Blacks fear arrests herald big clamp-down

Press, 26 October 1984, Page 8

Blacks fear arrests herald big clamp-down

NZPA-Reuter Pretoria One day after soldiers and police raided three black . townships, renewed stone-throwing and arson broke out in other black South African communities, a police spokesman said yesterday. Renewed violence broke out in townships near Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth, although black areas subjected to a big crack-down on Wednesday remained quiet, the spokesman said.

Troop convoys moved out of the Sharpeville area, but people living there said that Wednesday’s military operation, including some 358 arrests and searches of thousands of blacks’ homes, would not stop violent protest.

In the Transkei, a nominally independent homeland, authorities banned the antiapartheid United Democratic Front. Leaders of the group said that they feared the ban was a prelude to a nation-wide clamp-down on the largest legal black opposition group in South Africa.

Lieutenant Johan Barnard said that the police had used rubber bullets and birdshot several times yesterday to disperse crowds of youths in

townships around Johannesburg and in Port Elizabeth, in the south. Youths smashed school windows in the Port Elizabeth township of New Brighton and the house of a local black mayor was set alight, he said. Stones were thrown at police who tried to break up the. crowds and a number of vehicles were damaged. Sharpeville and nearby Boipatong, 50km south of Johannesburg, were quiet yesterday, but residents voiced anger at mass arrests on Wednesday and said that high rents and unemployment, not political agitators, had provoked riots in which About 30 people died in a day last month.

“We can’t say things are going to be quiet now. Things are going to be bad,” said a young man in Boipatong. Hours after Pretoria sent 7000 police and soldiers into three townships — the biggest joint military-police operation against civilians in modem South African history — the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to demand an end to apartheid. Britain, which usually abstains from such votes, approved the resolution

against the strict policy of racial segregation, and the South African Foreign Ministry summoned the British Ambassador, Mr Patrick Moberly, for talks.. There was rapid international outcry against the South African military action. The French Government issued a statement in Paris yesterday saying it “firmly denounces this new wave of repression which is accompanied by measures particularly harmful to human dignity.”

Authorities - said troops were deployed to arrest “revolutionary and criminal elements” which the Government blames for widespread unrest in which more than 80 people have died, most of them blacks in the Sharpeville area, during the last three months.

The clamp-down was the first time the Army had been used in a big civil action since 1960, the year Colice shot and killed 69 lack people in a demonstration at Sharpeville.

Few residents of the area were willing to talk to reporters, but one young man said of the pre-dawn raid, “We woke up in the dark and the Army was there. People were frightened, they thought the Army had come to fight us.” ■

At Boipatong, another young man said resentment among black people at apartheid had reached new intensity. “It’s worse now than it ever was between the police and us,” he said. In Pretoria, Commissioner of Police, General P. J. Coetzee, said that several arms caches had been discovered after the arrest last week of an alleged member of the outlawed antiGovernment guerrilla organisation, the African National Congress. The arms included plastic explosives, limpet mines, hand grenades, AK47 rifles, and a large quantity of ammunition, he said. Relations between Britain and South Africa have been strained for more than five weeks because of a sit-in at the British Consulate in Durban by three South African fugitive dissidents. South Africa retaliated by refusing to send four of its nationals to face arms smuggling charges in a British court. The three dissidents and three others who were detained when they tried to slip out of the consulate were granted permission yesterday to appeal against revised orders for their arrest.