Blacks turn on Indians

Press, 10 August 1985, Page 10

Blacks turn on Indians

NZPA-Reuter Durban At least 22 people have been killed around the Indian Ocean port of Durban in one of South Africa’s worst eruptions of rioting, looting and arson since unrest in black townships began 18 months ago. Police firing shot-guns, tear-gas and rubber bullets clashed repeatedly with crowds of blacks who plundered Indian-owned shops and houses and set them alight north and south of Durban. All but one of the dead were black. Hundreds of Indians fled their homes and the Government called in reinforcements to help troops and police quell the unrest.

Casualties were still streaming into local hospitals late yesterday. Hospital spokesmen said that many of them were blacks with gunshot wounds. The President, Mr Pieter Botha, who imposed a state of emergency in parts of the country last month after more than 500 people died in rioting, said reporters in Pretoria that the Government was in full control. “If necessary, we can take stronger steps than we have taken so far but I am not going to get hysterical,” he said. Durban, in Natal, is not under the emergency regulations. As rioting continued elsewhere in the country, the Government issued orders empowering the security forces to impose a curfew on black townships in the eastern Cape province and to order boycotting pupils to go to school. In Cape Town 22 students were arrested when the police broke up an illegal march in protest against the emergency. Durban’s black and Indian townships were in chaos yesterday after three days of increasing disturbances. Crowds of blacks plundered shops, set buildings alight, put up barricades in the streets and stoned vehicles. Relations between South Africa’s Asian community, numbering fewer than a million, and the six-million-strong Zulu tribe, both mainly based in Natal, have long been delicate. Although Indians, as well as blacks, have been subject to apartheid, the Asians are generally wealthier and better educated and own shops in black townships all over the country. “We’ve got comfortable cars and luxurious homes so we become targets,” said one Indian in a crowd guarding Indian homes on the border of kwaMashu, a black township north of Durban. Some of the crowd said that the blacks were unemployed and hungry. Others accused the Government of putting black and Indian residential areas together so that Indians, and not whites would be the target of black anger. Officials at a community centre in Phoenix near kwaMashu, said that they had processed 1500 Indians who had fled from their homes, most of them in the nearby Inanda district where blacks and Indians live together. “People have turned against the Indian community,” said an Indian Cabinet Minister, Amichand Rajbansi. He said that Indians and blacks had lived in “wonderful harmony” for decades. He is a Minister without portfolio in the Pretoria Government.