Apartheid Foes Meet to Plan New Tactics

More than 4,500 activists Saturday opened the largest-ever anti-apartheid conference with hopes of finding new tactics to topple the white minority government.

Black, white, Indian and mixed-race members of about 2,100 organizations--some of them ideological rivals in past years--filled a university hall for the Conference for a Democratic Future.

“The regime . . . has done its utmost to break us: whipping our people, declaring the states of emergency, assassinating and detaining our leaders,” said the keynote speaker, African National Congress leader Walter Sisulu. “It has failed. We gather here in greater numbers than ever before.”

The government chose to allow the anti-apartheid conference even though many participants belong to groups banned under terms of the 3 1/2-year-old state of emergency. A similar conference was prohibited last year shortly before it was to open.

The agenda for this year’s gathering included plans for mass protests and the possible formation of a new organization encompassing all the participating groups. Decisions reached at the conference were expected to be announced today.

“Your diversity is our strength,” Sisulu said. “The gigantic task of this conference is to confirm the crucial importance of unity and to plan a program of mass action . . . that will challenge the apartheid state.”

Sisulu, 77, was freed unconditionally in October by President Frederik W. de Klerk after 26 years in prison. But Sisulu had no praise for the president or the white-controlled government’s offer to negotiate some form of black political rights that stops short of majority rule.

“Mr. de Klerk, your back is to the wall,” Sisulu said. “Come stand on the floor of a conference like this. . . . Submit to the processes of democracy.”

Sisulu acknowledged that De Klerk, during four months in power, has moved faster toward reform than his predecessors. “But we know he has limits beyond which he will not go,” Sisulu said.

“We reiterate our commitment to one person, one vote . . . as the non-negotiable principle on which a future South Africa will be built,” he said.

De Klerk has said he supports giving South Africa’s 28 million blacks some form of power, but not the concept of one person, one vote. The nation’s 5 million whites control the economy and the government.

Meanwhile, in Boksburg, an industrial city near Johannesburg, police used tear gas to break up clashes between white extremists and scores of mixed-race people who came to picnic at a whites-only park. Ten people were arrested, police said.

Boksburg has been beset by racial tension since far-right candidates won control of the municipal council last year. Civic leaders in Rieger Park, Boksburg’s mixed-race neighborhood, organized the picnic to protest alleged assaults on mixed-race women by members of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement.