Nelson Mandela said Thursday that his guerrilla movement considers government installations to be legitimate targets for attack and that civilians inevitably will be caught in the cross fire.
Mandela said there has been no decision to suspend the armed struggle, which has been largely dormant in recent months.President F.W. de Klerk legalized the ANC on Feb. 2, but the group says its armed struggle remains one of its strategies to put pressure on the government.
Asked if the country's 5 million whites would have to change their lifestyles under an ANC government, Mandela said: "They are already adjusting." He cited recently integrated beaches, the fact that a few select neighborhoods have been opened to all races and that some private schools are integrated, although public schools remain segregated.
"Whites in this country are a very important section of the community, and without them, without their cooperation, we will have immense problems," Mandela said. "That is why we are so keen to ensure that the changes we are demanding are not going to mean domination of whites or blacks."
De Klerk wants to negotiate a new constitution that will include the 28 million black majority in the national government. But he opposes a one-man, one-vote system and outright black majority rule. He envisions some mechanism that will give whites veto power on major policy decisions.
Earlier Thursday, Mandela met Jesse Jackson on his final day of an eight-day visit to South Africa. The former Democratic presidential candidate said South African blacks still were not free and the United States and Western Europe must put pressure, including economic sanctions, on the government to end apartheid.
Jackson said it was a "misnomer that Mr. Mandela is free. He is not free to live where he chooses. He is not free to send his children to the school of their choice. He is not free to buy land in 87 percent of the country."
In the capital of Pretoria, supporters of the pro-apartheid Conservative Party held a rally to call for the removal of de Klerk and new elections.
"Our people have kept a low profile up to now, but we have fought for our own fatherland, and that fatherland you will not take away from us," Conservative leader Andries Treurnicht told a rally Wednesday night in Bloemfontein. The opposition has denounced de Klerk for freeing Mandela and legalizing the ANC.
- CORETTA SCOTT KING urged a peaceful dismantling of apartheid. But African National Congress member Sifiso Makhathini warned of a struggle that would make the French Revolution look like a "children's picnic" if negotiations with the South African government fail.
Their comments came during a torch-lighting ceremony in Atlanta Wednesday at the crypt of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., in celebration of Mandela's release.