Multiracial Council Begins S. Africa Oversight Role

Meeting in a presidential chamber long used to ensure oppressive white rule, a multiracial panel took tentative control of the reins of South Africa’s political power for the first time here Tuesday.

The members of the mostly black Transitional Executive Council, which will help oversee the white-led government until the country’s first democratic elections next April 27, beamed with delight as they gathered in the plush President’s Council room to formally oversee the end of white minority control.

“I feel ecstatic,” Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary general of the African National Congress, told reporters. “We can now see where we are going. We are standing on the hill. And we can finally see the promised land of democracy.”

Chief government negotiator Roelf Meyer, whose ruling National Party created apartheid in 1948 to enforce white domination of the 5-to-1 black majority, called the historic session “the final step in the process to bring about true democracy in South Africa.”

“We have achieved the seemingly impossible,” crowed Joe Slovo, chairman of the Communist Party and a key leader in the anti-apartheid struggle. “Now for the miracle of a completely free and fair election.”

The council’s largely administrative inaugural meeting was marred, however, by the absence of the so-called Freedom Alliance. The coalition of right-wing whites and conservative black “homeland” leaders, including powerful Zulu leader Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, boycotted the recently completed constitutional talks and have repeatedly threatened to launch a civil war rather than surrender the powers they assumed under apartheid.

A last-minute attempt by negotiators to lure the militant group into the council and the election process collapsed Monday night. The alliance members seek greater autonomy for their own racial and ethnic strongholds, including near-veto powers over the next national government.

Time is now running out for the fractious alliance. The white-run Parliament is sitting this month, in what is expected to be its final session, to formally ratify the new interim constitution and other legislation that will trigger the transition to black majority rule.

But in what they described as a “symbolic, nonviolent” act of protest, about 30 right-wing whites with assault rifles and shotguns took over Ft. Schanskop, a former Afrikaner fortress now used as a military museum, outside Pretoria early Tuesday. The self-named Boer Commandos erected barricades of trees and rocks, and planted a sign warning of land mines.

Heavily armed South African troops, backed by armored vehicles, had sealed roads leading to the site by midday and turned back several dozen whites who arrived to offer support, according to news agencies. The fort is near the famed Voortrekker Monument, which memorializes bloody 19th-Century marches into the interior by white settlers seeking to escape British colonial reign.

The TEC, as the newly formed council is known, includes senior officials of the reformist government of President Frederik W. de Klerk as well as 18 other political groups that took part in the constitutional negotiations. Neither De Klerk nor ANC President Nelson Mandela attended the session; both are due to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Friday.

The council is charged with supervising the pre-election period to ensure “a level playing field” so that neither the white government nor any political party enjoys a special campaign advantage.

Although De Klerk’s government will remain in office until then, the council will also have an as yet untested role in supervising decisions involving such critical areas as finance, defense, intelligence gathering, state broadcasting, police and foreign affairs.

The government and the ANC, however, have long differed over how those powers will be exercised. Most important, perhaps, will be whether the council will be able to create an independent police force and replace the widely criticized white security forces. Those forces have been unable or unwilling to control the political and criminal violence that is ravaging the nation’s black townships.

On Monday, De Klerk called the council an advisory body, adding: “The TEC is not going to take over the government tomorrow. The TEC has a focus . . . to ensure that the government does not misuse the powers that it has.”

But in his opening remarks, Ramaphosa denounced the government for already trying to reduce the council to a “toy telephone.”

“We call on them to finally accept that the days of minority rule are over,” he said. He pleaded with the other council members to “exercise our functions with determination and a great deal of courage.”

David Welch, a professor of political studies at the University of Cape Town, called the council a “watchdog with powerful teeth.”

“No government decision of consequence can be taken without the TEC or one of its sub-councils,” he said. “They have the power to monitor and the power to veto. It’s a forerunner of power-sharing.”

In reality, power has already begun to shift inexorably from the lame-duck white government to the black-led ANC, which is now expected to sweep next year’s elections. Led by Ramaphosa, ANC negotiators won key concessions in the final stages of the constitutional talks, and ANC leaders are increasingly consulted before crucial government decisions.

The first session of the TEC had special resonance because of its location. The President’s Council was created to ensure that whites had a veto over a tricameral Parliament expanded in 1984 to include separate legislatures for Indians and people of mixed race. Blacks had no representation.

“Our entrance here means we have disinfected the chamber of all the bad odor,” Ramaphosa told reporters. “This is the people taking over what is theirs.”

Moreover, the session took place near the windy shores of Table Bay, where the first white settlers landed in 1652. Whites have ruled the country ever since.

Slovo, the Communist Party leader, added the only note of warning in the cascade of self-congratulatory cliches that marked the council’s first meeting.

“We must have no illusions,” he said. “All we really have up to now is a mountain of paper. The real test is coming.”