Government and ANC resume democracy talks

AFTER a hiatus of nine months, multi- party talks resume this morning in Johannesburg to set in train a process that will lead to democratic elections and a new South African constitution.

At least that is how the government and the African National Congress, the country's two leading political players, see it. They are calling the two-day event a 'multi-party planning conference'.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party has other ideas. At a 'prayer breakfast' in Durban yesterday the Inkatha leader described today's talks as the most important political event in South African history.

His hope is that the conference will determine whether post-apartheid South Africa will be a unitary or a federal state, and specifically whether his demand for the creation of a virtually autonomous Natal-KwaZulu state will receive the conference's blessing. He has broad support for this demand among white right-wing groups, themselves yearning for separate 'homelands', and from his closest black political ally, Brigadier Oupa Gqozo of the Ciskei.

The question will be whether a broad framework for the transition to democracy already agreed in bilateral talks between the government and the ANC will be undermined or enhanced by the conference. What the big two envisage is for multi-party control to be established by mid-year over state institutions such as the security forces, whose impartiality will be vital if - again, as envisaged - free and fair elections are to be held within the next 12 months. They have also agreed on the establishment of a five-year coalition government after the elections whose immediate task it will be to draft a democratic constitution.

This is a scheme which Chief Buthelezi and his allies, all of whom in various ways derived their power from the apartheid system, are seeking to short-circuit. They want a constitution to be drawn up by a self-appointed multi- party body prior to elections.

The anticipated conflict today offers a novel twist in the negotiations drama. When talks at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, a negotiating forum comprising 19 parties, broke down in May the reason was an irreconcilable conflict between the government and the ANC. At the time Inkatha was squarely in the government camp.

Since then a general strike, a 'mass action' campaign by the ANC, two massacres of ANC supporters and a realisation of the dire need to reconstruct the South African economy have had a sobering effect on the government and the ANC. The outcome, hammered out in numerous bilateral discussions since September, has been a mutual resolve to elevate the national interest above - or at least on a par with - party interest. By contrast, as the Johannesburg Star pointed out yesterday, 'those placing obstacles in the way of the conference will be regarded as spoilers - largely for placing party political views above national interests'.

Regarded also as spoilers, but of a more bloodthirsty variety, are the gunmen who on Tuesday opened fire on a station-wagon in Natal, killing six schoolchidren and wounding six. Inkatha blamed the ANC but the police, who have offered a 60,000 rand reward for information leading to the arrest of the killers, could not confirm this.