COLUMN LEFT : No Rewards Before Real Change : Apartheid is not dead and white South Africa should not feel the pressures have lifted until it is.

South African President F.W. de Klerk’s decision not to visit the United States this month was the right choice. He would have met unprecedented resistance and mass demonstrations.

De Klerk is receiving favorable credit for giving South Africa a face lift, but as yet, the oppressive laws of apartheid have not been lifted. The death count continues to rise, the innocent continue to languish in dungeons, detained without charges or trials. In other words, the character of the apartheid system has not been altered.

It is a strange twist of fate: De Klerk once held the keys to Nelson Mandela’s prison. Mandela now holds the keys to De Klerk’s prison. There’s an old adage that says, “You can’t hold someone in the ditch unless you get in there with him.” As long as Mandela was a prisoner and locked out of South Africa’s society, South Africa and its heads of state were locked out of the world society. The nation’s athletes were barred from competition in the Olympics. Artists from around the world refused to perform there. Then, four years ago, Congress passed sweeping economic sanctions against the apartheid government.

With the South African economy suffocating from isolation, the burden of a racist system hobbling without a moral leg to stand on, and mounting internal and international resistance, De Klerk used good judgment and released Mandela in February.

But before Mandela could get home to Soweto from prison, President Bush and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher were rewarding De Klerk with invitations. That was a wrong move on the part of both governments. Rewards and diplomas come at graduation, not at admission time. The African National Congress and De Klerk need to continue their dialogue. Progress is being made, but much work remains to be done in order for all of South Africa to be free.

Last month, De Klerk went on a nine-nation tour of Western Europe hoping to win sympathy and regain favor with European leaders. President Bush, on the other hand, like his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, never truly supported sanctions against South Africa. After inviting De Klerk to the White House, Bush found a convenient loophole in the sanctions embargo and began allowing imports of fabricated iron and steel from South Africa.

All this is going on while American allies--Japan, Israel, Germany and Britain--do business with South Africa. Bush has offered South Africa not only carrots, but meat and dessert. We do not need South African iron and steel. There are full stockpiles here at home while thousands of American iron and steel workers remain unemployed.

Had the script been followed, Mandela, who has worked himself to exhaustion since his release, would have come to the United States on the heels of De Klerk’s visit. Mandela would have gotten a ticker-tape parade down the streets of New York City, while De Klerk got rewarded in a state dinner at the White House for releasing a man who should never have been jailed in the first place. Such ceremony would have qualified De Klerk to travel anywhere else in the world without protests.

Bush stands ready to embrace Mandela’s celebrity as a noble man forced to suffer but not to embrace a political understanding of the mind-set and conditions that compelled Mandela to suffer. But thanks in large to pressure by the anti-apartheid movement, De Klerk’s visit has been postponed indefinitely. That visit should remained tabled until the four remaining pillars of apartheid--the Group Areas Act, the Land Act, the Separate Amenities Act and the Population Registration Act--are dismantled.

South Africa is still a destabilizing force among the front-line states in Southern Africa. South African troops are still terrorizing black townships. And the state of emergency, which gives the police unlimited powers to detain without charge and search without warrant, is still in effect.

Our commitment must be to end apartheid. We should not treat Mandela and his quest for a non-racial, free and democratic South Africa as an equal with De Klerk, who represents a system that has become an anathema to the whole world.

Profound and irreversible changes must occur in South Africa before President de Klerk is rewarded. It will be the ANC and the people of South Africa who will announce to the world when that change has truly been accomplished--not Bush, and not De Klerk.