South Africa Jockeying for the Right Corner

By Bruce W. Nelan/Cape Town

P.W. Botha is not a man given to changing his mind, so his listeners did not expect any surprises last week when the South African State President addressed the opening session of Parliament. Walking behind the sergeant at arms carrying the ceremonial mace, Botha entered the whites-only House of Assembly in Cape Town and faced the newly elected members sitting on green leather benches. In his schoolmasterish, staccato delivery, he told them that his government stood firmly on the principle of politics by segregated racial groups and that those who disapproved would not be permitted to use violence or otherwise break the law. Declared Botha: "The fact that certain legal arrangements may not be acceptable to some people does not give them the right to contravene the law."

Already trussed up in the world's most elaborate net of emergency regulations, South Africans braced for a further crackdown after Botha's ruling National Party won an impressive victory at the polls earlier this month. The National Party, which has been in power since 1948, captured 52% of the popular vote and 123 out of 166 Assembly seats. At the same time, many whites, fearful of political concessions to the country's black majority, lined up behind the total-apartheid Conservative Party, giving it 26% of all votes cast and easily eclipsing the liberal Progressive Federals as the country's second major party. For the first time in Nationalist rule, the government found itself with a right-wing party as the official opposition. The lurch to the right sets the stage for a struggle between the Nationalists and the Conservatives, led by former Dutch Reformed Church Minister Andries Treurnicht, to see which party can sound more determined to protect the white minority.

Botha, for his part, engaged in heavy rhetoric but skimped on details. He warned that he would no longer allow funding from outside the country for those who rely on violence to promote political change. "We shall not permit the constitutional order in South Africa to be subverted in this way," he said. Many anti-apartheid organizations, church groups and trade unions receive contributions from abroad and will watch anxiously as the government spells out how it intends to take action and how it will define subversion.

Warming to his theme, Botha advised journalists working in South Africa to "guard against instigating and promoting activities of this kind under the guise of the freedom of the press." As if to underscore the point, the Department of Home Affairs last week refused to reverse its decision not to renew the work permits of two British television correspondents. At the same time, Botha pledged to be "more directly involved" in negotiations with black leaders and to create a National Council as a forum for such talks. But even moderate blacks such as KwaZulu Chief Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi have refused to take part until Nelson Mandela and other popular leaders are freed from prison and offered the opportunity to participate. The reform process, slow and tentative at best, appears stalemated.

But Botha sounded reasonable compared with Treurnicht, a onetime chairman of the Broederbond, the secret brotherhood of Afrikaner nationalists. The day after the President's speech, Treurnicht rose from his Assembly seat to introduce the opposition's traditional no-confidence vote. Then, smiling with satisfaction and jabbing the air in the direction of the Nationalist benches, he attacked Botha for weakening apartheid. Said Treurnicht: "The government's policy means that eventually we will not have control over our own fatherland." As the Nationalists across the aisle jeered, Botha sat rigidly in his seat, occasionally making a comment to his lieutenants.

The Conservative Party program calls for partitioning South Africa into 13 separate, independent states. One of them, named Southland and including most of present-day South Africa, would be reserved for whites, while the others would be divided among nonwhites. After Treurnicht finished, Nationalist Minister of Manpower Pietie du Plessis, a fierce debater, took the floor, armed with a batch of Treurnicht's old speeches. He read quotes to prove that before he walked out of the National Party in 1982, Treurnicht had supported the policies that he now vigorously denounced. The Conservatives, Du Plessis said, "are living in a dream world. We cannot enforce a system of absolute separation." It was the Conservatives' turn to jeer, forcing the Speaker of Parliament to call repeatedly for order.

Du Plessis wound up by linking Treurnicht with Eugene Terre'Blanche, leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), many of whose followers support the Conservatives. He said that he was reminded of a puppet show in which the man pulling the strings was the AWB leader. But it was Colin Eglin, head of the Progressive Federal Party, who said aloud what many in the House of Assembly must have been thinking: "Here we have a Nationalist government that believes in race classification, group areas, apartheid in schools, hospitals, housing and constitutional provisions, being attacked for being too liberal. What a sad day for South Africa."

In the midst of the rhetoric, two car bombs exploded outside Magistrate's Court in downtown Johannesburg, killing four policemen and injuring 14 other people. The tragedy served as a reminder that the speeches in the House of Assembly are not some dry debating match but deal with deeply emotional issues that can and do cost lives. The irony of the Conservative challenge is that even though the reform process has shuddered to a halt and there is no prospect of negotiations with black leaders, Botha's image might be boosted by the astonishing confrontation in Parliament, where the Nationalist government is being denounced as dangerously liberal.