Unrest continues as international sanctions bite

Press, 3 August 1985, Page 11

Unrest continues as international sanctions bite

NZPA-AAP Tumahole, South Africa The Noble peace prize winner, Bishop Desmond Tutu, threw down a challenge to South Africa’s white rulers and said yesterday that he would defy their new restrictions on black funerals. The black Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg, said, “If they try and promulgate laws that are unjust, I am going to break these laws. I will not be told by any secular authorities what gospel I must preach.” Bishop Tutu spoke to 2000 mourners at a funeral service for riot victims in the township of Tumahole just outside an area in which the authorities acted on Thursday to restrict the growing use of funerals for other-wise-banned anti-apartheid protests. The South African President, Mr Pieter Botha, told business and industrial leaders at a meeting in Pretoria yesterday that the 12-day state of emergency would be “lifted as soon as possible.” Mr Botha’s announcement came after a leading economist had warned that continuation of the emergency could do long-term damage to South Africa’s economy. The warning, by John Cloete, chief economist at Barclay’s Bank in the re-

public, came as the South African Reserve Bank intervened for a second successive day to prop up the plunging rand. The weakness of the rand was the direct result of international hostility to the emergency, Mr Cloete said. Bishop Tutu’s challenge came as South Africa faces economic sanctions and growing diplomatic isolation. The United States Congress reached a compromise on limited economic punitive measures against Pretoria’s racist policies but the Senate delayed a vote on implementation of the sanctions until next month. The global tide of antiPretoria sentiment has been swelling since July 21 when South Africa, following mass unrest which killed more than 500 blacks in 18 months, introduced draconian emergency rule in riot-torn regions. France has already withdrawn its envoy from Pretoria and banned new investments in the republic. The nine other European Economic Community partners, together with future members Spain and Portugal, agreed to consult their Ambassadors soon.

This, the most concerted anti-South Africa action for many years, arrayed Pretoria’s main Western allies

against the apartheid policies which are largely blamed for the increasing violence in the white-ruled country. South African police yesterday announced tough tactics to end school and business boycotts in the troubled Eastern Cape.

Police went from house to house ordering children to attend school in the black townships around GraafReinet, an Eastern Cape stronghold of the anti-apart-heid United Democratic Front.

Residents said that children attended school for the first time since April, and the police, acting under their special emergency powers, said they might close black-owned businesses in the suburbs if a boycott of white-owned shops in the town centre continued. The British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, made it clear yesterday that Britain had no intention of pulling its diplomatic envoy out of South Africa permanently. The British High Commissioner would return South Africa after attending the proposed E.E.C. consultative meeting in Brussels, Mrs Thatcher said.

She wanted him present in South Africa “to know exactly what is going on.”