Eighteen blacks die in shootings

Press, 23 March 1985, Page 1

Eighteen blacks die in shootings

NZPA-Reuter Uitenhage

South African police shot dead at least 18 black protesters in the latest outbreak of bloodshed and rioting which has racked the country over the last year. Troops and police in armoured personnel carriers patrolled Uitenhage in the troubled eastern Cape Province yesterday after the shootings on Thursday evening (New Zealand time). The killing occured as the nation’s black majority commemorated the twentyfifth anniversary of the massacre at Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg,

when the police shot dead 69 blacks protesting against the Government’s apartheid laws.

The police said they shot with rifles into a crowd of thousands of rioting blacks marching on the white town of Uitenhage. Black witnesses said they were marching to a Sharpeville memorial elsewhere and that the police attack was unprovoked. “Bodies were piled up on one another,” a marcher told Reuters later. “Everybody was grief-stricken. It was a terrible sin.”

The police said a patrol of less than 20 of their men was attacked with stones and petrol bombs and forced to open fire. More than 30 people have died in rioting round Uitenhage and neighbouring Port Elizabeth during the last week, bringing the death toll in South Africa over the last year to about 230.

Black residents in the eastern Cape Province say they are suffering from rising prices, unemployment exacerbated by the recent decline of the local vehicle industry and, above all,

apartheid laws which deny blacks freedom of movement and political rights. Black political activists in the area have called for a strike in protest against the decision of the Government to ban the funerals of four victims of recent riots.

A strike and boycott of white-owned shops and buses in Port Elizabeth early this week was largely successful. It was called by a local black civic organisation affiliated to the national anti-apartheid United Democratic Front.

Onlookers and the police said rioting occurred on Thursday elsewhere in the eastern Cape Province, in Sharpeville itself, and in other parts of South Africa. The Australian Government and the Opposition were outraged by the “unwarranted slaughter,” the Australian Parliament was told yesterday. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Hayden, in a statement endorsed by his Opposition counterpart, Mr lan Macphee, said the killings showed the South African Government’s determination to crush dissent.