Riots should affect whites, says black

Press, 25 July 1985, Page 6

Riots should affect whites, says black

NZPA-Reuter Lusaka A call was made yesterday for blacks to spread rioting to white areas of South Africa in a general offensive against apartheid. The President of the African National Congress, Mr Oliver Tambo, said on a Radio Freedom broadcast that the state of emergency now in force in South Africa was military dictatorship. “All our people must be mobilised . . . That must be our reply to the enemy’s desperate counter-offen-sive,” he said. The Congress is sworn to overthrow white rule in South Africa by force and Mr Tambo said it was, “vital that all areas of our country should join in the general offensive to make the apartheid system unworkable and South Africa ungovernable.” “We must take the struggle into the white areas of South Africa and attack the apartheid regime and its forces of repression in these areas . . .” White areas have not been affected by the the 18

months of violence in the townships round Johannesburg and in the eastern Cape Province in which about 500 people have died. Mr Tambo said white South Africans should not be allowed to think they could continue, “business as usual while our people are perishing in their hundreds.” Yesterday, two men died as security forces imposed emergency laws. The police revealed 438 names of black leaders and white antiapartheid activists held under the new powers. The two men died when the police fired birdshot at a crowd they said was stoning them. This brings to 11 the official death toll since the powers were introduced at the week-end. According to a police list, only four of 653 people reported held under the emergency laws are white men, all active opponents of South Africa’s apartheid race discrimination policies. Many of the 653 are still unidentified, at least 373 are black and the rest mixedrace or Asian by apartheid

classifications. The names include clergy such as De Villiers Soga, chairman of an eastern Cape black ministers’ group, advocates of a sporting boycott of South Africa such as Ihron Rensburg of the South African Council on Sport, and trade unionists such as Sehlolo Neep, general secretary of a carworkers’ union. The detainees can be held indefinitely for interrogation without access to relatives or lawyers. Many of them belong to community groups affiliated to South Africa’s main anti-apartheid group, the United Democratic Front. Many of the front’s prominent leaders are in jail or on bail on strict conditions awaiting trial on treason charges. The police yesterday raided the front’s offices in Johannesburg, witnesses said. At Kwathema township, in the Johannesburg area covered by the emergency laws, journalists estimated that 50,000 people attended the funeral of 15 riot victims.