Joint plea for peace talks

Press, 31 August 1985, Page 11

Joint plea for peace talks

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg

White and black South African business leaders have urged the Government to talk to jailed black leaders, as the Reserve (Central) Bank Governor began talks with British and United States officials aimed at defusing the country’s economic crisis. South Africa is facing financial turmoil after .the rand plunged to an all-time low amid continuing black township bloodshed and a threat of punitive international sanctions.

The bank’s governor, Gerhard de Kock, flew to London yesterday for emergency talks and is due in Washington for more meetings next week. Leading business organisations yesterday urged the Government to talk with black leaders, including those in jail, in an attempt to resolve the crisis.

A joint statement by leading white and black business chambers said it was essential that the Government deal “even-handedly with the accepted leaders of the black community, even if some of these are currently in detention.”

They called also for an early lifting of the state of emergency.

Economists are expecting an important announcement on currency regulations be-

fore a lifting of the freeze on Monday but there has been no indication yet of when this will be made. The statement by the business community said the Government should resist introducing economic measures which could lead to a “siege economy.” Violence escalated in South Africa yesterday with police firing shotguns, rubber bullets and tear-gas from— armoured trucks against stone-throwing schoolchildren in Cape Town. The death toll in the republic since nine were killed on Wednesday rose at least 21 yesterday. The recent clashes ranked among the worst violence since the state of emergency was proclaimed in 36 magisterial districts around Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth on July 21. The emergency was imposed after 10 months of racial unrest that took over 500 lives. Since then, at least 150 more people, nearly all of them black, have died. Witnesses said that in Mitchell’s Plain, a settlement for people of mixed racial descent set amid the dunes of the Cape Flats, the police fired tear-gas, shotguns and rubber bullets at primary school and high school students who had built barricades of blazing

tyres and old beds across main highways. The violence followed the most extensive unrest in years in Cape Town, where the white civic authorities pride themselves on being the most racially enlightened in South Africa. The clashes were sparked first when the police thwarted efforts by clergymen to organise a march on Pollsmoor prison near Cape Town to demand the release of Nelson Mandela, the jailed leader of the out-lawed-African National Congress. —-- By nightfall, witnesses said, there was “a ring of fire” in black and Coloured areas far from Cape Town’s white centre. Mitchell’s Plain was built as a supposed model settlement for Coloureds. It is a place of neat, modest homes built around broad, fourlane highways and located between Cape Town and False Bay on the Cape’s Indian Ocean coastline. Charges against nine foreign and South African journalists of obstructing the police during rioting would be dropped, said the Cape Province AttorneyGeneral, Mr D. J. Roussouw. He gave no reason. The journalists appeared in court earlier yesterday and were not asked to plead but told to appear again in a suburban Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.