Stalled Reform

Instead, Botha calls an election

As South Africa's all-white parliament opened its annual session in Cape Town, hopes rose that this might at last be the year for dramatic new moves to ease racial tensions in the country. In his remarks during the opening debates last week, however, Prime Minister P.W. Botha failed to mention any of his longstanding proposals for reducing petty discrimination and improving the plight of urban blacks. Instead, he expounded on such politically safe slogans as the Communist menace and, to the parliament's surprise, announced that he was calling a general election for next April 29. With that, the tantalizing prospect of reform receded once again, as it has repeatedly over the past two years.

Botha's decision to go to the country for endorsement of his leadership, 19 months before the law requires him to do so, appeared to be carefully calculated. It was timed to capitalize on a still booming economy and was aimed at strengthening his hand against the recalcitrant right wing of his own National Party. Botha has never received a popular mandate; he was elected by his party in 1978 after Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster resigned during the Information Department's "Muldergate" scandal. He has since shaken the Afrikaner establishment by challenging white South Africans to "adapt or die," and calling for dismantling of the petty apartheid laws and regulations that enforce racial separation. One reform, for instance, would allow hotels, bars and restaurants to desegregate at the discretion of their proprietors. Botha even scandalized the old guard by questioning the sanctity of the Mixed Marriage Act and the Immorality Act, laws that make it a crime to marry or have sex across the color line.

In the eyes of reformers, however, Botha's government has been long on proposals and short on action. "It's the same old story of promises, promises, promises," said Opposition Leader Frederik van Zyl Slabbert last week. "History is not written about politicians' good intentions." As it is, the Botha government it self has managed to undermine many of its stated good intentions. The future success of its liberalizing policies, for example, is said to rest with a new 60-member President's Council, which is supposed to initiate the constitutional changes that may lead to parliamentary representation for some nonwhite groups. But Botha appears to have guaranteed the council's impotence by announcing that no blacks will be among its nonwhite minority, only Asians and mixed-race "coloreds."

Three proposed bills designed with the laudable aim of relaxing the hated pass laws and giving urban blacks greater mobility in jobs and places of residence are so complex that they end by entrapping their would-be beneficiaries in a Catch-22 dilemma: no jobs without housing, no housing without a guaranteed job.

The passes themselves could eventually be replaced by a system that would require every citizen, regardless of color, to carry an identification document with his fingerprints on it. The proposal had the immediate effect of uniting white and black South Africans in common indignation.

The government has made a mockery of its boasts of a free press and its commitment to a "new deal" for urban blacks by continuing its crackdown on the black press. Last week, after the closing of the country's two leading black newspapers, two more black newsmen were "banned" -- which amounts to being placed under house arrest. Botha had a more brutal answer to the demands for black majority rule put forth, often violently, by the banned African National Congress: at week's end South African commandos killed eleven A.N.C. members in a lightning raid on their headquarters in Mapu to, Mozambique.

If Botha succeeds in winning popular approval for his policies, some of the most irksome aspects of life under South Africa's racist system may yet come to an end.

But the election itself will postpone any debate on Botha's proposals until next fall, when the new parliament elected in April will convene.

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