50 Whites Defy Pretoria, Meet With Rebels

DAKAR, Senegal —  Fifty prominent white South Africans, defying their government, opened three days of talks with the outlawed African National Congress here Thursday on a strategy to end apartheid and establish a democratic political system for their country.

Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the white delegation of politicians, businessmen, clergy, academics, writers and students, said the meeting would discuss “alternatives to the brutal catastrophe unfolding inside our common fatherland.”

Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s information director, declared that “the system of white minority rule can only be ended through struggle,” but he added that the increasing willingness of whites to oppose apartheid “greatly augments the struggle for change.”

“The more whites who join us, the faster the struggle advances, and the sooner we will all be liberated,” Mbeki told the conference.

Although the meeting itself is a breakthrough in efforts to open a political dialogue across South Africa’s racial divide, participants said its results can only be measured by changes in attitudes over time.

“We are not here for any artificial detente or for negotiation--we don’t have the power to negotiate,” Slabbert said. “This meeting should not be over-exaggerated.”

But the session, arranged with the help of the French and Senegalese governments, clearly has far greater importance than the ANC’s earlier meetings with white businessmen, politicians, religious leaders and educators over the past two years, and many participants described it Thursday as a historic initiative.

Larger than previous groups, the white delegation is drawn mostly from the Afrikaner community, which has dominated the Pretoria government for nearly four decades and whose fears of majority rule are acknowledged by the African National Congress as an important factor in working out the country’s future.

The delegation includes two members of Parliament, a member of the president’s council, the Rev. C. F. Beyers Naude, former general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, the novelist Andre Brink, the managing director of one of South Africa’s largest retail chains and some of the country’s most distinguished academics.

Author, Priest Included

The African National Congress delegation of more than 20 includes five members of the ANC’s national executive committee and several whites, among them the exiled author Breyten Breytenbach and a Dominican priest.

A principal aim of the conference, most of which will be held behind closed doors, will be to “dispel myths and prejudices,” Slabbert said, and to “break out of our cocoon of ignorance” that results from apartheid.

But the meeting also constitutes an important political victory for the African National Congress, which has won wider recognition, this time from influential Afrikaners, of its legitimacy as a spokesman for South Africa’s black majority and of the central role it will play in resolution of the prolonged crisis in the country.

“We recognize they are a crucial part of the solution to the problem,” Slabbert, the former leader of South Africa’s Progressive Federal Party, said of the ANC. “They constitute the largest movement in our country working for liberation, and the oldest. There is no solution possible without their involvement.”

ANC Seeks Allies

The ANC, at the same time, sees significant progress in its efforts to develop a broad “united front” working to end apartheid and establish a democratic, non-racial government in South Africa without its allies necessarily agreeing with its armed insurgency or its longstanding partnership with the South African Communist Party.

“A multiple strategy would have to be devised (to end apartheid), and that is happening here and now,” said Alex Boraine, co-director with Slabbert of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa, which organized the conference. “Different strategies could be adopted by different groups with equal validity.”

Boraine, briefing newsmen after the first closed-door session, said that the talks had already focused on the difficult issue of violence, particularly the ANC’s “armed struggle” against the Pretoria government, and that this would be taken up again today as the ANC seeks to answer the questions from the white delegation.

Outlines ANC Strategy

Mac Maharaj, a member of the ANC national executive committee, outlined the ANC’s broad strategy at the session after the formal opening of the conference. But he said later that he was not so much attempting to win support as understanding for the ANC’s use of violence.

His main aim, Maharaj said, was to urge whites to develop complementary strategies to “bring about a non-racial democratic South Africa” while keeping “in consonance with black aspirations.”

The talks will focus later on the political, economic and social system that the conference’s participants, who range from right of center to liberal within the white delegation, hope will replace apartheid.

With Senegal as the host of the conference and Danielle Mitterrand, wife of French President Francois Mitterrand, an organizer of the meeting, the role of the international community in promoting change in South Africa will also be discussed.

President Abdou Diouf of Senegal, in opening the conference, pledged the support of black Africa for any solution worked out by South Africans themselves, but he also called for increased international pressure on Pretoria to end apartheid.

To Urge Prisoner Release

He said black African countries intend to campaign for the release of political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, the jailed ANC leader, and are considering a “tribunal” that would try South Africa for “crimes against humanity,” much as the United States was “prosecuted” during the 1960s for the war in Vietnam.

Even before they began, the talks were sharply criticized by South Africa’s ruling National Party and the opposition Conservative Party, and right-wing groups have called for the prosecution of delegation members under the country’s severe security laws.

Boy Geldenhuys, a senior National Party spokesman, said in Cape Town that the meeting here would create the impression that the African National Congress is participating in the peaceful resolution of South Africa’s problems while, in the government’s view, the ANC is the main obstacle to this.

He criticized Slabbert and Boraine for organizing the conference at a time when, he said, the government is succeeding in exposing, both in South Africa and abroad, “the true, terrorist nature” of the ANC.