S. Africans Hear Final Call for ‘Yes’ on Reform

In a final push for today’s crucial referendum, South Africa’s white leaders Monday took out newspaper advertisements, handed out leaflets and appeared on radio talk shows to persuade thousands of still-undecided voters to make a final break with apartheid.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, who has vowed to resign if he loses, said in an open letter to South Africans that a “no” vote would “lead us to a dead end of division and destruction.”

De Klerk’s foreign minister, Roelof F. (Pik) Botha, called the referendum “the most decisive moment in the history of South Africa.” A vote against reform “will cause this ship to sink,” Botha told several hundred cheering supporters in Johannesburg.

But right-wing leaders countered that a “no” majority would be a vote for the right of all ethnic groups in South Africa to govern themselves in separate lands.

“A ‘no’ vote would be an honest vote for real democracy, so people can decide for themselves,” said Andries Treurnicht, leader of the Conservative Party, which opposes De Klerk’s reforms. A “yes” vote, he added, “would be a vote for the redistribution of wealth and, after that, the redistribution of poverty.”

Treurnicht’s ally, Afrikaner Resistance Movement leader Eugene Terreblanche, told 1,000 cheering supporters at a rally in Carletonville that a “yes” vote would mean the end of civilization in South Africa because, he said, “small, smelly black men” would end up ruling a white nation that has attained nuclear bomb technology and transplanted hearts.

De Klerk is given a slight edge in the election. But political analysts say that anything short of a landslide victory would leave the conservatives as powerful spoilers in the months of difficult negotiations that lie ahead.

South Africa’s leading business, religious, sports and cultural leaders are virtually unanimous in their support for the referendum. And all the mainstream newspapers in the country have pledged their support, showing a unanimity previously unseen in South Africa.

De Klerk won support from an unexpected source on Monday when Ian Smith, the former prime minister of white-minority ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, called for a “yes” vote in the referendum. Right-wing whites in South Africa often point to Zimbabwe, where the government recently proposed to confiscate white-owned land, as an example of the tragedy that would befall whites under a black-controlled government.

But Smith said the situation in South Africa is very different from that in Zimbabwe, where foreign nations oversaw the end of Smith’s government. South Africans are in control of their talks with black leaders, Smith added, and a “yes” vote would strengthen De Klerk’s hand at the bargaining table.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel peace laureate, also called on whites to vote “yes,” adding: “I urge you to pray that good sense will prevail on election day.”