Sober Christmas for whites

Press, 26 December 1985, Page 6

Sober Christmas for whites

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg South Africans celebrating Christmas reflected yesterday on a year of unprecedented and bloody racial strife.

Six more people were killed yesterday on the eve of the Christian festival. A white man was stabbed to death and three blacks were killed when guards fired rubber bullets during clashes at a gold mine near Johannesburg. Another black was shot dead by a black policeman whose house was being petrol-bombed in Soshanguve township, central Transvaal, and a councillor at Nyanga, near Cape Town, was burnt to death when a crowd of blacks set his car alight, police said. South African whites were still in shock over the bomb blast that killed three white women and two white boys on Tuesday at the Indian Ocean resort of Amanzimtoti. The Government has promised to avenge the killings, for which it blames the outlawed African National Congress guerrilla group. South Africa’s ’financial newspaper, “Business: Day,” said that the A.N.C. was putting itself beyond negotiations. After the bombing, it said, “whatever slim prospects there were of dealing with the A.N.C. are surely dead.” , ;