Apartheid foes gagged, police shoot youths

Press, 13 March 1986, Page 10

Apartheid foes gagged, police shoot youths

NZPA-Reutner Johannesburg

South Africa has silenced two leading antiapartheid campaigners with banning orders, and the police shot dead two youths and wounded about 80 other people in a crowd outside an eastern Transvaal province courthouse.

The Internal Security Act banning orders were issued yesterday in Port Elizabeth against Mkhuseli Jack and Henry Fazzie, restricting their movements and making it illegal for the local news media to quote them. Mr Jack co-ordinated a devastatingly successful

black boycott of white businesses in the eastern Cape Province last year and Mr Fazzie is the regional vice-president of the nation’s biggest antiapartheid group, the two milllon-strong United Democratic Front. The business boycott is due to resume next month unless residents are satisfied with moves to reform apartheid. In eastern Transvaal, the police said they had fired on a crowd of 2000 blacks who gathered outside a magistrates’ court in Kabokweni, a black township near Kruger National Park. Residents had crammed

into the tiny courtroom to see a case concerning eight youths arrested in rioting last month. The police said their numbers were swollen by seven busloads of youths, some of them armed with sticks. When the crowd refused to obey an order to clear the area, the police had fired tear-gas and birdshot, killing a youth, aged 15, and wounding 80 people, police headquarters in Pretoria said.

In subsequent clashes in the township, the police had shot dead a 14-year-old black youth and wounded a 17-year-old.