Lawyer for Imprisoned Mandela Spurns South African Offer of Freedom

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  President Pieter W. Botha’s offer to free Nelson Mandela, the jailed leader of the outlawed African National Congress, if he renounces violence was dismissed Friday as irrelevant by the Mandela family’s lawyer.

Ismail Ayob, an attorney speaking on behalf of Mandela’s wife, Winnie, said: “P.W. Botha has missed the whole point. Mandela has never asked for his release and he isn’t asking for it now.”

Ayob quoted Winnie Mandela, who herself is banished to a remote town and banned from public speech, as saying, “Botha is speaking of my husband’s freedom: My husband speaks of the people’s freedom.”

Ayob said he saw Mandela, 66, in Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town last year and quoted him as saying then: “If the ANC (African National Congress) is legalized and can participate in the constitutional development of the country, then there’s no need for violence. But the conditions which lead up to violence must be removed.”

Ayob said that Mandela was referring to the whole structure of apartheid.

Botha, in a speech Thursday to Parliament, offered to release Mandela, saying, “All that is required of him now is that he should unconditionally reject violence as a political instrument.”

Botha did not specify whether he requires the rejection of the use of violence by Mandela’s banned group or just his personal disavowal of violent tactics.

Mandela, jailed since 1962, was sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment on charges of sabotage and plotting violent revolution. He backed armed struggle, which has generally been aimed at property rather than people, after campaigns to end apartheid by nonviolent means failed to produce results.

In Lusaka, Zambia, the African National Congress denounced Botha’s proposal.