Pretoria disputes raid toll

Press, 26 May 1983, Page 8

Pretoria disputes raid toll

NZPA-Reuter Pretoria South Africa and Mozambique have given sharply divergent accounts of the results of the South African Air Force’s retaliatory raid into Mozambique on Monday.

Mozambique says that six people were killed and 30 injured in the raid, while South Africa insists that it killed 64 people in African National Congress bases in retaliation for the explosion which killed 18 people in Pretoria on Friday. Western journalists in Maputo, the Mozambican capital, reported yesterday that most of the casualties and damage had appeared to be to Mozambican civilians and property with

little connection with the war between South Africa and its African nationalist opponents. But a South African military spokesman said that it was, “well-known terrorist tactics” to show photographs of dead children and to say innocent civilians had been killed. “Sealing off the area . . . hiding the bodies of terrorists and showing dead civilians to sympathetic journalists have been standard propaganda ploys during every war in the last two decades, specially here in Africa,” he said. The Defence force was satisfied that the places hit had been allocated to the Congress and were occupied

by guerrillas. Of the six listed dead by Mozambican officials, all were Mozambican except one man described as a South African refugee. The others were three farm factory workers, including two women, a boy, aged two and a girl, aged six. Forty people, all said to be Mozambican, were reported wounded.

A South African communique yesterday said that the dead included 41 members of the A.N.C. which on Monday claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Air Force headquarters. Seventeen others were Mozambican soldiers and six were civilians.

“Some of the civilians who died were in a house next to one of the targets which was shot at from the air with rockets and aircraft cannon,” the communique said.

Retaliatory action against the A.N.C. in Mozambique should serve as a warning that, “terrorists and their organisations which hide in neighbouring States—even in normal residential areas—will be sought out and destroyed.” “If civilians are therefore killed or injured in such circumstances, they must carry the consequences because they support terrorism by giving them shelter. “The blame for the deaths

of such civilians rests squarley on the A.N.C. and the governments and institutions which support them. The Mozambican Information Minister, Mr Jose Luis Cabaco, said that his country would allow congress refugees to live there but would arrest any who bore arms against South Africa.

Asked what would happen to those who did so, he replied, “They would certainly be arrested.”

South African Airways flights to Maputo were still suspended yesterday but a railways spokesman said that rail traffic between the republic and Mozambique was continuing as normal.