Opening of Parliament Shows S. Africa Division

This nation’s past and future collided here Monday, with President Frederik W. de Klerk reopening the country’s apartheid Parliament while several thousand blacks, still locked out of those hallowed halls, shouted insults from the street.

De Klerk, speaking to a joint session of the white, Indian and mixed-race Colored houses, vowed to continue with “orderly reform” and negotiations, and he criticized Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress for its “inability to control and oppose the Communist radicals within its ranks.”

Members of Parliament later congratulated each other for a new “open seating” policy in which Indian and Colored representatives could sit next to white delegates in joint sessions.

Only minutes earlier, ANC leaders led a peaceful protest march through the streets of Cape Town.

The anti-apartheid leaders “renamed” the square outside De Klerk’s Parliament office for Albert Luthuli, the late ANC founder and Nobel Peace laureate. And speaking from a podium put up beneath a statue of Afrikaner hero Louis Botha, they delivered a verbal fusillade against De Klerk and his government.

“As long as that illegitimate and racist Parliament is filled with people who do not represent us, we will protest,” declared Allan Boesak, a leader of the ANC in the western Cape Province.

Joe Slovo, a white leader of the Communist Party, said: “We want that place closed down. De Klerk doesn’t represent the nation.”

And, in a reference to De Klerk’s balding pate that drew cheers, Slovo added, “De Klerk only represents the people who are the same color as the top of his head.”

The exchange here between the government and the ANC, the two most important forces in the country’s future, was mostly theater. But it reflected both the country’s desire for a quick resolution of the South African conflict and the strong feelings of animosity that remain.

The government and the ANC agreed last month to return to the negotiating table, and officials from both sides say privately that the current Parliament could be out of business by next March or April.

But the government still is angry with the ANC’s decision to continue with “mass action,” its campaign of protests and demonstrations aimed at forcing concessions from the government. And the ANC still deeply distrusts the government, believing that De Klerk will need to be dragged, “kicking and screaming,” in ANC Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa’s words, into a “new South Africa.”

Complicating matters is the decision by Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, to withdraw from talks with the government. Buthelezi is miffed by De Klerk’s concessions to the ANC.

“Parliament is meeting under difficult and challenging circumstances,” De Klerk acknowledged in his speech Monday. But, he promised, “we shall continue to take negotiations further, combat violence with all the means at our disposal and advance orderly reform in the best interests of all South Africans.”

De Klerk strongly denied claims that he was negotiating only with the ANC. He said he has scheduled meetings in coming weeks with Buthelezi, as well as with the ANC, the radical black Pan-Africanist Congress and some right-wing whites. And he said he hopes to have multi-party constitutional negotiations back on track soon.

The government had hoped to use this short session of Parliament to pass legislation that would rubber-stamp agreements made in constitutional negotiations. But those negotiations broke down in late June, when the ANC pulled out in protest over the slaying of more than 40 blacks at Boipatong and alleged government involvement in the killings.

Now the 10-day session is expected to take up only a few matters, just one of which is considered contentious. De Klerk has said he will introduce legislation to allow him to rid the country of separate government administrations for whites, Indians, Coloreds and blacks. Under current law, schools, pensions and certain other government functions are administered separately by race. The ANC supports that change.

But the ANC has been sharply critical of a bill that will allow De Klerk to grant amnesty to anyone for past crimes relating to apartheid. Under that legislation, the president can, in theory, absolve members of his own administration, such as police and army generals, who have been implicated but never charged in the deaths of anti-apartheid activists.