ANC Chief Calls On Nations to Pressure Pretoria With Stiffer Sanctions

Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, called on Tuesday for intensified sanctions against South Africa to increase its international isolation and to force the country’s white minority into negotiations to establish a democratic government there.

Tambo, opening a four-day ANC conference here, said anti-apartheid groups around the world will be asked to take part in a new sanctions campaign intended to cut more of South Africa’s economic, cultural and political ties and to shift effective international recognition to the ANC.

The congress was outlawed by the Pretoria government in 1960.

In the United States, Britain and West Germany and in other nations that are South Africa’s major economic partners, where the governments are likely to reject further official measures, major efforts should be made, Tambo said, to impose “people’s sanctions” through renewed boycott campaigns.

450 Delegates

The conference, the first such international meeting that the 75-year-old ANC has organized, has drawn more than 450 delegates from anti-apartheid organizations, political groups, labor unions and churches in 55 countries.

The conference will also focus at length on the ANC’s vision of a post-apartheid South Africa and its broad strategy to achieve those goals.

The ANC’s hope, senior officials said, is to intensify international pressure on Pretoria through sanctions that hit South Africa’s 5 million whites the hardest and thus erode support for the minority government.

ANC’s strategists believe that as the political crisis in South Africa deepens, pressures including heightened anti-apartheid activity inside the country and the ANC’s low-level guerrilla war will force the ruling National Party into negotiations that establish a new political system based on one-person, one-vote rather than on race.

But Tambo reiterated the ANC’s refusal to negotiate until it is certain that the outcome will be a “united, democratic and non-racial South Africa” with apartheid ended and a new political system in its place.

Without prior acceptance of these goals, he said, negotiations would not result in peace.

At the same time, Tambo rejected government conditions that the ANC end, or at least suspend, its armed struggle and that it break its 60-year alliance with the South African Communist Party--which has sustained it in adversity, brought it much financial and military support and provided it with ideological direction and leadership.

The ANC remains willing, however, to negotiate “the cessation of hostilities”--meaning an end to its low-level insurgency, for matching government concessions--as this is part of “an overall process of negotiations to create a democratic, non-racial South Africa,” Tambo said.

“The question of whether to negotiate or not and under what circumstances,” he added, “will have to be considered by the leadership in its entirety.”

Imprisoned ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela, would have to be released; others would have to return from exile, and the organization itself would have to be allowed to operate legally once again so that the views of its supporters could be heard.

Although some Western governments and even many of its own backers overseas are pushing negotiations hard, the ANC is “not interested in talking for the sake of dialogue,” Tambo said, describing prospective negotiations as “a new area of struggle.”

But Julius K. Nyerere, one of Africa’s elder statesmen as the former president of Tanzania and still the leader of its ruling party, cautioned the ANC that resolution of the South African crisis would have to come through negotiation. Some of the ANC’s members feel that intensified armed struggle is the only route to victory.

“There will come a time when the South African racist regime and its military will accept that such a racist government is no longer possible,” Nyerere told the conference. “They will then accept that negotiations must take place with the people’s leaders.”

In his analysis of the situation in South Africa, Tambo contended that the Pretoria government’s ban on a rally last weekend that Govan Mbeki, the recently freed ANC chairman, was to have addressed in the South African coastal city of Port Elizabeth, not only showed the depth of the political crisis--in which the government can only rule under a state of emergency--but also the support that the ANC commands.

The Port Elizabeth rally, at which more than 50,000 people were expected, “would have confirmed the pre-eminent position of the ANC and the democratic ideals for which it stands,” Tambo said.

But he lamented the sharp divisions within the black community that have led to continued political feuds and considerable bloodshed in South Africa. Most of the continuing civil strife in the country results from internecine clashes around Pietermaritzburg between supporters of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups, and Inkatha, a Zulu political movement also opposed to apartheid, led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.