De Klerk Meets With Mandela; 2nd Round Set

By SCOTT KRAFT

July 21, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —

Amid worldwide calls to keep the peace process in South Africa moving, Nelson Mandela and President Frederik W. de Klerk met privately for an hour Friday and agreed to set Aug. 6 for a second round of talks between the government and the African National Congress.

The meeting between Mandela and De Klerk, at the presidential offices in Pretoria, came only two days after the ANC deputy president returned from a six-week international tour. And it indicated that both the ANC and the government want to quickly resolve the remaining obstacles to formal black-white negotiations.

A joint ANC-government working group, set up during the first round of talks in May, has been drawing up a plan to meet the ANC’s demand that all political prisoners be freed and all political exiles be allowed to return with immunity. Although details of the group’s report have not been released, it is said to outline a phased release of political prisoners.

The report also will make provisions for deciding who is a political prisoner. The ANC says about 3,000 prisoners have been convicted of politically motivated crimes, while the government, defining political offenses less broadly, estimates less than half that many.

Senior government negotiators have said they support the working group’s report, but the ANC has yet to make a final decision. The ANC’s 37-member National Executive Committee will meet Monday and Tuesday in Johannesburg to consider the report as well as other matters.

A statement released by De Klerk’s office Friday said the next round of ANC-government talks will cover the recommendations on political prisoners and review the progress that has been made on others of the ANC’s obstacles to negotiations.

While Mandela was touring Europe, North America and Africa, De Klerk lifted the four-year state of emergency in three of South Africa’s four provinces, going most of the way toward meeting that ANC demand.

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Scott Kraft

Scott Kraft is editor at large for enterprise journalism and special projects at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversees the Investigations department, standards and practices, polling and survey research projects, and newsroom-wide reporting initiatives. He works closely with departments across the newsroom to elevate series and is leading an initiative to actively develop books that are an outgrowth of Times’ expertise and original reporting, in partnership with commercial book publishers. During nearly four decades at The Times, Kraft has been managing editor, deputy managing editor/news and national editor, as well as a foreign and national correspondent. As an editor, he has directed work that won nine Pulitzer Prizes. As a reporter, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing while a New York-based national correspondent for the Associated Press before joining The Times in its Chicago bureau. He spent a decade abroad as The Times’ bureau chief in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Paris. He covered the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid as well as the ill-fated U.S. military mission in Somalia, among other major stories. His story for the Los Angeles Times magazine on the AIDS epidemic in Africa won the SPJ Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence. He has served as both a juror and chair of the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. He also was a Pulitzer Prize juror in international reporting in 2014 and subsequently chaired five Pulitzer juries – Public Service in 2015, International Reporting in 2020, Explanatory Reporting in 2021, Illustrated Reporting and Commentary in 2022 and Editorial Writing in 2023. He is currently president of the Overseas Press Club of America. Kraft was born in Kansas City, Mo., and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Kansas State University.

De Klerk Meets With Mandela; 2nd Round Set

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