Massacre Was a Last Straw in the Weight of Grievances : South Africa: The ANC, with so little to show for its two years of accommodation, had no choice but to break off talks.

When the African National Congress started talks in 1990 with the South African government, the black community was delirious with excitement. Two years later, no tears are being shed over the ANC’s angry departure from negotiations with the government.

Blacks have become disillusioned with the government’s intransigence and duplicity since negotiations started. The ANC desperately needed to both shock the government and show its members that it had not gone soft. Therefore last Wednesday’s killings at Boipatong were, in a political sense, a godsend for the organization. The ANC could leave negotiations with its head held high, protesting government brutality.

Indeed, the Boipatong massacre was just the last straw in an orgy of killings that has stretched over two years. Blacks are murdered on trains, in taxis, at night vigils, in shebeens (speak-easies) and on the streets. Faceless hit squads are behind many of the attacks; battles between the largely Zulu/Inkatha inmates of some workers’ hostels and residents of black townships account for other deaths.

Last Wednesday’s attack was typical. More than 200 hostel inmates invaded the “squatter camp” in Boipatong, a township 25 miles south of Johannesburg. The armed gang murdered 45 men, women and children. Two 3-month-old babies were among the victims. Police failed to act quickly. When they did act, they first merely raided the hostel and confiscated weapons, and only made arrests days after the event. Blacks expect these six suspects to be released soon, for lack of evidence.

This has been the pattern in past incidents. President F. W. de Klerk defends his police and blames political organizations for the violence. The ANC and the black community lay the blame squarely on De Klerk’s doorstep, saying police complicity has been established.

However, the violence and allegations of police complicity are merely the apex of an accumulation of grievances in the black community over the negotiations process. Since 1990, the government has exacted concession after concession from the ANC, showing white South Africans that their future is safe in government hands. The ANC, which was selling itself to whites, has been very accommodating, to the dismay of its members. They realized that the more the ANC played up to white interests, the more their interests would be shelved. True, De Klerk scrapped several apartheid laws, but that has not changed the socioeconomic disparities. Whites still live in islands of affluence surrounded by the oceans of poverty in which blacks live.

When the ANC suspended armed action in 1990, the government was to reciprocate by freeing political prisoners. But there are more than 100 such prisoners still in jail. When the ANC lifted the global sports boycott against South Africa, whites rushed to compete internationally while apartheid’s victims languished at home. Yesterday’s oppressors now represent blacks in international sporting events.

It was the government’s recent insistence on “minority rights”--shorthand for the preservation of white political and economic privilege--that brought things toa head. The ANC had to initiate its mass-action campaign to stem a revolt by members who said it was giving in to government intransigence. True to form, the government warned that this would lead to violence.

There was an outbreak of violence, but it did not flow from the ANC campaign. Instead, the faceless killers who roam the streets unleashed a new wave of terror and 15 people died in Daveyton and Soweto. Then came the Boipatong Massacre. However, what brought the fury to a peak was last Friday’s freeing of seven men charged with the murders of 38 blacks at a night vigil in Sebokeng, close to Boipatong, in January, 1991. The judge criticized police, saying they did not dig hard enough for evidence. This incident, coming two days after the Boipatong Massacre, sealed the fate of the negotiations.