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By Joe Contreras
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The annual opening session of South Africa's racially segregated Parliament last week may be remembered as the day apartheid was buried for good. In a dramatic address, President F. W. de Klerk promised to topple all remaining pillars of apartheid legislation, including a key law that requires classification of all South Africans on the basis of skin color. Horrified rightist Afrikaner legislators heckled him with cries of "traitor" and "hangman"; many stalked out in protest. But de Klerk pressed on. "The goal, with the removal of discrimination, is to give all South Africans full rights in every sphere of life," the president said. "South Africa cannot allow the dynamic process of reform to slow down."
For nine years, South Africa's ruling white minority has been groping for a political formula to end the country's international isolation and avoid a racial civil war--without sacrificing what whites consider their vital interests. De Klerk's predecessor, P. W. Botha, tried palliatives that only succeeded in highlighting the need for real change. De Klerk has gone much further, agreeing to release imprisoned black nationalist Nelson Mandela and to open talks with black leaders on the country's political future. Last week South Africans were expecting him to announce the repeal of the Group Areas Act and the Land Acts, which restrict where blacks can live and own property. But de Klerk did more: by proposing to repeal the Population Registration Act, under which all South Africans are classified by rigid racial categories, he sought to remove the remaining legal and ideological underpinnings of apartheid. There is now no way to escape rewriting the political and social rules that govern the country. "From that moment onwards there will be no black or white South Africans," observed Jan van Eck of the opposition Democratic Party. "There will be only South Africans."
To the Bush administration, de Klerk's speech was further evidence that its own policy toward South Africa was working. "It's the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall," said a State Department official. The scrapping of the Group Areas and Population Registration acts is among five conditions laid down by Congress which must be met before U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa can be eased. During de Klerk's visit to Washington last September President Bush described the process of political change in South Africa as "irreversible" and voiced hi's support for removing sanctions at the first available opportunity. As of last week, Pretoria had already fulfilled three of those conditions--lifting the state of emergency, legalizing the African National Congress and opening talks with black leaders. The lifting of U.S. trade restrictions is months away; the sanctions law says that de Klerk must still release all of the country's political prisoners, estimated to number between 600 and 3,000, and that is not likely to happen before the end of April. At that point Bush may decide, in consultation with Congress, to lift one or more of the sanctions to show support for de Klerk.
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Radical as the new proposals seemed to recalcitrant Afrikaners, de Klerk's speech didn't go far enough for antiapartheid forces. The ANC and other critics noted the absence of any detailed plans to repatriate 40,000 political exiles or to disband the discredited network of black town councils. And de Klerk ignored longstanding demands for the repeal of the country's repressive security laws, which give the police and military sweeping powers to detain political suspects.
Indeed, de Klerk seemed to be positioning his government for tough bargaining ahead over a new constitution. He dismissed the ANC's demand that he hand over power to an interim government while negotiations are underway. He also rejected an ANC proposal for an elected assembly to draft a new political charter. That, too, angered black activists. "We still have no votes," Mandela said at a news conference. "We can't be members of Parliament. The police are still harassing, persecuting, even killing our people, and the government will not bring them to book." Last week the ANC launched a "mass action" campaign of consumer boycotts, one-day labor stoppages and other organized protests to back up its demands for an interim government and one person, one vote elections to choose a constituent assembly.
But the ANC has problems of its own. It failed to anticipate the eruption of black-on-black violence in townships outside Johannesburg in August, leaving its followers unprotected against armed groups of Zulus who back the rival Inkatha. A membership-recruitment drive aimed at signing up 1 million dues-paying supporters by the end of 1990 stalled at around 300,000. The ANC leadership's decision to suspend "armed struggle" alienated militant township youths. Mandela's triumphant 10-day U.S. tour brought in an estimated $5 million in pledges--but as of November not one penny had arrived in the ANC's coffers. Thus de Klerk will have little incentive to meet ANC demands until the group can pull itself together--and end its blood feud with Inkatha, which now seems assured of a seat at the table when talks on a new Constitution begin later this year. To achieve that, Mandela and Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi met last week for the first time in three decades, agreeing to tour jointly some of the black townships hardest hit by the violence that cost 3,400 blacks their lives last year.
The new spirit of tolerance lasted less than a day. Police in Natal province reported that at least 10 people died when hundreds of armed Inkatha supporters attacked the homes of suspected ANC sympathizers in the coastal town of Umgababa. The incident showed how difficult it has become for Mandela and Buthelezi to make their policies fit the increasingly restive mood on both sides. The ANC's "mass action" campaign, designed largely to satisfy militant younger members, annoyed Inkatha. The group's members say that a similar campaign last year targeted Buthelezi and the Zulu homeland he heads--and many blacks will resist any attempt to coerce them into supporting the ANC tactics. Such tensions may explain the other incident of black-on-black violence last week: unidentified assailants threw more than a dozen ANC supporters oft' a commuter train near a station in Soweto, killing one person and injuring 10.
South Africa's whites, too, were fighting one another in the streets. Thousands of' white farmers rolled into Pretoria on tractors and heavy trucks to protest the upcoming repeal of the Land Acts. Those laws set aside 87 percent of the country's available land for the white minority; rural Afrikaners, deeply indebted and feeling betrayed by de Klerk, resorted to civil disobedience of their own. As an attention-getting device the protest achieved its goal, but the white right poses remarkably little threat to de Klerk. Polls show that de Klerk's popularity is rising among whites as they grow accustomed to the notion that minority rule in South Africa is on its way out.
De Klerk has fended off the rightist challenge by convincing many whites that he can best protect their interests in the upcoming talks over a new constitution by safeguarding their rights as individuals instead of as a racial group. But that implicit commitment may create problems for de Klerk in his dealings with black leaders. Last month Mandela said the ANC supported an "all-party congress" that would bring together all the country's representative political forces to work out a bill of rights and other broad principles that might provide the cornerstones for a new constitution. In his address to Parliament de Klerk echoed the proposal for a multiparty conference. But by rejecting a constituent assembly elected on a one person, one vote basis, de Klerk has set his government on a collision course with the ANC.
That is the stuff' of negotiation among competing political forces. But an inflexible stance by Pretoria in the forthcoming talks could pose a threat to a peaceful transition in South Africa. De Klerk may succeed in outflanking the ANC by securing the opposition of Inkatha and white liberal forces to the idea of an elected constituent assembly, since such a body would enable the ANC to virtually dictate the terms of a new political charter. But a de Klerk victory on that tactical issue might also inflame black militants, making it impossible for Mandela to stick to his relatively moderate line. "De Klerk seems to show no understanding that negotiations won't succeed unless grass-roots blacks feel they provide concrete benefits for them," cautions the Democratic Party's van Eck. "And if they don't feel that, they will turn against the process of negotiations." With admirable speed, de Klerk is now on the verge of fulfilling his pledge to eradicate the worst legacies of his political forebears--but if he tries to impose his vision of a "new South Africa" from above, he runs the risk of undermining the democratic future he is trying to achieve.
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