The Keys to the Cells

President Pieter W. Botha has expressed disappointment with the response of the black majority to his initiative for a dialogue to chart the future of South Africa. But the absence of dialogue is a response to his own deliberate policy of continuing to imprison those who are essential to the process of negotiation. Now he has made matters worse, if not impossible, by banning virtually every political voice of blacks seeking a peaceful solution to the nation’s problems.

Under new orders, the United Democratic Front, the largest of the anti-apartheid groups, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the largest of the labor federations, have been barred from all political activity--along with 16 other o rganizations and at least 18 leading black activists.

The government of the United States has joined in an almost universal expression of shock and dismay at this chilling reversion. The government that talks of negotiations has again denied the means of negotiation to the majority of the citizens, and, with that calculated move, has also denied the blacks any alternative to violence. That--as Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, the Anglican primate, said--is an invitation to “war.”

The sincerity of the government had already been placed in doubt by the continued incarceration of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader. Virtually every influential black in South Africa and many governments, including the United States, have emphasized the crucial importance of freeing Mandela so that he can play a role in negotiations.

Mandela is not the only key person imprisoned by the government. None of the wholesale detentions are more troubling than that of Zwelakhe Sisulu, the editor of the New Nation. He has been under arrest for more than a year, under “indefinite” confinement without formal charges. And the newspaper itself is facing a court battle to try to resist efforts to suppress its publication. Sisulu’s father, Walter, is serving a life sentence. His mother, Albertina, is co-president of the United Democratic Front, now restricted by the new regulations. The newspaper, founded in 1986, is funded by the Roman Catholic Church.

The government of South Africa holds in its hands the keys to undertaking the process of beginning to dismantle apartheid. The keys are to prison cellsconfining so many of that nation’s black leaders. They must be freed, as must the organizations that represent the majority, if violence is to be restrained as a new nation is built.