Congressmen, Botha Clash Over Apartheid

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — A delegation of six U.S. congressmen exchanged angry words Wednesday with South African President Pieter W. Botha over apartheid and prospects for its abolition, and the Americans emerged from the meeting deeply pessimistic.

Although Botha sketched the reforms he intends to announce when Parliament opens Jan. 31, Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Budget Committee and leader of the delegation, said later, “Listening to the specifics, I was not given much to hope for in terms of the question of major reform of apartheid.”

After discussions with Botha and two of his ministers at the president’s vacation home at the coastal resort of George, Gray said, the delegation is not convinced that South Africa has any plans for “meaningful change.” Botha told them the government is “considering various things,” Gray said, “but when we asked for specifics, there were no specifics.”

‘Very, Very Far Apart’

Rep. Peter H. Kostmayer (D-Pa.) went further: “I feel bitterly disappointed, especially in the president, who I found totally closed and unwilling to be responsive. We are very, very far apart.”

Kostmayer, who said he found the 70-year-old president rude and at times “even coarse,” said Botha disparaged him during the 90-minute meeting as “a white liberal” and that he called Botha “a white reactionary” in reply.

“From what I have heard so far, I feel quite pessimistic,” Kostmayer said, “and it seems unlikely that fundamental and basic changes that are necessary will take place.”

Gray was one of the authors last year of legislation that would have imposed economic sanctions on South Africa if apartheid were not ended. He said the six congressmen, five of them Democrats and four of them blacks, pressed Botha hard on basic reforms, changes that Congress may use to judge progress and decide whether to adopt new sanctions.

The suggested reforms touch on many aspects of apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation and minority white rule. They include the abolition of laws preventing blacks from working and living in urban areas, the end of segregated residential areas, a halt to the forced resettlement of blacks living in designated white areas and repeal of regulations that prevent black workers employed in cities from bringing their families from rural areas to live with them.

The congressmen also called for equal education for all races and for an end to restrictions on the news media here so that South Africans can learn what is going on in their own country.

A ‘Miserable Attitude’

Botha told newsmen after the meeting that imposing economic sanctions, even to promote reform, reflects “a bad, miserable attitude on the part of the United States (toward) a developing country, one of the best developing countries in Africa.”

The congressmen are on a five-day trip to South Africa to assess the civil unrest of the last year, progress on reforming apartheid and the effectiveness of the limited sanctions imposed in September by President Reagan, preempting legislation approved by the House and Senate.

In addition to their meetings with Botha and three Cabinet ministers, they are seeing leading white liberal politicians and businessmen and members of the anti-apartheid movement. They also are visiting Soweto, the sprawling black satellite city outside Johannesburg, and the Crossroads squatter settlement near Cape Town.

They will be followed to South Africa by Chester A. Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, who is currently visiting Angola. Crocker is due here Saturday in a new American bid to revive negotiations on independence for Namibia (South-West Africa), which Pretoria continues to administer in defiance of U.N. resolutions.

The key issue in the stalemated Namibia negotiations is the withdrawal of 30,000 Cuban troops from Angola--and the precariousness of the Marxist regime there without them in its decade-old war with the guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

Savimbi is to visit Washington later this month in a bid for renewed American aid, now getting favorable consideration from the Reagan Administration.