De Klerk to Meet ANC’s Leadership : South Africa: The April 11 meeting will lay the groundwork for full negotiations. The demand to free political prisoners may be an obstacle.

This country’s white minority-led government and the African National Congress, chief adversaries in decades of racial conflict, will meet April 11 in groundbreaking talks to remove obstacles to full-scale peace negotiations, the government said Friday.

The first official contact between the South African government and the guerrilla movement will bring President Frederik W. de Klerk and senior Cabinet ministers face to face with freed nationalist Nelson R. Mandela and with ANC leaders who have been in exile for up to three decades.

“We will discuss with Mr. Mandela and ANC leaders from outside and from within the country the obstacles perceived to obstruct the process toward negotiation,” De Klerk said in a statement.

In the weeks since the government lifted a 30-year ban on the ANC and freed Mandela, the ANC has expressed a willingness to enter into government-sponsored negotiations on a new constitution that will give the black majority a vote in national affairs.

But, as a condition for those negotiations, the ANC has demanded that the government free prisoners convicted of politically related crimes, lift the 45-month-old state of emergency and repeal all laws that inhibit political activity.

Those conditions will form the basis for the government-ANC talks in Cape Town next month. And Mandela, deputy president of the ANC, said in Stockholm on Friday that the meeting “must produce a result if we are going to continue talking.”

Mandela, who returns today from a five-country, 26-day journey through Africa and Europe, spent much of this week consulting with ANC President Oliver R. Tambo, who is recuperating from a stroke in Sweden, and with other senior congress officials. The ANC position is that De Klerk “must meet the preconditions we have set,” Mandela said in a Swedish radio interview.

The ANC, which plans to begin opening offices in South Africa next week, also is worried about the safe return of about 10,000 exiled congress members, many of whom could be subject to criminal prosecution in South Africa. De Klerk said that is one of the “stumbling blocks” to negotiations that is likely to be discussed when he meets the ANC.

“I think it is reasonable that we should address such practical problems,” De Klerk told a news conference in Cape Town. Among those who might be subject to prosecution for treason and terrorism would be ANC foreign affairs chief Thabo Mbeki and former ANC military commander Joe Slovo, both of whom are expected to sit at the table with De Klerk.

Although the government has stressed that any negotiations for a new constitution will include all black leaders, including moderates and homeland leaders who have worked closely with Pretoria, the more radical ANC holds the key to De Klerk’s hopes. The government needs the agreement of the ANC, the primary liberation movement representing the country’s 27 million blacks, to draw up a constitution that will be accepted by blacks as well as the rest of the world.

But the ANC and the government are far apart on the conditions for negotiations.

The state of emergency, which gives police broad powers to clamp down on political activity and unrest, is not a bargaining chip in the negotiation process, De Klerk said Friday.

“It’s there because it is necessary in a volatile situation,” he said.

Unrest has risen markedly in the past month, with more than 300 blacks killed in factional fighting and riots in the ethnic homelands. The violence now approaches the levels of the bloody days of 1984-86, which prompted the government to declare the current emergency.

De Klerk said he hopes the government, the ANC and other leaders in the country will restore peace in the country and “enable us to lift the state of emergency.”

The ANC’s demand that all political trials be halted and all political prisoners released presents additional difficulties for the government.

Human rights groups estimate that at least 2,500 inmates in South African prisons, including some right-wing whites, were convicted of crimes committed with a political motive. And the government would face intense criticism from white voters if it were to open the prison doors to people convicted of such violent crimes as murder, treason and terrorism.

Mandela, who met twice with De Klerk in prison and held dozens of meetings with senior government officials to try to persuade Pretoria to talk with the ANC, said he is optimistic about the talks.

“Mr. De Klerk does want change, and there are men advising him who I think do want change,” he said in the Swedish interview. But Mandela, who launched the ANC’s armed struggle in 1961, has expressed reservations about De Klerk’s ruling National Party, which introduced sweeping apartheid legislation when it came to power 42 years ago and maintains most of those laws.

The ANC has delivered mixed signals to its supporters in the country in recent weeks. During his overseas trip, Mandela has urged foreign powers to step up pressure on Pretoria, including economic sanctions and severing diplomatic ties. But he also has called for peace in South Africa’s troubled townships, where years of frustration with the white-controlled system and raised expectations for a black majority government have erupted into violence.

So far, most Western governments have refused to step up pressure on Pretoria, which has been widely praised for taking bold steps to remove restrictions on anti-apartheid activity. And since Mandela’s release, violence has increased in the townships.

Three people died and tens of thousands fled their homes Thursday and Friday in Sharpeville and other townships near Vereeniging, about 40 miles south of Johannesburg, after unfounded rumors circulated of an attack by black gangs from other areas, according to police. A black man and woman apparently died of shock after hearing the rumors, police said.

Men in the townships armed themselves and set up roadblocks, and several cars were attacked by frightened mobs. A 40-year-old white man driving a BMW past the township of Sebokeng was killed when local residents stopped his car and hit him on the head with a machete, police said.