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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 16, 1985
The speech·was more of a declaration of intent, rather than a blueprint or
timetable. The President said that negotiations (no time frame was men
tioned) with "elected black officials" (meaning homeland and national state
officials, not the ANC or other radical groups) would determine the coun
try's future. Here are key excerpts of what else the President said:
The overriding common denominator [ in such open-ended negoti
ations] is our mutual interest in each other's freedoms and well
being. Our peace and prosperity are indivisible. Therefore the
onl � way forward is through cooperation and coresponsibility. �
we ignore the exfstence of minorities..� favor of a simplistic
winner-take-all system, then we will diminish and not increase
the freedoms of our peoples.•.•
The alternative is bloodshed, the alternative is turmoil, the
alternative is a clique who wants to get control of power in
South Africa•••. Peaceful negotiation is their enemy because it
will lead to joint responsibility.... They wish to seek and
monopolize all power•.•• Their actions speak louder than their
words. Their words offer ready panaceas such as one-man, one
vote: freedom and justice for all. Their actions leave no doubt
that the freedoms that we already have•..are the true targets of
their violence.
Mr. Botha's speech was perhaps primarily intended to calm the fears of
South African whites that the government was caving in to Western pressure.
American news analyst Robert Novak said on CNN that the President rewrote
the speech several times between the time a top American official met with.
Foreign Minister R.F. Botha in Vienna and the actual delivery. The rewrit
ings, to accommodate the conservative power base of his party, thus altered
what U.S. officials had hoped would be major moves or some kind of a blue
print "away from apartheid," which seems to be America's only concern.
Ultra-rightist Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht said, a day
before the address, that any serious move away from separate development
would "awaken the tiger in the whites" and that Mr. Botha underestimated
the extent of white backlash. From their point of view, Conservative Party
members (who split off from the Nationalist Party) felt the speech was full
of ambiguities and potential dangers. The easing of "influx control" laws
restricting where blacks may work and live could, in their view, lead to
chaos and third-world-like slum areas. Mr. Botha's discussion of a common
citizenship for all whites and non-whites living outside the nominally
independent homelands, seemed, to them, inconsistent with his demand that
there not be one-man, one-vote. What is citizenship without the vote?
(Some say there should be a qualified--property ownership or net worth
minimum, for example--rather than universal suffrage.)
On ABC's Nightline, Conservative Party member Counie Mulder (a former Na
tionalist Party cabinet official) bluntly said that Mr. Botha has painted
himself into a corner and that the ruling Nationalist Party has no choice
but to inexorably move in the direction of one-man, one-vote. The Conser
vatives claim the only solution is that of partitioning the country into
its constituent parts, with every group running its own affairs. This
would have been easier to accomplish years ago, before millions of blacks
left their traditional homelands to find work in the industrial complexes
of white South Africa.