De Klerk Calls for End to All Apartheid Laws : South Africa: His proposal includes the abolition of segregated housing, curbs on black ownership of land.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, sweeping away the last legal pillars of apartheid, Friday announced government plans to scrap the laws that segregate housing, restrict black ownership of land and legally classify all citizens by race.

The president’s decision put the country on the verge of meeting all five preconditions established by Congress for removing U.S. sanctions against Pretoria. Both the government and the African National Congress say they expect the final condition--the release of political prisoners--to be met by the end of April.

“The South African statute book will be devoid, within months, of the remnants of racially discriminatory legislation which have become known as the cornerstones of apartheid,” De Klerk said in a speech opening South Africa’s Parliament. The lawmaking body, which is controlled by the ruling National Party, is expected to approve the president’s recommendations before it adjourns in June.

Foreign Minister Roelof (Pik) Botha told reporters the speech was “an important further step on the road to a return to international respectability.”

“The process toward dismantling apartheid and fundamental change in South Africa is irreversible,” Botha added. “After today, few can doubt that.”

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler hailed De Klerk’s steps, which she said brings South Africa “pretty close” to conditions required for lifting U.S. economic sanctions.

“We welcome President De Klerk’s historic announcement that his government will introduce legislation to repeal the Group Areas Act, the Lands Act and the Population Registration Act,” Tutwiler said. “We also welcome his proposal to begin working toward unified, non-racial local governments. This is further evidence of President De Klerk’s courageous statesmanship.”

The ANC, the country’s leading black opposition group, said it would respond later to De Klerk’s speech. But it had previously demanded that the government fulfill its agreement to release political prisoners, grant indemnity to returning exiles and remove security laws that restrict political expression.

Millions of blacks heeded a nationwide call by the ANC and the more radical Pan-Africanist Congress to boycott work on Friday, and many of them marched through city streets to press De Klerk to hand over power to an interim government and allow a constituent assembly, elected in a multiracial national election, to draw up a new constitution.

The government opposes both an interim government and a constituent assembly. But De Klerk said the government would consider giving black leaders a voice in policy decisions during the transitional period to the new order. And he added that he supports the ANC’s planned all-party congress as a first step toward writing a constitution.

Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the 1984 Nobel peace prize laureate and a supporter of sanctions, congratulated De Klerk on his reform initiatives and said that the days of sanctions were numbered.

“We are getting very near to where (reform) will be irreversible,” Tutu told 8,000 people at an anti-apartheid rally in Cape Town. “It’s going to be very difficult for us to continue to ask for sanctions.”

South Africans gathered around television sets in homes, offices and stores Friday to watch De Klerk’s address, which came a year after he steered the country onto a new path of reform by legalizing hundreds of anti-apartheid organizations.

“South Africa cannot allow the dynamic process of reform to slow down,” the president said. “The future of our country and of every one of its people is at stake.”

De Klerk’s right-wing white opponents in Parliament walked out of the chamber midway through the speech, interrupting the president with shouts of “No! No!” and “Traitor!”

“The fight is on for the survival of white people,” declared Ferdi Hartzenberg, deputy leader of the Conservative Party.

But De Klerk’s actions moved the government a step closer to shrugging off the U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, the strictest sanctions ever imposed on Pretoria.

The key provision of that act, passed over President Ronald Reagan’s veto in 1986, requires South Africa to free “all persons persecuted for their political beliefs.”

About 100 prisoners have been released thus far, but several hundred to several thousand, depending on the definition of political crimes, remain in jail. The ANC says that the government is moving too slowly and that it has threatened to suspend talks if Pretoria fails to release the prisoners by April 30.

Botha said Friday that the process of freeing prisoners “is on track.” When asked if his country had now met the U.S. conditions, Botha responded: “Virtually.”

The other four conditions are lifting the state of emergency, unbanning political parties, ending residential segregation and race classification and agreeing to enter good-faith negotiations with the black majority. With his speech Friday, De Klerk appears to have met all those conditions.

According to the U.S. law, if President Bush determines that South Africa has freed political prisoners and met three of those other four conditions, he may decide to suspend sanctions. Congress then has 30 days to adopt a joint resolution disapproving his action.

American diplomats say Bush will move quickly once De Klerk has met the minimum requirements.

“The Administration is anxious to move on this,” said an American diplomat in Pretoria, who asked not to be named. “And De Klerk’s speech brings us a lot closer to getting those sanctions lifted.”

De Klerk promised to introduce legislation within months to scrap the Population Registration Act, the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, and the 40-year-old Group Areas Act.

He added, however, that the Population Registration Act, which classifies each South African according to race and underpins the current constitution, would be replaced with a “temporary transitional measure.”

Gerrit Viljoen, the government minister of constitutional development, told reporters that, once the act is repealed, births and new immigrants into the country would no longer be classified by race. But the existing race classification rolls will be maintained to keep the government functioning, he said.

The act has been used by the government to exclude blacks from national elections. Viljoen acknowledged that blacks would be denied the vote as long as the present constitution exists. But he said the government believes that a new constitution, with full voting rights for all races, will be in place before the next national election, scheduled for 1994.

By removing the Land Acts, De Klerk has opened a door long closed to blacks. The Land Acts reserve 87% of the country’s land for 5 million whites. And most of that is farm and ranch land owned by fewer than 50,000 white farmers. The 30 million blacks now can own property only in some black townships around cities and in the 10 self-governing black homelands.

The future of land ownership is the most difficult problem facing the white-led government as it enters negotiations with black leaders. Over the years, the government has forcibly removed millions of blacks from their land, then turned it over to whites.

Erasing racial barriers to land ownership is a first step toward meeting the demands of anti-apartheid leaders, who want land redistributed to the black majority.

“No one dare underestimate the emotions and even the conflict potential relating to land rights,” De Klerk said Friday. Only two days earlier, thousands of white farmers marched through downtown Pretoria, clashing with police and clogging city streets with their tractors and trucks for two days in a protest over low farm prices, high interest rates and feared changes in land ownership.

Government officials say they must help black people obtain land by opening sources of financing to all races. The challenge, De Klerk said, was to guarantee the rights of whites who currently own land while also making land accessible to blacks.

Viljoen said the government had no plans to return any land taken from blacks.

“To go back historically would have a chaotic effect on the country,” he said. He added, however, that hundreds of thousands of acres of land taken by the state in the last year was being held for sale to blacks.

The final law set for repeal, the Group Areas Act, has since 1950 designated separate residential areas for whites, mixed-race Coloreds, Indians and Africans. Cities and suburbs have been reserved for whites, while blacks have been forced to live outside the cities in townships, frequently without water or electricity.

Squatter shacks have proliferated in the townships, where the housing shortage exceeds 1 million units. And tens of thousands of blacks have moved, illegally, into white areas, where a housing surplus has made it difficult for whites to sell their homes.

De Klerk, who has come under sharp criticism from some whites for his reforms, tried to assure his constituents that whites who want to live together will still be allowed to do so. But he added that the racial makeup of residential areas would be governed only by the principle of freedom of association in the future.

“A community life of one’s own has to be sustained by one’s own inherent will and abilities--and not by statutory coercion,” he said.