Botha to Vote ‘No’ in Referendum on Reform : South Africa: The former president’s stand could sway whites against talks on sharing power with blacks.

Pieter W. Botha, the crusty former president who took the first tentative steps toward ending apartheid in the 1980s, announced Saturday that he will vote “no” in President Frederik W. de Klerk’s reform referendum March 17.

“I cannot participate in . . . a direction of suicide for my own people,” the 76-year-old Botha said in a statement from his seaside retirement home. “Like my honored predecessors, I believe in the self-determination of peoples.”

Botha also asserted that De Klerk’s negotiations with the black majority will result in a government dominated by the African National Congress and its Communist Party allies and “send us over the precipice.”

The former president’s announcement is sure to give a boost to De Klerk’s right-wing opponents and could influence the many whites still undecided about how to vote in the referendum.

It came as a surprise to De Klerk and the ruling National Party, which Botha led with an iron fist during the turbulent 1980s.

De Klerk called it tragic that Botha is backing away from the reform process he began. The president noted that it was Botha who had released the avowed Communist, Govan Mbeki, from prison as well as taken the first steps to free ANC leader Nelson Mandela.

“I cannot but believe that his current conduct is motivated to a large extent by personal resentment,” De Klerk said.

De Klerk said Botha’s decision was based on the faulty assumption that whites would be dominated by blacks in any new constitution. De Klerk said he is negotiating a constitution that would protect whites and other minorities and “save South Africa from disaster.”

The referendum will ask South Africa’s 3.2 million white voters whether they want De Klerk to continue negotiations with the black majority, and De Klerk has promised to resign and call new white elections if he loses.

Although Botha has been at odds with the National Party since his resignation in 1989, he has never before confronted his successor publicly or sided so clearly with the right-wing Conservative Party. The Conservatives were Botha’s nemesis during most of his presidency.

Botha initiated the National Party’s first fledgling reforms, ushering in a three-chamber Parliament in 1983 that gave Indians and mixed-race Colored people--but not blacks--their first vote in national affairs. He also got rid of the notorious pass laws that restricted the movement of blacks. But he was perhaps best known for clamping down on anti-apartheid activists through Draconian emergency decrees.

Botha’s reform program had stalled by December, 1988, when he suffered a stroke and relinquished leadership of the National Party. Botha opposed De Klerk, a member of his Cabinet, as his successor, but he was overruled by the party caucus.

Under pressure from his party, Botha later agreed to step down as president when his term ended in September, 1989, but he resigned a month early in a bitter dispute with his Cabinet over a visit by De Klerk to Zambia.

In his statement Saturday, Botha said he did not intend to return to politics. But he said he had received many calls from whites seeking his guidance, and “I can’t spend my time answering the phone and being called to the front gate to meet people, so I decided why not make a clean breast of it?”

He said he and his wife had “seriously considered what we should do in this referendum” and “have decided to vote ‘no’ on March 17.”

Botha said he still supports “orderly reform, but I do not support a spirit of gradual abdication” of white power. Instead, he said, he believes in “self-determination,” suggesting support for the Conservative Party demand for a self-governing homeland for whites.

Botha also criticized the government for rushing into talks with the black majority.

“Why the unnecessary haste?” he asked. “Consultation and negotiation, done properly, take time.”

Meanwhile, a right-wing rally Saturday in Pretoria drew a smaller-than-expected crowd of about 3,000. Conservative leader Andries Treurnicht said whites would not hesitate to take up arms against the government “to ensure that we are not dominated by terrorists or Communists.”

Eugene TerreBlanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, fell off his horse as he wheeled into the square at the head of a band of horsemen, news agencies reported. He remounted, flushed and apparently unharmed.

There was a minor scuffle at the end of the rally when TerreBlanche and several followers on horseback forced their way through a police line. Police tried to pull members of the group from their horses. Police said three officers were slightly hurt.