Black union leader dies after being freed

Press, 9 May 1985, Page 6

Black union leader dies after being freed

NZPA-NYT Johannesburg

A black South African labour leader was reported yesterday to have died, purportedly of head injuries, shortly after his release from police custody. The police, who declined comment on the cause of death, said that an inquiry had been begun into the death on Monday of Andries Raditsela, aged 29.

Mr Raditsela was an official of the Chemical Workers’ Union and an executive member of the Federation of South African Trade Unions, a prominent black labour organisation. Union officials said yesterday that he had been detained by the police in Tsakane township, near Johannesburg, and assaulted.

Three hours later, a union statement said, relatives had found him in a local Government office, “sleeping in a twisted position with his hands over his face. He was not able to sit up properly. He was able to talk but not in a very clear way. He was unable to search himself for the telephone number of his wife.”

He was said to have been charged under the Internal Security Act — South Africa’s catch-all security legislation — but the charges were withdrawn before he died. Mortuary officials who saw his body said that he seemed to have died of head injuries. The officials declined to be identified. The statement by Mr Raditsela’s union said that he was in good health before he was detained. Since 1960 some 50 people, including Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness movement, have died in police custody in South Africa. Since September the racially divided nation has been seized with unrest, in black townships and, more sporadically, among labour activists caught up in opposing white minority rule and in combating lay-offs and dismissals of their members as a result of South Africa’s worst economic crisis in decades. The newest tensions seem to be between two opposition political groups, the United Democratic Front and the National Forum, whose supporters have

clashed in township violence.

The Bishop of Johannesburg, the Rt Rev. Desmond Tutu, has sought, thus far inconclusively, to reconcile the rival factions, whose differences have simmered since the U.D.F. was founded in August, 1983, to oppose a new Constitution seen as formalising the exclusion of the black majority from power.

The main difference between the two groups is that the U.D.F. favours nonracial opposition to white minority rule while the National Forum, whose foremost organisation is called the Azanian People’s Organisation, regards itself as the custodian of the Black Consciousness movement, which sees no role for whites in combating apartheid. The differences are historically rooted. The U.D.F. is regarded as sharing the same political goals — but not the violent means — of the outlawed and exiled African National Congress. The Black Consciousness movement is seen as a descendant of the rival Pan-

African Congress. The A.N.C. and the Pan-African Congress were outlawed after the Sharpeville killings of 1960.

The dispute between the two crystallised into open hostility in January during a visit by Senator Edward Kennedy, whose hosts were Bishop Tutu and the Rev Allen Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. The U.D.F. supported the visit to vindicate Bishop Tutu’s decision to invite him.

The Azanian People’s Organisation opposed it, depicting the visit as a public-ity-seeking extension of United States politics. Mr Kennedy had to abandon plans for a public meeting in Soweto, Johannesburg’s huge black township, after a small group of Azanian People’s Organisation demonstrators disrupted it. Bishop Tutu said then that the demonstration' marked a watershed in black politics. The U.D.F. claims a following of more than 1.5 million people, drawn from 600 affiliates. The size of the National Forum’s following is less clear.