No Turning Back Now

There is no turning back in South Africa now. The ruling National Party has maintained control of Parliament in this week’s elections, albeit with a drastically diminished majority, assuring Acting President Frederik W. de Klerk the votes to proceed with his promised reforms. Now must come the dialogue and then the action that will extend, at long last, political rights to the black majority.

Enormous obstacles remain, not least the delicate task for De Klerk to translate his platitudes and ambiguities into an effective, meaningful program supported both by the majority in the white Parliament and by the black majority.

That task will be made more difficult by the growth of the Conservative Party, which gained the most in this election, now holding 23% of the seats in Parliament to assert its hard-line commitment to a restoration, expansion and enforcement of apartheid. The task also will be made more difficult by violence on both sides--the violence of security forces against peaceful demonstrations on the eve of this election, an excess if not abuse of power that raised troubling questions about the ability of De Klerk to control his own government, and the violence of blacks on election day.

But the task will be facilitated by the extraordinary growth of the Democratic Party, firmly committed to ending apartheid if less than firmly committed to true democracy. That party gained 13 seats and now controls 20% of Parliament, which, added to the majority of the National Party, means that 75% of the seats belong to parties committed to do away with apartheid in one way or another.

Furthermore, the unity of the blacks, in their election day general strike that paralyzed much of the economy, and the virtual boycott by Indian and mixed-race voters of their separate parliamentary elections, served as a reminder to the white minority of the growing power in the ranks of the nonwhite majority.

There will now be immediate tests of De Klerk’s real intentions. His sincerity about dialogue will be tested, for example, by his willingness to release Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders from imprisonment, to end the state of emergency and to restore political rights to the ANC and other opposition groups. Without those steps, there can be no dialogue, and to argue otherwise is to perpetuate a farce.

Parliament itself has a long agenda to affirm a commitment to the profound changes implied in the National Party campaign statements. The highest priority is abandonment of the group areas act that enforces racism. De Klerk, like his predecessor, Pieter W. Botha, has insisted that apartheid is dead and that a new day is dawning in South Africa. That rhetoric has no meaning to the black majority, however, until it is translated into equal political and economic rights, the elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The profound change to which De Klerk has said he is committed cannot come instantly. Even the Democratic Party, with its firmer commitment to end racism, argues the necessity of a time of transition and special protections for minority interests. But history has shown that the process now beginning in South Africa accelerates at its own pace, cannot always be controlled, and its end result cannot be neatly forecast. The prospects for constructive change are enhanced, and the risks of violent anarchy reduced, to the extent that those in power are able, as they begin to share power, to demonstrate respect for the wisdom unique to democratic institutions.