Backing Off

Botha postpones racial reform

What has happened to the Prime Minister? Where is that decisiveness and idealism he seemed to display one or two years ago? Why is he backpedaling on the undertakings he gave the people of South Africa?" While members of South Africa's ruling National Party shifted uncomfortably in their green leather seats, Colin Eglin of the opposition Progressive Federal Party last week sent his questions ringing across the chamber of Cape Town's Parliament. The angry counterattack from South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha: "I am not a weakling who tries to satisfy everybody. I have my own ideas and pattern for leading South Africa." Some of Botha's ministers have echoed similar pious themes.

Those ideas for moderating South Africa's rigidly segregationist policies of apartheid show every sign of being far weaker than Botha had once promised. Two years ago, Botha told his fellow Afrikaners they must "adapt or die" in confronting racial segregation. Using the same moralistic tones, he later declared: "I am more convinced than ever that there is only one course to follow: do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

But as the South African Parliament began its summer session last week, Botha backed off. He dismissed the possibility of letting non-whites vote. Indeed, he categorically rejected any role in national decision making by the country's 19.8 million blacks, who make up 71.5% of South Africa's population. He indicated that any change in the inferior status of the country's nonwhite minorities (Indians, Chinese, mixed race) would be deferred until 1983 at the earliest. Botha also lashed out at liberal white South Africans who criticize his government's apartheid policies, implicitly branding them as agitators. Said he: "There are Satans walking about in white garb." The only racial palliatives Botha's party offered were marginal and vague.

Among them: allowing blacks to handle explosives in mining jobs, traditionally a whites-only prerogative, and possibly relaxing restrictions against serving alcoholic beverages to all races at sporting events.

The reason for Botha's retrenchment lies in last April's national elections. Al though his party retained 131 of 165 parliamentary seats, it still suffered the worst setback of its 33 years in power. The moderate Progressive Federal Party gained nine seats (to a still ineffectual 27). But Botha was far more concerned about the rise in popularity of the ultraright Herstigte (Reformed) Nasionale Party (H.N.P.), which strongly advocates continued white privilege, black subjection and rigid racial segregation of all kinds.

Though it did not capture a single seat, the H.N.P. nonetheless more than quintupled its vote total to 191,000, and cut sharply into government majorities in many districts.

Botha also faces a challenge from the right wing of his own National Party, led by Andries Treurnicht, who has earned the nickname "Dr. No" for his militant opposition to any aspect of racial reform. As a result, Botha has seemed more sensitive to attacks on his personal political grip than to criticism of his nation's repressive policies. Helen Suzman, the country's best-known liberal and a member of the Progressive Federal minority in Parliament, charges that "now as never before," Botha "places the interests of his party above the interests of South Africa."

While the politicians talked, the grim current realities of apartheid were clearly displayed last week in a freezing ghetto area outside Cape Town, where hundreds of blacks huddled after being evicted from their shanty homes in a whites-only district. The blacks were ordered to leave for one of the ten black reserves, or "homelands," that the government has established in its long-term strategy of geographic segregation of blacks and whites. The home lands make up 13% of South Africa's area, but are intended eventually to hold most of the black population. Blacks who refused to move to homelands where housing and jobs are scarce were ar rested, and sometimes separated from their children. All too clearly Botha and his government were determined last week to maintain the separation of the races in South Africa.

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