Rightists Vow to Battle De Klerk Reforms : South Africa: Conservatives threaten a strike and seek an election. This underscores the president’s vulnerability among white voters.

The right-wing Conservative Party, saying that President Frederik W. de Klerk’s reforms far exceed his electoral mandate, vowed Wednesday to launch a campaign to force new elections among South African whites and threatened to call a two-day general strike of all its supporters to show “the power of the CP.”

Such a work stoppage, which Conservative spokesmen said would be called only as a last resort, could virtually shut down the country and threaten De Klerk’s government.

“South African Airways would not be flying, police will not be running, hospitals, fire brigades, buses, schools--the lot,” said Conservative Party spokesman Koos van der Merwe. “Then they’ll see what we are prepared to do.”

The threat underscores the vulnerability of De Klerk’s political support among white Afrikaners stunned by his decision to lift the longstanding bans on the African National Congress and other guerrilla groups and by his promise to free black nationalist Nelson R. Mandela without forcing him to first renounce violence.

“As long as the ANC relies on violence, it has no place in South Africa,” Van der Merwe said.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived in South Africa on Wednesday for the first time since 1979, and dozens of curious blacks clogged the airport arrivals hall in Johannesburg for a glimpse of him. He told reporters that he and his 17-member entourage plan to “get a firsthand view of South Africa” during their visit, which was approved by the South African government last month.

Jackson, greeted at the airport by ANC leader Walter Sisulu and anti-apartheid clerics, said he will try to unite blacks in South Africa and address the “unfounded fears” of whites.

“There is no security in the future if apartheid continues,” he said. “Apartheid must go--it is a sin.”

Conservatives won 31% of the vote in September’s general elections, and many of those voters work in the government civil service, police force and army. Most of the remainder of the 2 million white voters support the ruling National Party or the more liberal Democratic Party, both of which advocate power-sharing with the black majority.

De Klerk has said the combined two-thirds vote for his party and the Democrats reflected a clear mandate for his government to create a climate in which blacks and whites can draw up a new constitution that will give blacks voting rights for the first time. Conservatives favor dividing South Africa into independent white and black states.

The Conservatives maintain that De Klerk’s National Party would not have been reelected in September if it had been honest with white voters about its plans. Van der Merwe showed reporters brochures that De Klerk’s party distributed in the last election campaign. In those pamphlets, outlining its stand on the issues, the National Party said that “as long as the ANC relies on violence, this organization has no place in a new South Africa.”

“The National Party has deliberately crooked the people,” Van der Merwe said.

De Klerk has said that legalizing the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Pan-Africanist Congress was justified because the security situation in the country has improved.

“No one can say we bluffed anybody,” a senior government official said Wednesday night. “We made it clear (in the election campaign) that we were going to end white domination.”

Earlier in the week, government Education Minister Stoffel van der Merwe, who is no relation to the Conservative spokesman, said the right-wing reaction to De Klerk’s reforms “doesn’t really matter because they have never given us one ounce of support in anything.”

“To say we have a mandate explicitly for this or that is not so important,” added the minister, one of the architects of De Klerk’s reforms. “The voters will get their opportunity to accept or reject” any new constitution.

The Conservatives this week launched Action One Million, a plan to increase their political strength beyond the 673,000 voters who supported them in the last election.

Koos van der Merwe said his party wants to pressure the government to call an election before its five-year term is completed.

“We will keep pressure on (De Klerk) day to day until he has no alternative,” Van der Merwe said.

Both the government and the Conservative Party have labeled past worker stayaways by blacks a form of violence, and such strikes, as well as calls for them, remain illegal under the 3 1/2-year-old state of emergency.

But Koos van der Merwe said that a Conservative Party job action “is not violence. It’s just proof of the strength of our party.”

“They (the government) are trying to put us in chains and we won’t go,” he said. “We want a proper fatherland. If you go through this country you will find the graves of thousands of Afrikaners who have fought for this country. But we say the blacks, the Coloreds (mixed-race) and the Indians are also entitled to land in this country. And we can only survive by dividing the land.”

The Conservative Party, which has a close but uneasy relationship with other, more militant right-wing groups, “is not interested in violence,” Van der Merwe said. “We reject it.”