RHODESIAN UNIVERSITY Closure After Police Raid

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31124, 29 July 1966, Page 13

RHODESIAN UNIVERSITY Closure After Police Raid

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter— Copyright)

SALISBURY, July 28. A police raid on Rhodesia’s multiracial university yesterday has forced the acting principal to close it.

Nine European lecturers and 10 students were arrested after the raid which followed months of campus disturbances and demonstrations. The closure announcement, pinned on a college notice board, said the acting principal, Professor Alan Milton, had decided to close the college forthwith because of the circumstances. This is nearly a month before the start of the long vacation on August 20.

In his announcement closing the college. Professor Milton said that as a result of the police action adequate teaching was no longer available in a number of departments, college discipline had been disrupted, and an atmosphere created in which teaching could not be carried on. Teaching would resume after the vacation, he said. Under Detention In Parliament yesterday afternoon, the Minister of Justice, Law and Order, Mr Desmond Lardner-Burke, said the nine white lecturers and an Asian student had been placed under detention after recent campus incidents. Another nine students, three of them white, were restricted for one year, he said. Of these, five Africans were sent to the remote Gonakudzingwa restriction area—where many Rhodesian African nationalist leaders are being held. One white student was restricted to the Gatooma area, about 90 miles south-west of Salisbury, and three other students to various parts of the capital, excluding the college campus. Mr Lardner-Burke told Parliament he had evidence that preparations had recently been made at the college for what he called “the commencement of violence” against students who refused to fall in line with a dissident group. After a meeting at the university college last night the students representative council issued a statement condemning the police action against lecturers and students “in the strongest possible terms.”