ANC leaders hear the militants’ message, but they’re not heeding it. Boipatong has not touched off wider unrest. And while the reform drive President F. W. de Klerk began two years ago has faltered, it survives; both sides have too much to lose if it dies. Instead of giving in to growing pressure for a renewed “armed struggle” or paralyzing strikes, ANC leaders last week announced that they would withdraw from further negotiations with the government on a new constitution. Yet at the same time they began laying the groundwork for another round of talks. ANC strategists, notes University of the Witwatersrand political-scientist Tom Lodge, “are keen to provide themselves and the government with a way out.”
Yes, the ANC’s road map is a tough-sounding 14-point list of demands. But government ministers had already agreed to several of them, including the eventual formation of a joint interim government and the election of an assembly to draft a new constitution. That suggested the outlines of a compromise; the negotiation process could then restart before the end of the year. Even though reform has a short history in South Africa, the showdown looked familiar. Only a year ago ANC leaders pulled out of preliminary talks, citing many of the same grievances. Six months later they were back in Pretoria.
This time good will is in shorter supply. One of the ANC’s top demands is that the government agree to let an international commission investigate the Boipatong massacre-and particularly its longstanding claim that the government is using the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party in a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. It’s no secret that if substantial numbers of Zulus, the country’s largest single ethnic group, joined with white and mixed-race supporters of the governing National Party, the coalition would represent a formidable voting bloc–enough to hamstring the ANC.
De Klerk has balked at letting foreigners meddle in South Africa’s ethnic politics, saying that would violate its sovereignty. But the global outcry over Boipatong was intense. Last week the head of the independent Goldstone Commission, assigned to investigate the violence, said he would appoint a chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court and a British criminologist to the panel.
De Klerk has taken a hard line in negotiations since last March, when he easily won a whites-only referendum endorsing the talks. But the economy is shrinking, and few multinational corporations have been willing to bring in desperately needed investment without a green light from the ANC. Threats last week to have South Africa barred from the Barcelona Olympics and upcoming rugby tours also serve as a reminder that sanctions can be reimposed.
The result is that, like Mandela, de Klerk is pulling his punches. Although he blasted the ANC’s pullout from talks as “irresponsible,” he is resisting calls to reimpose a state of emergency.
Nonetheless, growing evidence of state involvement in political violence threatens to demolish de Klerk’s own reformist image abroad. After the latest massacre, eyewitnesses reported that police drove Inkatha fighters to Boipatong before the massacre began. And last week a mine security guard reportedly linked the massacre to former members of a notorious counterinsurgency unit originally attached to the Namibian police and known as Koevoet (“Crowbar” in Afrikaans). Police denied any involvement. But investigators from the Goldstone Commission who raided a mine hostel east of Johannesburg uncovered a secret Koevoet base stocked with an arsenal of assault rifles and ammunition.
The deepening scandal may compel Pretoria to grant the ANC’s most important conditions for resuming negotiations, such as the closure of the Inkatha-occupied workers’ hostels that have been linked to much of the violence. If so, the ANC could be talking to the government by late August. By then, an ANC “mass action” program of sit-ins, strikes and boycotts will have run its course. Its professed goal is to bring de Klerk down, but the campaign’s tactic will be to let ANC militants vent their frustration. Mandela’s challenge will be to keep the protests from spinning out of control. If he succeeds, “we’ll be back at the table,” conceded one member of the ANC’s national executive committee. That’s because neither side has any real alternative to more negotiations. It’s no formula for a settlement, but it’s a start.
