ANC Ready for De Klerk Talks : South Africa: The move is a major step in ending armed resistance to the government. The two sides will discuss removing obstacles to black-white negotiations.

The African National Congress announced Friday that it will soon send a delegation for groundbreaking talks with South African President Frederik W. de Klerk on removal of obstacles to black-white negotiations.

The ANC’s surprise decision, a major step toward ending 30 years of armed resistance to white minority-led rule in South Africa, clears the way for the first meeting between guerrilla leaders and a South African head of state. It was announced after a three-day meeting of the ANC’s chief policy-makers at the group’s headquarters-in-exile in Lusaka, Zambia.

The action also marks the first significant move toward compromise by the ANC since De Klerk lifted a ban on the ANC and freed its leader, Nelson R. Mandela, from prison.

ANC leaders also said they would immediately begin to re-establish their organization inside South Africa and take steps to prepare for the return of about 15,000 ANC members after three decades in exile.

However, Alfred Nzo, ANC secretary general, said his movement would not be ready to negotiate a “suspension of hostilities” with Pretoria until De Klerk has met the ANC’s remaining conditions for negotiations by scrapping the 3 1/2-year-old state of emergency and freeing all political prisoners.

The ANC, the primary guerrilla group fighting Pretoria, has waged a bombing and sabotage campaign since 1961. But the armed struggle has been scaled back in the past 18 months and the ANC recently acknowledged that its military campaign poses no serious threat to the government.

A presidential spokesman in Cape Town said De Klerk had no statement to make about the ANC announcement.

The president has said the emergency regulations will be lifted when he is convinced that they are no longer needed to control unrest in the country. The release of prisoners held for politically motivated violent crimes would be a subject for negotiations, the president has said.

The government has moved quickly in recent weeks to remove restrictions on black political activity to lure black leaders from the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups to the negotiating table, where it hopes to draw up a new constitution to give voting rights to the 27 million blacks and bring an end to apartheid, the system of racial segregation.

De Klerk has gone most of the way toward meeting the ANC’s pre-negotiation demands, but until Friday, the ANC had refused to talk with the government before all its demands were met. Now, the ANC, under international pressure to meet De Klerk halfway, has backed away from that rigid position.

The ANC’s decision may have been influenced by Mandela, freed Sunday after serving 27 years of a life sentence for sabotage, who has adopted a conciliatory view toward the government’s peace initiatives. Mandela has described De Klerk as “a man of integrity” and expressed the hope that negotiations between the ANC and the government could begin soon.

Political analysts say the move is likely to polarize the ANC, which is said to have been divided over whether to talk to the government. It will also dampen support for the ANC among more radical activists, who refuse to talk to the government until it removes the remaining vestiges of apartheid and agrees to hand over power.

No free ANC leader has met with a South African president since long before the ANC was banned in 1960. While in prison, Mandela met twice with De Klerk and once with his predecessor, Pieter W. Botha, to present the ANC’s position.

The ANC said its delegation to South Africa would include leaders from both inside and outside the country. It specified no date for the meeting.

In recent months, several senior members of the ANC have been released from life prison terms, including Mandela, 71, and Walter Sisulu, 77, and those men will probably be part of the talks with De Klerk. Mandela plans to visit the ANC headquarters next week for consultations, and the ANC has yet to announce what role he will play in the movement.

In Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, Mandela said he is ready to play a role in the talks, including meeting with De Klerk.

“They (the ANC) might want me to meet Mr. De Klerk and convey certain messages. This will be decided by them,” he said.

Nzo told reporters Friday that Sisulu, a former ANC secretary general who was freed in October after 25 years in prison, will lead the effort to rebuild the ANC inside South Africa.

“It is important immediately to begin the work of re-establishing the ANC within the country,” Nzo told reporters after the 33-member ANC executive committee met in special session. He added that the organization would soon begin making arrangements for exiles to return on a large scale, and the ANC set its next general meeting for Dec. 16 in South Africa.

De Klerk’s stunning reforms, introduced Feb. 2, have legalized more than 60 anti-apartheid groups, including the ANC and its ally, the South African Communist Party, and lifted restrictions on hundreds of political activists. De Klerk followed that announcement last weekend by freeing Mandela, who the president said is committed to peaceful solutions to South Africa’s problems.

De Klerk has come under heavy fire from right-wing whites critical of his initiatives, but he insists he has the support of the majority of the country’s 5 million whites, who are outnumbered 5-to-1 by blacks. He envisions a new constitution that will give blacks a vote but still maintain protection for the white minority. The ANC and other black groups want a system of one-person, one-vote majority rule.

The president has said that his initiatives removed the rationale for the ANC’s armed struggle, which Mandela launched in 1961 in response to the government’s use of force to stop all forms of peaceful protest.

Nzo said the ANC viewed De Klerk’s moves “in a positive light,” and he said the ANC leaders had considered “with all due seriousness” suggestions that it suspend its armed struggle.

But he said police in South Africa and in the nominally independent homelands created by Pretoria were continuing a “campaign of repression.” And he said the ANC will negotiate a cease-fire with Pretoria only when the government has created “a climate conducive to negotiations” by lifting the state of emergency and other repressive legislation and freeing political prisoners.

Nzo called that “the only just and correct way to approach this question.”

The ANC executive panel reiterated its support for international sanctions against South Africa, noting that the sanctions were imposed to end apartheid. The pillars of apartheid, including laws segregating residential neighborhoods and schools, remain in place.

“There can therefore be no justification for lifting these sanctions at this stage,” the ANC said in a statement.

Mandela told reporters after a closed meeting with foreign diplomats in a hotel near Johannesburg that he had urged the diplomats to ask their governments to intensify the sanctions.

The ANC leaders also said they are concerned by the continuing violent clashes between black supporters and opponents of the ANC inside South Africa, and they said urgent steps are needed to end the “fratricidal carnage.”

In particular, violence in Natal province between supporters of the United Democratic Front, a multiracial umbrella group of about 650 anti-apartheid organizations, and those of Inkatha, a Zulu tribal organization led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, has left as many as 2,000 dead in the last five years.