justice minister, who authorized Mbeki’s release, and Stoffel van der Merwe, the deputy minister for information and constitutional development, said President Pieter W. Botha and his Cabinet will watch closely to see the results of the move.

“The future of Mandela and the others is, to some extent, in Mr. Mbeki’s hands,” Van der Merwe said in an interview with the Johannesburg Star.

Should Mbeki, 77, “become involved in political unrest, trouble or incitement or break any laws,” Van der Merwe added, the government’s hopes of releasing Mandela and other leaders of the ANC and the smaller Pan Africanist Congress of Azania would be “damaged.”

Coetsee, who has sought for several years to find the right time and way to free the black nationalists, said in a separate interview that “if the issue of Mr. Mbeki and his release results in an increase in unrest and a rise in the (political) temperature in the country, it will naturally have an influence” on future prisoner releases.

But Coetsee, speaking to the influential Afrikaans-language newspaper Rapport, said he expects Mbeki, who may speak and travel freely although he may not be quoted inside South Africa, to become fully involved in “normal politics”--and he implied that this is the government’s hope.

Aim for Reconciliation

Coetsee also expressed confidence that the veteran ANC and South African Communist Party leader, who has already emphasized his desire to see reconciliation and a peaceful resolution of the country’s problems, will not allow himself to be manipulated by “radicals.”

The two ministers’ comments were the first explanation of the government’s motives in releasing Mbeki, who was serving a life sentence for his part in a campaign of sabotage and bombings that launched the ANC’s armed struggle against minority white rule in the early 1960s. Neither minister was available for further comment Sunday, and other government spokesmen said they could not elaborate on their remarks.

The interviews, published Sunday, added substantially to speculation here that President Botha, who is trying to develop a dialogue with black leaders on a new political system for the country, has embarked on a bold initiative that will lead to freedom for Mandela and other imprisoned leaders as a step toward full negotiations on a “power-sharing” constitution.

Van der Merwe, the government’s principal negotiator in those talks, said the release of Mbeki and other political prisoners would deprive the ANC of a reason for rejecting the talks and force it to respond to government initiatives. But Coetsee reiterated the official government position that the ANC, if it wants to take part in negotiations on the country’s future, must first end its armed struggle and abandon violence as a means to bring political change--a condition that the ANC rejects without a matching government commitment.

Yet, the thrust of government efforts over the past six months has been to draw the ANC and its supporters into a political dialogue. When Mandela and the other prisoners are freed, Van der Merwe said, then other black leaders, such as Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, would be willing to join the negotiations, said Van der Merwe, who also sees their release as largely a question of finding the right way and time.

The release of Mbeki, Van der Merwe added, has already won wide approval within and outside South Africa, giving further impetus to the government’s reform program and its efforts to promote a political dialogue with the country’s black majority. The government also wanted, he said, to avoid “martyrdom” for any of the prisoners, most of whom are in their 70s or late 60s--Mandela is 69--and have been held for two decades or longer, and to “demythologize” them by releasing them as soon as possible.

“There are some people in jail who have served a very long time,” Van der Merwe said. “The need for retribution has been fulfilled. The main concern is the prognosis.”

For many observers, Mbeki was a surprising choice for the government. A tough-minded intellectual whose resolve steeled many younger prisoners, Mbeki remains a committed Communist as well as the ANC’s national chairman.

Yet Coetsee, who has met with Mandela and other ANC prisoners, expressed extraordinary confidence in Mbeki, both as a man and as a political leader. Mbeki had “cooperated completely with all those involved in his release,” Coetsee told Rapport, and as a result there was “complete trust between Mbeki and those officials.”

This cooperation apparently extended to Mbeki’s conferring with the government on the timing and circumstances of his release--he has repeatedly declared that he was freed unconditionally--and to intensive consultations with other ANC leaders, including Mandela, who are still in prison.

While Mbeki’s release was not intended as a test run for that of Mandela, South Africa’s preeminent black leader, Coetsee described the connection as inevitable. “This places, naturally, a very heavy onus on Mr. Mbeki,” he added.

Aside from a brief confrontation between police and jubilant black youths who greeted Mbeki on his arrival in Johannesburg, news of his release has generated no disturbances so far. On Sunday, he walked around New Brighton, a black township near the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, where he will make his home, and was greeted by scores of well-wishers but caused no excitement.

Mbeki has declared his desire to resume an active political role and re-establish contacts with the ANC leadership in exile, once he has studied the situation inside the country, but he seems more intent on the broader questions, such as black unity and racial reconciliation, than the day-to-day organization and mass mobilization that were his specialty 30 years ago.

In the country’s troubled Natal province, meanwhile, at least five blacks were killed in a further upsurge of fighting between rival black groups, police headquarters in Pretoria reported Sunday. One of the victims was a 15-year-old boy whose throat had been cut.

More than 150 people have been killed in the past three months in the fighting around Pietermaritzburg, the Natal capital, as supporters of the United Democratic Front have battled with members of Inkatha, the Zulu political movement led by Buthelezi. While both groups oppose apartheid, they differ sharply over the means blacks should use to end it and the kind of political system that should follow.

Combat troops joined riot police last week in an intensified government effort to halt the almost daily clashes. Efforts by senior officials of both groups, as well as prominent churchmen, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, have failed to establish a lasting cease-fire.