Talks, At A Price

ROBERT MCBRIDE, 29, KILLED THREE WHITE WOMEN with a car bomb outside a Durban pub. Barend Strydom, 27, gunned down seven blacks in downtown Pretoria. Once condemned to death, McBride and Strydom walked free last week when President F.W. de Klerk released 150 prisoners in a deal to entice Nelson Mandela's African National Congress back to the negotiating table. Most of the convicts had been serving time for violent acts in the antiapartheid cause, but Strydom's release was an obvious sop to whites: as leader of the ultra-right White Wolves, he had become a hero for some militant Afrikaners. Nonetheless, many blacks and whites were appalled.

But De Klerk's gamble paid off, up to a point. Citing the prisoner releases and other "substantial" moves by De Klerk to curb violence, the A.N.C. voted unanimously to resume negotiations with the government and scale back its "mass action" campaign of marches and strikes. Unfortunately, this new coziness prompted a sometime De Klerk ally, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party and the KwaZulu homeland, to angrily announce his own boycott of the talks and warn of possibly more violence to come.

Buthelezi's objections raised doubts about whether multiparty talks could resume by the end of the year as De Klerk and Mandela hoped. The peace process has managed, however, to survive despite the Sept. 7 killing of 29 A.N.C. protesters who marched on the "independent" homeland of Ciskei. In findings released last week, Justice Richard Goldstone criticized A.N.C. officials for exposing their followers to danger but reserved his strongest condemnation for Ciskei authorities, saying "their indiscriminate shooting at innocent demonstrators was morally indefensible."