Apartheid tour ‘could split N.Z.’

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32663, 20 July 1971, Page 1

Apartheid tour ‘could split N.Z.’

A visiting apartheid sports team could “split New Zealand in two,” the chairman of the Halt All Racist Tours organisation (Mr T. Richards) said in Christchurch last evening.

Mr Richards, who returned yesterday from a four-day visit to Sydney to study the tactics of Australian anti - apartheid demonstrators, said that this had already happened in Britain and in Australia —“a country pitted against itself.”

Supporters of sporting visits by apartheid teams claimed that sport bound people together, he said. “But the Australian Springboks tour has done anything but this.” “Over there the issue is on everyone’s lips. The division of opinions has split the country in two, as it did in Britain in 1969, and which it will do in New Zealand when the South African team tours in August.” In an effort to prevent this trouble, Mr Richards will telegraph Mrs A. Gooder, president of the International Hockey Association, suggesting she see the Rugby matches in Canberra and Brisbane. She could then see “the kinds of things that happen to a country” when a racist sports team tours, said Mr Richards.

If the hockey team’s visit went ahead, demonstrators in New Zealand would use the same tactics as those employed by the Australian opponents of apartheid. H.A.R.T. booklet “H.A.R.T. will produce a booklet such as the one used in Australia, outlining all the necessary information on the tactics we intend adopting,” Mr Richards said. “We also intend inviting two leaders of the Australian movement to New Zealand before the arrival of the hockey team to speak to public meetings on the campaign in their country.” He emphasised that the “mass disruption” of matches would be non-violent. The demonstrators would use the techniques of chanting slogans, blowing whistles, and throwing flares that had proved so successful in Australia.

The success of the peaceful nature of the demonstration would, however, depend largely on the attitude of the police. Answering reports that the demonstrations had been a “flop,” he said: “When 900 police, at a conservative estimate, are needed to control a Rugby match, a state of emergency is declared in Queensland —with all the accompanying. suppression of civil rights—and more than 300 demonstrators are arrested at Melbourne and Sydney, no-one can say that the ■ campaign was a failure.

I “While no demonstrators managed to get on to the field at Sydney, the fact that there was one line of policemen between the spectators and a barbed-wire barrier, two lines of police beyond it, and a ‘clearance crew’ beyond them again to put out flares, was an effective disruption in itself.

“What the demonstrations have done, in fact, is to change a Rugby tour into anything but a. sporting fixture. The plgyers are in a complete stage of siege.”