Personal Attacks by S. African, ANC Leaders Dim Hopes for Talks

A series of unusually vitriolic personal exchanges between leaders of the government and the African National Congress has reduced relations between the two sides--key participants in ongoing constitutional negotiations--to their lowest point in years, politicians and analysts here say.

In recent days, ANC President Nelson Mandela has compared the government of President Frederik W. de Klerk to the regime in Nazi Germany, saying it allowed “people to be killed simply because they are blacks.” Government officials have responded by calling Mandela a “racist” who has condoned the killings of blacks who do not support the ANC.

The atmosphere has many observers here bracing for harsher attacks to come and has increased pessimism that the constitutional talks can bear fruit within months or even by the year’s end.

Anti-government groups have raised the specter of a new round of civil unrest that could undo the political advances already registered in the country. And many fear the unexpected outbreak of rhetoric will force both sides to harden their positions, making compromise even more difficult.

“The stalemate is poisoning relations and making it difficult for them to iron out their problems behind the scenes. It’s the worst level of talk we’ve seen since the release of Mandela” from prison in 1990, said Oscar Dhlomo, a former top official of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a black group that has long had serious differences with the ANC. Dhlomo is now head of the Institute for Multi-Party Democracy, an ostensibly independent think tank.

The attacks followed a deadlock two weeks ago in negotiations over black and white voting power in an interim democratic government. The stalemate arose over a formula for preserving veto power for the white minority over political moves by a majority black government.

When the Convention for a Democratic South Africa adjourned without an agreement, De Klerk and Mandela appeared jointly to express their conviction that differences could be ironed out peacefully in a matter of weeks.

Since then that optimism has evaporated. The talks are now routinely referred to in the South African press as “near-disastrous.” The subsequent verbal hostility is seen as a clear indication that “there’s a complete lack of trust on the part of both sides toward the other,” in the words of Tony Leon, a member of Parliament from the liberal Democratic Party who participated in the deadlocked negotiations.

The latest round of vitriol began Monday, a week after the talks adjourned, when Mandela complained at a Helsinki news conference about the government’s unwillingness to quell an upsurge of violence in black townships that has taken nearly 1,000 lives this year.

He said he told De Klerk in a private conversation that “what is happening now has happened in Nazi Germany when people were killed simply because they were Jews. You are allowing people to be killed simply because they are blacks, and you don’t care.”

The allusion to Nazism predictably infuriated the government. The next day, Law and Order Minister Hernus Kriel replied in Parliament that Mandela condoned the violence because the victims were not ANC sympathizers. “Closer to the truth is that Mandela, by not controlling his followers, is allowing black South Africans to be killed simply because they do not support the ANC.”

One Johannesburg newspaper called the remark “the most personal government attack on Mr. Mandela to date.”

Since then, the ANC has charged that the government bugged its offices at the constitutional talks and is deliberately delaying the return to South Africa of thousands of black political exiles.

For its part, the government has released a long-delayed report by a public commission blaming the violence on the ANC and Inkatha and absolving government provocateurs.

De Klerk, so far, has personally stayed out of the fray; he is now on a trip to Eastern Europe and the Far East. But the attackers on the government side are closely identified with his administration, which is already weakened by disclosures that some of its members ordered the assassinations of black activists and misappropriated money that was to be used for development projects in black districts.

Most observers believe the talks will reconvene; neither side in attacking the other has ever remotely suggested that it would withdraw from the sessions, and both leaders clearly understand that negotiation is the only rational way to move South Africa into the post-apartheid era.

But the deadlock, which came on the eve of a four-day ANC policy conference now under way, may have strengthened radicals within the ANC.

Some analysts here say that Mandela feels the government tried at the talks to entice the ANC into a trap by which the constitutional convention would establish an interim government giving whites disproportionate power but leaving no easy way to move to a permanent majority-rule government--thus cementing white privilege into the system indefinitely.

“Mandela’s personal criticisms of De Klerk are those of a man who feels betrayed,” said Mark Swilling, an activist and political analyst here.