Mandela’s Wife Bars a Soviet Swap

CAPE TOWN, South Africa â€”  Winnie Mandela, wife of black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, rejected Monday a South African government proposal to free her imprisoned husband in exchange for two prominent Soviet dissidents and a South African commando captured in Angola.

Emerging from Pollsmoor Prison here after seeing her husband, Winnie Mandela said of the proposal: “It is not even worth reacting to. . . . It is just part of this gigantic ploy to present the government as human, wanting to give the people of this country and the international community the impression that it has human considerations on political matters, which it has not.�

Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress at the time of his arrest in 1962, is serving a life sentence for sabotage. He was officially informed of the government proposal, made Friday by President Pieter W. Botha at the opening of the South African Parliament. But Winnie Mandela said they have not discussed it seriously.

Past Statements Cited

“We have lived with this thing for far too long to attach any significance to what the government says,� she said, referring to repeated suggestions in the last two years that the black leader, now 67, was about to be freed.

One of the Soviet dissidents, Anatoly Shcharansky, 37, a computer scientist imprisoned as a spy for the United States, reportedly is to be released shortly in an East-West exchange of political prisoners and spies, West German sources confirmed Monday.

The West German daily Bild, which first reported the swap, quoted “high Soviet sources� as saying that Moscow has refused to include Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and 1975 Nobel Peace laureate who is in internal exile in the city of Gorky, among those to be exchanged.

President Botha offered to negotiate with “interested governments� for Mandela’s release on “humanitarian grounds� in exchange for three men: Shcharansky, Sakharov and Capt. Wynand du Toit, a South African commando captured trying to blow up Angolan-American oil facilities last May at Cabinda in Angola.

Disbelief Reported

The initial reaction among diplomats to Botha’s proposal was disbelief. Over the weekend, Angola and the Soviet Union both rejected the offer.

In Parliament meanwhile, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the moderate white opposition Progressive Federal Party, called on the government to free Mandela and other political prisoners, to legalize the African National Congress and to enter into full negotiations with black leaders on the future of the country.

Slabbert, opening parliamentary debate on the government’s policies, challenged the ruling National Party to begin repealing the laws implementing South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation and minority white rule, now that Botha has declared that it is “outmoded.�

Helen Suzman, a Progressive Federal Party member of Parliament, challenged the government to begin honoring its pledge to end the “influx controls,� which limit black migration to urban areas, by suspending enforcement of those laws, under which an average of 500 blacks are arrested daily.

‘Leaderless, Hopeless’

In the harshest opposition attack on the government in recent years, Slabbert said that over the last year it had left the country “leaderless, directionless and hopeless.�

As the crisis over apartheid deepened over the last year, Slabbert continued, the Botha government turned increasingly into “an arrogant, smug, bellicose executive-military clique� that runs the country without regard to its parliamentary democracy.

“Parliament is becoming a rubber stamp and not a forum where government can be called to account,� Slabbert said.

Parliament was not recalled to debate the imposition of a state of emergency in July last year, he noted, nor was it able to discuss other major issues, including the acknowledged violations of South Africa’s nonaggression pact with Mozambique and the decision to renege on payments of the country’s foreign debts.