The issue of violence and armed struggle increasingly dominated talks on removing obstacles to a climate for negotiations.
While the government characterised the ANC's armed struggle as an obstacle, the ANC said that it was defensive and could not be abandoned without a curtailment of violence by the police and organised groups acting with the support or complicity of state forces. The government asserted that mass mobilisation by the ANC and other anti-apartheid organisations was inherently violent and therefore also an obstacle. However, the ANC asserted the right of the majority of South Africans, deprived of political rights and mechanisms to address their grievances, to engage in mass action.
Differences over these issues were sharply expressed immediately after the Pretoria meeting. At a press conference afterwards Nelson Mandela criticised the government for police violence: 'Until the government tames the police we will continue to be dissatisfied.' An ANC advertisement placed in the press to explain the agreement said that the suspension of armed action was conditional on restraint by the police, and that it did not mean the dissolution of Umkhonto we Sizwe. It also said that mass action would continue.
Over the next five months conflict over this issue led to disagreements and eventually deadlock in the Paragraph Three Working Group on the armed struggle, and to disagreements and delays in the interpretation and implementation of the agreements on pardon and indemnity.
Having failed at the Pretoria meeting to secure an end to mass action in the form of boycotts, stayaways and strikes, the government attempted to broaden the scope of the ANC's suspension of armed actions by asserting that mass action was related to armed struggle and should therefore also have been suspended. At the same time it tried to link the issue to the release of prisoners and return of exiles.
Although it accepted the recommendations of the working group on pardon and indemnity, in October the government, after some delay, issued guidelines on the processes of pardon and indemnity which introduced a new element. The process of release and return was explicitly linked to 'progress under Paragraph Three of the Pretoria Minute'. This linkage was repudiated by the ANC as inconsistent with the agreements reached at the working group. The working group's proposals, contained in a report completed at the end of August and accepted by the cabinet, contained nothing to justify such a linkage.
There were related disagreements and delays over the procedures for the return of exiles.
These delays and government attempts to impose a re-interpretation of Paragraph Three of the Pretoria Minute led to allegations that it was using prisoners and exiles as hostages.
It was only in February 1991, after extended deadlock at the Paragraph Three Working Group, that a report of the working group was accepted at a meeting between ANC and government delegations led by Mandela and De Klerk. The government undertook to proceed with the release of political prisoners and return of exiles as previously agreed.
The final report of the working group defined the activities 'related to armed action' and therefore suspended by the ANC in terms of the Pretoria Minute. In spite of the earlier government attempts to broaden the definition, the report listed these activities only as 'statements inciting violence', and aspects of military activity: armed attacks; infiltration of 'men and materials'; creation of underground military structures; threats of armed action; and military training inside South Africa.
The report accepted the right of 'the population at large' to engage in peaceful demonstrations, thereby affirming the right to mass action which the government had challenged.
The agreement also included an undertaking by the government, in the words of an ANC press statement, 'to instruct its security services and counter-insurgency units, in keeping with the spirit of this agreement, to desist from harassment of ANC members, supporters and members of Umkhonto we Sizwe'.
In addition, the report of the working group recommended that further attention be given to community self-defence units. Proposals for the establishment of such units by the ANC arose directly out of the problem of state violence.
