Manifesto for Disappointment

By George Russell

"I believe that we are today crossing the Rubicon in South Africa. There is no turning back." That was State President P.W. Botha's assessment last week, but hardly anyone outside the South African government could find much evidence to support it. Speaking in the port city of Durban before the Natal provincial congress of his ruling National Party, Botha described his remarks as a "manifesto for the future of our country," ostensibly laying out guideposts for significant change in the racially divided nation. But rather than a hoped for watershed, Botha's speech was an international and domestic disappointment, creating a sense that South Africa might have missed a historic opportunity to begin ridding itself of apartheid.

Encouraged by South African officials, the outside world had expected the President to unveil a package of far-reaching reforms aimed at gradually dismantling his white minority government's policies of racial separation. Instead, Botha held out a vague and tentative suggestion of negotiations with the country's disenfranchised black majority as the solution for South Africa's worst crisis in more than two decades. Among other things, he invoked the prospect of unspecified future constitutional discussions involving "all South African citizens," presumably including the country's 24 million blacks. He implicitly admitted the failure of the country's much criticized "homelands" policy, aimed at denying South African citizenship to blacks, and seemed to promise a different but as yet amorphous arrangement for the future.

Even while making those oblique concessions, Botha seemed more interested in broadcasting defiance than in stressing the changes that his government would countenance. "I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on a road to abdication and suicide," he declared. He issued a blunt warning to foreign governments pressing Pretoria to change. Said he: "Don't push us too far."

That injunction had a painful ring for the Reagan Administration, which, despite growing criticism, has clung to its soft-spoken policy of "constructive engagement," an attempt to persuade rather than to pressure. In private, Administration officials expressed their disappointment with Botha's speech, though National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane called the Durban address an "important statement." The Administration was studying it carefully, he said, noting that several ideas in the speech "must be clarified." The same message came from Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, who suggested that Botha's remarks were "written in a code language of a polarized society and are not easily interpreted."

West European governments were cautiously disapproving. A British Foreign Office spokesman declared that there was "considerable disappointment" at Botha's address, but noted that there were "a number of positive features." A similar judgment came from West Germany, while a French official said that the South African situation "continues to disturb us."

In South Africa itself, the disappointment was far keener. Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, the black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, described himself as "devastated" by the speech. He said bleakly, "I think the chances of peaceful change are virtually nil." Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, the moderate head of the 6 mil lion-member Zulu nation, declared that "we are back to square one." The white leader of South Africa's parliamentary opposition, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, concurred. Said he: "The speech did not measure up even to any of the moderate expectation that had been generated." In Johannesburg the country's largest daily, the Star, editorialized that "each of us ... prayed for a message that would tip the balance towards peace and better understanding. The weight went the other way, tipping us closer to disaster."

Only one group seemed to be even slightly buoyed by Botha's speech: the outlawed black African National Congress, which is waging sporadic guerrilla warfare against the government. "The armed struggle continues," declared a spokesman for the A.N.C. in nearby Zambia.

As Botha spoke, violence continued to sputter in and around South Africa's black townships. Last week at least 28 more people, most of them black, were killed, mainly by police. But in one particularly gruesome incident, a black soldier was grabbed by a mob in the nominally independent black homeland of Ciskei, beaten to death, doused with gasoline and set afire. The week's fatalities brought the death toll to about 120 since the government slapped a state of emergency on 36 magisterial districts a month ago. At Brandfort, about 225 miles southwest of Johannesburg, the home of Winnie Mandela, wife of jailed A.N.C. Leader Nelson Mandela, was fire bombed. In all, about 300 people were arrested without charges, bringing the total number of arrests to 1,900 since enactment of the emergency decree. About 1,020 of those people have since been released.

No one in Pretoria seemed prepared to explain why South African officialdom had begun to signal more than two weeks ago that Botha's Durban speech would be a milestone of internal reform. Nor was anyone forthcoming about why the speech had become so much less substantial than billed in advance. But it was evident that continuing internal violence, coupled with growing pressure abroad for economic sanctions against Pretoria, had been raising the heat on the government. At the end of July, a special Cabinet committee put several reform proposals before Botha. Among the ideas: 1) some form of power sharing with the black majority, in a manner to be negotiated with black leaders; 2) common citizenship for all South Africans; 3) a South Africa no longer divided into "independent" black homelands.

The principle of a Botha speech embodying such concessions was adopted, and South African officials began passing the word of an upcoming major announcement. McFarlane and Crocker were briefed by South African Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha at a five-hour meeting in Vienna on Aug. 10; the Minister gave the same message to British and West German representatives. A few U.S. news organizations, including TIME, were given background briefings on the general nature and importance of the upcoming Durban address. Officials in Pretoria emphasized the likelihood that the government would have to pay a political price among its more conservative supporters for the impending announcement. As a National Party strategist put it, "This is going to cost us, and we know it."

Apparently President Botha knew it well, and conservatives in the Cabinet may have forced him to water down his message. When he appeared on the platform in Durban's oak-paneled city hall last Thursday, the President seemed preoccupied with protecting his right flank (see box). He made no mention of the term power sharing and explicitly vetoed the idea of adding a fourth, black branch of Parliament to the tricameral legislative system for whites, "coloreds" (mixed-race South Africans) and Indians that took effect last year. Botha declared only that "any future constitutional dispensation providing for participation by all South African citizens should be negotiated." It would be wrong, he said, "to place a time limit on negotiations."

Nor did Botha disavow, as some had expected, South Africa's existing homelands (there are now ten, four of which are "independent"). Instead, he endorsed the concept as a "material part of the solution," but added that "independence cannot be forced on any community." If people in certain designated homelands did not accept "independence," he said vaguely, they "will remain a part of the South African nation, are South African citizens, and should be accommodated within political institutions within the boundaries of the Republic of South Africa." The President also dashed expectations of breakthrough reform surrounding South Africa's influx controls, the laws that restrict the right of blacks to live in urban areas. Botha said only that "the present system is outdated and too costly," and that the advisory President's Council would report on the laws "in the near future."

On law-and-order, Botha adopted a familiar, harsh note. The state of emergency would end only "as violence diminishes, as criminal and terrorist activities cease, and as the process of dialogue and communication acquires greater momentum." He again rejected demands for the unconditional release of Mandela, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. Botha insisted that Mandela first must renounce violence as a means of gaining political goals; Mandela had previously turned down that condition.

As the negative reaction to the Durban speech gained in volume, Foreign Minister Botha insisted that the address had in fact lived up to its advance billing. He told TIME: "We have offered black participation. Now why doesn't the world community challenge us and say that if we stand for black participation, we should now implement it. Damn it, that would have been my reaction if I were a statesman abroad."

In the U.S., the most immediate question concerned proposed legislation to impose economic sanctions against South Africa. The likelihood seemed greater than before that such a bill would pass after Congress returns in September, even in the face of a possible Reagan veto.

President Botha seemed fully prepared for that eventuality. During his speech, he made a specific appeal to South Africa's powerful business sector, calling on it to "stand together" as it had in the face of a 1963 international arms embargo. That and other aspects of Botha's firmness may have been sheer bravado. Even if it was not, the South African leader's invocation of the Rubicon could prove all too telling. Julius Caesar's fording of that river in northern Italy in 49 B.C. led to three years of civil war and to the eventual collapse of the Roman republic. --By George Russell. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg and Bruce W. Nelan/Durban, with other bureaus

With reporting by Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg, Bruce W. Nelan/Durban, with other bureaus