Hollow Talk in Pretoria

South Africa’s President Pieter W. Botha has stirred more skepticism than celebration with his announcements that he will end the state of emergency in South Africa and move ahead with independence for Namibia. The skepticism is understandable.

If Botha plans to relax police powers and restore the press freedoms that existed before the emergency was imposed almost eight months ago, and if he intends it as a gesture of conciliation to expedite the opening of a free and authentic dialogue on the future of the nation, there is reason to cheer.

Unfortunately, there is little likelihood that this is what he has in mind. One form of repression is likely to be substituted for another, press coverage of the violence almost certainly will remain censored, and the dialogue will remain frustrated by the government’s determination to lock up those essential to real negotiation.

Botha’s long-trumpeted commitment to reform and change has been exposed to doubt by his own actions. On one recent day he told parliament that apartheid is “outdated” and that he was moving ahead to negotiate “the devolution of power” to “a democratic system of government” devised “without one group dominating another.” The next week he rebuked the foreign minister for having speculated that the future may hold black presidents for South Africa.

The promise of fresh action to free Namibia also had a hollow ring. It was conditioned once again on the withdrawal of Cuban troops from neighboring Angola--a condition apparently devised by the Reagan Administration and embraced with obvious delight by Pretoria. The timing of Botha’s new commitment happens to coincide with a renewal of covert American military aid to the Angola guerrilla forces of Jonas Savimbi, whose campaign of violence keeps the Cuban forces in Angola.

Botha’s state of emergency has produced more violence, not less. The white minority that imposed it on the black majority may take some satisfaction from the ugly fact that violence of black against black increased as police repression hardened. That terrible escalation will not stop until there is the prospect of real change. Nor will negotiations begin until Botha can, like his foreign minister, acknowledge that a new president can be drawn from the ranks of the black majority.