S. Africa, ANC Leaders Start Historic Talks

For the first time in its 78-year history, the African National Congress formally sat down Wednesday with South Africa’s white rulers, beginning three days of talks aimed at removing obstacles to black-white negotiations over dismantling apartheid.

President Frederik W. de Klerk and ANC Deputy President Nelson Mandela, standing side by side with their delegations intermingled behind them, opened the historic discussions on a note of optimism, saying they were taking the first steps toward restructuring South African society.

“The vast majority of South Africans are opposed to violence, to conflict, to intimidation and are reaching out for peaceful and just solutions,” De Klerk said in welcoming the ANC leaders to the lush grounds of Groote Schuur, the 330-year-old former home of South African prime ministers and site of the talks. “Confrontation will get us nowhere.”

Mandela said the meetings must decisively repudiate “the terrible tradition of a ‘dialogue’ between master and servant” and begin to replace it with “peaceful, democratic and genuine debate, discussion and negotiation.”

“The black masses of our country demand and expect fundamental change now and not tomorrow,” Mandela said.

Then, for the first time in public, the recently freed ANC leader switched briefly into Afrikaans, the first language of De Klerk’s team and of South Africa’s conservative white Afrikaners.

“To the white community, including the Afrikaners, we say you have nothing to fear from the ANC,” Mandela said.

The first session adjourned Wednesday night after four hours of discussions “characterized by openness and straightforwardness on both sides,” the government and the ANC said in a joint statement. Both sides presented what each viewed as the primary hurdles to negotiations and agreed to resume discussions this afternoon.

The sight of the eight Afrikaner men from the government standing on the heavily guarded estate next to 11 ANC supporters, including five of the most notorious figures once in exile, left both government and ANC aides shaking their heads in amazement. And it was featured prominently on state-run television’s evening newscasts.

“If you had told me six months ago that the ANC and the government would be standing together here today, I’d have said, ‘Not in my lifetime,’ ” said Caro Hoon, an aide to one of the Cabinet ministers involved in the talks.

Before the talks began, De Klerk and Mandela, who have met three times previously, appeared at ease as they addressed reporters gathered outside the Cape Dutch-style house at the foot of Devil’s Peak. After De Klerk’s remarks, Mandela turned to the president and said quietly, in Afrikaans, “Very good statement.” De Klerk nodded his thanks and smiled.

Although the talks are only a first step toward more substantive negotiations, they mark a victory for the sweeping reforms that De Klerk launched exactly three months ago. In an attempt to lure blacks to the negotiating table, De Klerk unbanned the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups, lifted most restrictions on black political activity and released the 71-year-old Mandela and two others on the ANC’s delegation after 27 years in prison.

The closed-door talks, requested by the ANC, center on the obstacles still standing in the way of black-white negotiations for a new South African constitution.

De Klerk said his government will raise the problem of escalating unrest in the townships, which he blames on the ANC’s refusal to formally abandon its 30-year-old guerrilla war against Pretoria.

The ANC, on the other hand, refuses to enter formal negotiations until De Klerk lifts the state of emergency that has curtailed many civil rights in the country for four years, releases about 2,000 political prisoners from South African jails and allows the ANC’s 15,000 members in exile to return home without fear of prosecution.

De Klerk granted temporary immunity from prosecution to the five exiled ANC leaders attending this week’s talks.

De Klerk says the ANC is only one of many groups, both black and white, that he is trying to bring into discussions about the country’s future. And he said Wednesday that the government will “continue its discussion with other leaders and parties . . . to encourage negotiation.”

The president envisions a new constitution that would extend full voting rights to the 27 million blacks, provide political protection for the country’s 5 million whites and abolish the remaining vestiges of apartheid that still grant whites a life of privilege by creating segregated residential areas, schools and hospitals.

But the ANC, the most powerful opposition group in the country, wants the constitution to be drawn up by a constituent assembly elected in a one-person, one-vote election of all races. It also says it will reject any attempts to give whites veto power under a new constitution.

The ANC’s delegation to the talks includes six blacks, two people of mixed-race, two whites and one Indian. Among them are two of the key figures in the ANC’s military wing in exile--Joe Slovo, the white former chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and leader of the South African Communist Party, and Joe Modise, the black commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Both the government and the ANC are under international pressure to reach a peaceful settlement. But they also face pressure from their own constituencies, which have seen increasing defections to left- and right-wing groups.

The ANC is struggling to maintain its support among more radical young activists, many of whom want to maintain the “armed struggle” until the government ends apartheid and agrees to hand over power to leaders selected in a one-person, one-vote election.

De Klerk is trying to maintain the support of South Africa’s more conservative whites, many of whom view the ANC with deep suspicion and fear that the government has put itself on a course that will result in black domination, just as successive white governments have dominated blacks.

Many right-wing whites have begun arming themselves in recent weeks to prevent their property from what they believe will be a black takeover.