ANC Backpedals, Will Meet With Zulu Leader

The African National Congress, in a surprising political turnabout, called formally Thursday for a meeting with rival Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi to study the causes of bloody township violence and draw up a joint strategy to end it.

The ANC’s top leaders also delivered an unusually sharp attack on President Frederik W. de Klerk for launching a crackdown on the violence this week “designed to abridge the civil rights of the African population . . . and repress legitimate political activity.”

They said De Klerk had acted in bad faith by criminalizing the possession of weapons in the township before a joint government-ANC working group had decided how to dispose of arms held by the ANC’s underground military wing.

All this emerged from a three-day meeting of the ANC’s 37-member national executive, which had been convened to discuss five weeks of factional violence in Johannesburg-area townships that has taken the lives of more than 760 blacks.

Although ANC officials said they do not intend to pull out of peace talks with the government, they said the process is in danger because the mutual confidence built up between the government and the ANC has been severely damaged by the violence and De Klerk’s reactions to it.

The ANC leaders encouraged their township supporters to “organize themselves for purposes of self-defense” but stopped short of promising to arm them.

Hundreds of ANC supporters have asked the organization to provide them with arms to defend against the violence, which has pitted mostly migrant Zulu workers from Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party against township residents aligned with the ANC.

The call for a meeting with Buthelezi, who broke with the ANC in the mid-1970s, represented a major policy shift for the ANC, the primary black political organization in the country. ANC Deputy President Nelson Mandela has come under criticism from many political groups in South Africa, including the government, for refusing Buthelezi’s numerous requests for a meeting.

In its statement, the ANC called for a meeting with leaders of the nominally independent black homelands--who include Kwazulu’s Chief Minister Buthelezi--”to get to the root causes of the violence and to secure peace among the people.”

The animosity between Buthelezi and the ANC, which stems from ideological differences, has been the catalyst for three years of fighting in Natal province between Zulus who support Inkatha and those who support the ANC. Nearly 4,000 people have died in that internecine war.

Members of the ANC’s national executive and the central committee of Inkatha met in Durban earlier Thursday for exploratory talks to end the Natal violence. Both sides described the talks as successful.