World

By William E. Smith.

SOUTH AFRICA CRACKS IN THE SYSTEM Under heavy pressure, the government takes steps toward change % THAT WAS WIDELY EXPECTED TO HERALD SIGNIFICANT REFORMS IN SOUTH AFRICA'S APARTHEID SYSTEM, HE DISAPPOINTED THE WORLD AND SOME OF HIS COUNTRYMEN BY SAYING PRACTICALLY NOTHING. LAST WEEK, AS PRESSURE ON SOUTH AFRICA CONTINUED TO MOUNT FROM EVERY SIDE, BOTHA AND HIS GOVERNMENT MADE TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS THAT COULD ALTER THE

COUNTRY'S COURSE.

In an address before a provincial congress of his ruling National Party in Bloemfontein, Botha declared that South Africa would henceforth grant citizenship to those blacks who live in the country's urban areas but are nominal citizens of the four "independent" homelands created within the boundaries of South Africa over the past nine years. A day later, a presidential commission recommended to Botha the scrapping of "influx control" regulations, or pass laws, by which the movements of South African blacks have been controlled since 1952.

In almost any other society, such reforms would seem barely adequate at best --and decades or even centuries overdue. But in South Africa, they were seen as significant cracks in the structure of "grand" apartheid envisioned by the late Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Helen Suzman, a veteran antiapartheid Member of Parliament, called the proposed changes "probably the most important step forward in 30 years." Botha had said nothing about parliamentary representation for the black majority, she conceded, let alone the right to vote. But, she said, "the abolition of pass laws and influx control, to my mind, is something that should be welcomed by every South African hoping for a peaceful solution."

Botha announced his latest reform efforts after pressure at home and overseas had reached almost unbearable intensity. Unrest has been sweeping South Africa's impoverished black townships for more than a year, resulting in the loss of more than 700 lives, the majority killed by police. During a two- month-old state of emergency in 36 districts, violence has waxed and waned as the government rushed police and army units into troubled areas. At the same time, the Botha government has begun to feel the heat of disapproval abroad. The withdrawal of credit by a number of U.S. and other Western banks over the past two months has produced a financial crisis that remains unresolved. Amid signs of rising anger in the U.S. Congress, President Reagan, in one of the major foreign policy shifts of his Administration, early last week imposed by Executive Order a series of sanctions against South Africa that went a long way toward preempting a stronger sanctions bill already passed by the House of Representatives and pending in the Senate. At the same time, Canada and the members of the ten-nation European Community, with the notable exception of Britain, announced sanctions of their own.

Finally, late last week, several leading South African businessmen flew to neighboring Zambia for a six-hour meeting with the exiled leaders of the African National Congress, the oldest black South African political organization, which is outlawed at home. The businessmen, led by Gavin Relly, head of the giant Anglo American Corporation, were undeterred by Botha's warning that such a meeting would be "a disloyal act," and afterward pronounced it a success.

In the meantime, after a visit to Cape Town's Pollsmoor prison, the family of Nelson Mandela, 67, the imprisoned leader of the A.N.C., announced that he was suffering from an enlarged prostate gland and cysts on the liver and right kidney, and called for medical treatment by a private physician. Mandela is the most popular black political figure in South Africa, even though he has been in jail for more than 20 years. If he were to die there, his death could easily touch off violence far more serious than anything the country has seen thus far.

Like Botha, Reagan had been under rising pressure as the South African crisis continued. As of a fortnight ago, the President thought he had little choice but to veto the pending sanctions bill, then face an almost certain override of his veto in a Congress angered by the behavior of the Pretoria government. Eventually, his aides convinced him that he might be able to avoid the embarrassment of a congressional defeat, and at the same time regain the initiative on the South Africa issue, if he were to accept most but not all of the tenets of the pending legislation and then speak out against apartheid. The President agreed. Scarcely two weeks before, he had been staunchly defending South Africa in a radio interview. But last week, as he announced the new policy, Reagan declared firmly, "The system of apartheid means deliberate, systematic, institutionalized racial discrimination denying the black majority their God-given rights. America's view of apartheid is simple and straightforward. We believe it is wrong."

In his Executive Order, Reagan banned the sale of computers to South African security agencies; barred most loans to Pretoria; proposed a ban on the import of the Krugerrand, the South African gold coin, subject to consultation with U.S. trading partners; and prohibited the export of most nuclear technology. The sanctions did not go as far as the congressional bill, which calls for a review of the situation in South Africa after one year, at which time more severe penalties might be imposed. Nonetheless, the President's action was important, at least psychologically, in underscoring U.S. opposition to apartheid. Reagan acknowledged that his standing policy of "constructive engagement" had become one of "active" constructive engagement, though that seemed an understatement.

The South African reaction to Reagan's decision was snappish. Said Botha: "Whatever (Reagan's) intention, the effect is punitive. It is a negative step . . . Reform can only be retarded by outside attempts to interfere." Indeed, a marked irascibility has characterized Pretoria's recent reaction to foreign criticism. Scarcely hours after Deputy Foreign Minister Louis Nel railed against journalists "who often send out untruths, half-truths, selective reporting, and create a false and twisted perception of South Africa," the Pretoria government expelled a Newsweek correspondent, Ray Wilkinson, and banned last week's issue of the magazine, which contained comments by angry black protesters and leaders of the outlawed A.N.C.

But the week's most important developments concerned the government's changing policies on apartheid. Assuming that Botha follows through, the changes will mark the beginning of the end of the elaborate Verwoerdian plan of creating ten black homelands, thereby leaving the remaining 87% of the country's land area to white South Africans. The citizenry of each of the four existing "independent" homelands is divided between people who live there and those who reside in the black townships of white South Africa. The government had previously said that the 4 million blacks in the latter category could continue to live legally outside their respective homelands. Last week Botha added that they would be permitted to regain their South African citizenship. As for the 5 million who reside inside the "independent" homelands, Botha proposed that they be given dual citizenship. Importantly, however, he insisted that the government was not abandoning the homelands policy and that "the sovereignty of these states is not in dispute."

In the announcement dealing with the equally significant and more emotional | issue of the hated pass laws, the presidential commission described these rules as discriminatory and "in conflict with basic human rights." It noted that the laws make criminals out of blacks who live in or near South Africa's cities but lack proper documentation, and estimated that arrests for such violations have been running between 200,000 and 300,000 a year. The panel recommended the abolition of the passbook system and the issuance of the same identity document to all South Africans, regardless of race. If Parliament takes up the recommendations in January and makes them law, blacks will gain the right to live and work in any part of the country and to have their families with them instead of in distant homelands.

What blacks will still lack is political power. Under the new proposals, they will not be granted the right to vote, nor will they have their own separate "parliament," like the two chambers created last year for the vastly smaller colored (mixed race) and Indian communities. Thus, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu dismissed the latest proposals as a "crumb" and as "piecemeal reform, grudgingly given." Still, in the South African context, last week's announcements represented some progress. Welcoming the government's shift on its citizenship policy, the leader of the white parliamentary opposition, Dr. Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, declared, "It signals the end of the apartheid dream but poses the challenge of doing away with the apartheid reality."

On a national scale, violence abated slightly, but disturbances boiled up in the huge township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, as police attempted to get students to return to their classrooms, on one occasion arresting more than 700. Near Cape Town, an angry crowd killed a plainclothesman after he fired at mourners following a funeral. Said General Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner: "We do not have a state of war or revolution in this country." Still, unrest and violence remain daily features of South Africa's life.

With reporting by Bruce W. Nelan/Johannesburg and Barrett Seaman/Washington