S.A. gets assurances it demanded

Press, 19 December 1985, Page 8

S.A. gets assurances it demanded

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg South Africa’s Foreign Minister, Mr Roelof Botha, said yesterday that his representative in Harare had been given assurances by the Zimbabwean Government that it would not let its territory be used for attacks against South Africa.

The land-mine explosion on Monday caused widespread anger in South Africa at the death of six whites, four of them children.

the outlawed African National Congress guerrilla group claimed responsibility for the incident.

Diplomatic sources in Harare said that junior Army officers of both countries had already met near the two countries’ border post of Beitbridge to discuss ways of easing tension. They gave no other details and a Government spokesman was unable to comment.

Political analysts said that a meeting at junior

officer-level could only have the objective of setting up talks of more senior officers. In a statement released in Harare the A.N.C.S chief representative in Zimbabwe, Reddy Mazimba, said that the guerrilla organisation had no bases in Zimbabwe.

“We are fighting the (South African) regime inside the country and not from Zimbabwe,” he said. South African newspapers said that the attacks had weakened the chances of negotiations with the A.N.C.

The often pro-Govern-ment “Citizen” newspaper said, “There can be no negotiation with the A.N.C. while it continues its terrorism ... There can be no reason for giving the A.N.C. a mantle of respectability, to treat its leaders as a bunch of decent democrats, when they are nothing but organisers of savage violence.” The financial daily, “Business Day” said that those who planted the mines

“have done the cause of peaceful change in this region a grave disservice.”

Meanwhile the death toll in South Africa’s racial strife has climbed to at least 1000 since February last year when anti-apart-heid grievances erupted into violence.

Police headquarters said that the latest unrest victim, a black man, was burned to death by a black mob in Soweto, the country’s largest township outside Johannesburg.

The independent Institute of Race Relations, which claims to be conservative in its casualty figures, released-, statistics last week showing that 999 people had died in unrest since Emma Sathekge, aged 15, was run over by a police vehicle on February 13, 1984.

She was killed at Atteridgeville township, near Pretoria, as black pupils launched school boycotts to demand a better education deal in line with that offered to whites.