Police kill nine as beleaguered economy faces strike threat

Press, 30 August 1985, Page 6

Police kill nine as beleaguered economy faces strike threat

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg Nine people died as South African police and troops yesterday broke up marches on the jail holding the black nationalist leader, Nelson Mandela. New threats to the unstable South African economy were posed when the strongest black union announced mine strikes from Sunday. The republic’s strongest Western ally, the United States, reacted sharply to the police crackdown on the demonstrators who tried to march on Cape Town’s Pollsmoor jail to demand the release of Mandela. Cape Town police said that eight blacks had been shot, but it was not known how the ninth was killed. Witnesses said that church leaders, nuns, students, and university lecturers were- among more than 29 people thought to have been detained. Some were later freed,

the police said.

The clashes with the police in Cape Town erupted in five separate places, including two university campuses, a teacher’s training college, Guguletu township, and outside a sports stadium. The trouble began when the police forcibly halted 5000 people, gathered in different places for the march to the prison holding Mandela.

Most protesters clashed with the police miles away from Pollsmoor prison — on college campuses and in black townships. Seven white marchers made it to within 100 m of the prison’s brown brick walls. They were immediately arrested. At one point, policemen charged with riot sticks and fired tear-gas and rubber bullets at 1500 protesters led by priests who sat in a road and sang a hymn.

Nine journalists, including a reporter from “Time” magazine were arrested, detained for three hours, fingerprinted, and charged with interfering with the police. The detention on Wednesday of the man who was to have led the march to the prison, Dr Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, seemed to have added to the passions of protest. The police used whips, known as sjamboks, to disperse some would-be marchers.

The day brought clashes with people from all races, many of them Coloureds. In Guguletu township, columns of black smoke billowed upward from barricades of blazing tyres left in the streets by young blacks. They hurled stones at the police, who fired back from armoured trucks with shotguns and rubber bullets.

At the predominantly white University of Cape Town, the police fired teargas after a crowd demanding Mandela’s release bombarded an advancing line of policemen with stones. The police were caught briefly in the middle of a main highway as traffic backed up behind them, and some officers took shelter behind a centre-road barrier under the barrage of stones. At the University of the Western Cape, which under South African law is set aside for Coloured students, policemen with riot sticks charged students who had gathered for the march. In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Charles Redman, criticised the police action in general terms and blasted Pretoria for the banning of the Congress of South African Students, a key component of the main internal antiapartheid group, the United

Democratic Front.

“Banning individuals and organisations from political activities is one of the most odious practices of the South African Government,” he said.

More than 630 people have died in 19 months of black unrest which has continued unabated in spite of a state of emergency clamped on several areas last month. International protest against apartheid has mounted and economists say foreign investors have precipitated a financial crisis by withdrawing their money from South Africa. The black National Union of Mineworkers said yesterday that a strike would begin on Sunday in five foreign exchange-earning gold mines and two coal mines.

It said that if action was taken against its 62,700 members in the affected mines all other union mem-

bers would take unspecified “solidarity action.” The union said that it would recommend that members accept pay increases of up to 22 per cent offered by mines owned by three groups, including the giant Anglo American Corporation. It would, however, strike at mines owned by Gold Fields of South Africa, General Mining Union Corporation, and Anglovaal, which have refused to match the packages. Economists have said that a sufficiently widespread and lengthy strike at gold mines, which bring in more than half of South Africa’s export earnings, would hit the economy further.

The Government suspended currency and stock dealings on Wednesday after the South African rand, valued at United States 85c 17 months ago, plunged to just over United States 35c.