‘Bechuanaland Sabotage Base’

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30219, 26 August 1963, Page 11

‘Bechuanaland Sabotage Base’

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) PRETORIA, August 25. Colonel H. J. van den Bergh, a senior security branch police officer, told a press conference yesterday that the British authorities “willingly, in my opinion,” allowed Bechuanaland to be used as a refuge by “Communists and saboteurs” wanted in South Africa.

He said the Bechuanaland authorities provided guest houses for them and allowed planes to land at Francistown to pick them up for their journeys north. “In fact, there is one continuous red carpet for South African saboteurs from Lobatsi (Bechuanaland) to

Northern Rhodesia.” he said. Bechuanaland was not only a haven for political refugees, “but a base for sabotage against South Africa,” Colonel van den Bergh said. He said that under the cloak of offering asylum to “so-called political refugees” Bechuanaland had allowed unemployed African youths, recruited in South Africa by the Communists and the African National Congress, to pass through its territory for the sole purpose of being trained in sabotage and guerrilla activities in other African and Communist states.

After they had finished their training, they were allowed to return to South Africa through Bechuanaland. He said 12 Africans who had returned to South Africa after training as saboteurs in other countries were now in prison and more were being arrested.

Normally they underwent three months’ training in Abyssinia, Algeria, Egypt, Russia or China before coming back. “The Bechuanaland authorities must be 100 per cent, aware of what is going on,” he said. Apartheid For All

The South African Minister for Bantu Administration and Development (Mr de Wet Nel) said at Bultfontein, Orange Free State, that apartheid would eventually be applied throughout the world in the interests of racial peace. Most Africans were friendly towards South Africa, he said. Only “reactionaries, such as Communists,” hated South Africa.

White South Africans were prepared to fight with their backs to the wall to keep the flag of Western civilisation aloft, he said. In Cape Town, the Cape Town editor of the non-white Johannesbury weekly. “Post." Mr Mike Norton, was released yesterday after 20 days in gaol for refusing to name the source of an article saying illegitimate white children were being adopted by coloured (mixed race) families.