S. Africa Offers Namibia Pullout Starting Nov. 1

GENEVA —  South Africa’s foreign minister said his country offered to withdraw troops from Namibia starting Nov. 1 as U.S.-mediated talks on peace in southern Africa opened here today.

Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha said in Johannesburg that the proposal also called for elections in Namibia, formerly South-West Africa, on June 1 next year.

“It follows that the total withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola will be completed by June 1, 1989,” Botha said.

The talks on southern Africa, the fifth round of closed-door negotiations that started in May in London, are being held in Geneva’s bunker-like International Conference Center. The U.S. team and the joint Angolan-Cuban delegation arrived ahead of the South Africans.

A U.S. spokesman, Art Skop, said U.S. officials would maintain a news embargo until a press conference planned by Chester A. Crocker, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, after completion of the talks here.

Hopes have been buoyed by an agreement announced July 20 in New York on a set of 14 principles designed to establish the basis of peace in the region.

The accord was the first joint document accepted by the three parties locked in an undeclared war since 1975. The principles include an end to South African administration of Namibia and the withdrawal of all Cuban troops from Angola.

Cuban troops, estimated by U.S. officials as numbering up to 50,000, have helped the Marxist Angolan government to fight the rebel movement UNITA, which receives military aid from South Africa and the United States.

Angola has also been used as a base by the South West Africa People’s Organization, which has been waging an armed struggle for Namibian independence since 1966.

The organization and UNITA are not parties to the agreement, but spokesmen for both have welcomed it.