ANC Plans Challenge of Pretoria’s Legitimacy

The African National Congress, in an important tactical shift, plans to directly challenge the legitimacy of South Africa’s white-led minority government in a campaign aimed not only at increasing Pretoria’s international isolation but at winning recognition for the ANC as the “sole authentic representative of the oppressed people” of that country.

The ambitious new campaign, launched last week at a major anti-apartheid conference here, will seek to shift international recognition from the government in Pretoria to the ANC, the principal organization fighting continued white rule in South Africa.

This, in turn, is part of far-reaching changes in ANC strategy to put the 75-year-old organization continually on the offensive in confronting the government of President Pieter W. Botha at home and abroad.

“The illegitimacy of the apartheid regime is self-evident,” Johnstone Makatini, the ANC’s international affairs director, told a committee meeting at the conference. “Everyone is agreed that apartheid as a system cannot be reformed . . . and so our challenge is to build up a replacement. It is not enough to say apartheid must go. We must say what and who will replace it.”

Drive to Shift Recognition

In international terms, this means a campaign to shift recognition from Pretoria, which still has important diplomatic ties with the United States and most of Western Europe, to the African National Congress, which plans to bid for broad acceptance of its political program as well as improved diplomatic status.

The ANC hopes to win such recognition first from African states and Third World leaders like India, and then from sympathetic Western countries, starting in Scandinavia, ANC officials said.

The ANC now has full diplomatic recognition only from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania, Cuba and Kenya, and it has observer status at the United Nations and most international groups.

“We should have a clear program of action in various capitals on the position of the ANC as the incontestable vanguard of the broad democratic movement in South Africa, even as the sole authentic representative of the oppressed people of the country,” Makatini said.

“Once they understand it, no one can fault the position of the ANC--not even the Reagan Administration--when we say that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that the birthrights of all should be guaranteed, regardless of race, creed or color. . . . We sound like the American Founding Fathers.”

The new ANC effort will also turn major international conferences, such as the annual meetings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, other U.N. organizations and the International Monetary Fund, into anti-apartheid forums as Pretoria’s credentials are challenged and the ANC’s claim to represent South Africa is pressed.

The ANC would like to begin by supplanting the Pretoria government in nominating officials for employment by the United Nations and other international groups.

“The South African government in its propaganda says that it is legitimate and the ANC is a terrorist organization,” Yusuf Saloojee, the chief ANC representative in Canada, commented. “Our emphasis should not only be on countering this but on making the international community take a firm stand. Everyone recognizes the immorality of the apartheid regime, but governments continue to give legitimacy to that regime through diplomatic recognition.”

Canada is regarded as a test case for the new tactics after Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s declaration earlier this year that Ottawa would consider new sanctions against South Africa, including a break in diplomatic relations.

Sees ‘Major Contradiction’

“The Canadians have a problem: How can they, or any other country, continue to give any recognition to a system they have declared to be immoral?” a senior ANC official said, explaining the group’s new tactics. “For Canada, in these circumstances, to continue its recognition of the legality of apartheid is a major contradiction.”

Canadian officials are, in fact, examining formulas that would shift the accreditation of its ambassador in Pretoria from the government there to “the people of South Africa,” according to diplomats who attended the four-day ANC conference here.

“There’s an alternative power in South Africa in the making,” Saloojee added. “We need to get acceptance and support for that new alternative power and even formal, legal and international recognition of the illegitimacy of the present regime and of the legitimacy of this democratic alternative.”

But the ANC’s diplomatic moves, as described by top officials of the group, are part of a broader, still-evolving strategy that seeks to transform the whole anti-apartheid movement, shifting it from protests against government policies to action programs that keep it on the offensive.

Vision of a New System

Challenged by recent calls, notably that of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, to declare what kind of future it wants for South Africa, the ANC intends to articulate its vision of a new, democratic political system, no longer based on race, and to campaign for international support for it, according to senior ANC officials.

This looks forward to widely anticipated negotiations--accepted in principle by the government, the ANC and most other major political groups in South Africa--to work out a new political system for the country and resolve the prolonged crisis.

“We need to be able to say what we are for, what we want, how we propose to obtain it,” one member of the ANC’s national executive committee said. “We have always had our ideals, our goals, but now we need to define them and to begin selling them as such.”

Makatini, who also is a member of the ANC’s policy-making national executive committee, said that one ANC goal is to win international endorsement of the group’s Freedom Charter, first adopted in 1955, that sets out in broad terms its vision of a post-apartheid South Africa. The document will soon be put to the European Parliament for such action, he said.

While Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, told the conference that the group’s armed insurgency, launched in 1961 after the organization was outlawed, will be intensified, the emphasis was clearly on a broad new political offensive that looks forward to negotiations to resolve the crisis.

Related to ‘United Front’

The new international tactics are part, too, of the ANC’s attempts to establish a broad “united front” of anti-apartheid forces in South Africa. If successful, the new efforts would win international recognition for such a movement, reinforcing its position inside the country--and assuring the ANC of a leadership role.

A potential problem that concerns ANC leaders is probable resistance from the rival Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, which has important backers, including Zimbabwe, and which is certain to object to any attempt by the ANC to seek recognition as the “sole authentic representative” of the country’s black majority.

“None of this is aimed at the PAC,” a senior ANC official commented, “and we hope that it would not become divisive. But we think it does reflect the real support we have in the country.”

In assessing the current situation in South Africa, the ANC sees what it calls “dual power,” with the government’s right to rule not only contested sharply by the ANC and its supporters but challenged by an emerging “alternative power” based on community backing for rival political structures.

“The democratic perspective is represented by our liberation movement and other mass formations of the democratic movement,” the ANC said in a working paper prepared for the conference.

“Together, these forces enjoy the support and confidence of the overwhelming majority of our people.

Their twin goals, ANC officials said, are further isolation of Pretoria and strengthening of their “democratic alternative” to apartheid.

Some of the international boycotts of South Africa, for example, will probably be relaxed under this shift so that “progressive organizations,” ranging from universities to theater groups to black businesses, would be helped rather than hurt by the measures.