Police' kill 4 striking blacks

Press, 17 August 1978, Page 8

Police' kill 4 striking blacks

i NZPA Salisbury The Rhodesian police fired into a crowd of striking mineworkers early on Tuesday killing four blacks and injuring five at the country’s largest copper mine, 144 km north-west of Salisbury’, the police have reported. The police opened fire early on the second day of a pay strike by almost the entire 1700-member black staff at the Mangula mine, owned by the South Africanbased Messina Transvaal Development Company. The police said that a crowd of blacks estimated to number 3000 — many armed with axes, wooden clubs, and iron bars — attempted to rush police barricades on Tuesday morning outside the mine offices. The mine director (Mr H. C. Inversen) said the strike was instigated by outsiders and youngsters. But Mr Inversen said that there was no evidence that nationalist guerrillas were behind the strike.

The spokesman said the crowd was orderd to disperse 2J hours after it began millihg around the mine office in the early hours of Tuesday. The police said when the order was ignored they fired teargas and the crowd dispersed. The strikers then quickly regrouped, attempted to rush the barricades and dragged down two policemen. The police were forced to open fire to extricate the police officers, said the spokesman. The strike began on Monday, apparently to press pay claims. The Rhodesian guerrilla leader, Robert Mugabe, is expected to visit Lusaka in Zambia this week for talks aimed at co-ordinating strategy with Joshua Nkomo, his co-leader in the Patriotic Front alliance, nationalist sources have said. The visit will be Mr Mugabe’s first since he angrily criticised President Kenneth Kuanda of Zambia almost one year ago for meeting the Rhodesian Prime Minister (Mr lan Smith). It also coincides with mounting scepticism about the chances of ending Rhodesia’s widening, six-year-old guerrilla war through an all-party conference now being proposed by Britain and the United States. The Patriotic Front, spearhead of the guerrilla war effort against the biracial Government in Salisbury, is almost two years old. But it has so far failed to closely unite Mr Mugabe’s Mozam-bique-based Zimbabwe African National Union and Mr Nkomo’s Zambian-based Zimbabwe African People’s Union. In Bonn, the Protestant wing of the West German Christian Democratic Party has attacked the World Council of Churches for giving money to the Patriotic Front. “Members and sympathisers of this militant organisation attacked and brutally murdered 12 British members of a Rhodesian mission in June,” the party’s Protestant Working Group said. Commenting on the allocation of 170,000 marks (about $85,000) to the Patriotic Front the statement went on: “This decision shows in a frightening way the incredible, irresponsible and Pharisaic behaviour of the council towards accusations of violations of human rights in southern Africa. “The plainly Marxist Patriotic Front of the guerrilla leaders Nkomo and Mugabe now gets money from Geneva while the movement led by the black Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who is aiming at reconciliation with the whites, is deprived of money from Geneva.”