Botha ends hated ‘pass laws’

Press, 21 April 1986, Page 6

Botha ends hated ‘pass laws’

NZPA-Reuter Cape Town

South Africa’s influx control measures for blacks, the “pass laws” which were effectively abolished on Friday are one of the most bitterly resented aspects of apartheid.

The President, Mr Pieter Botha, told Parliament that all blacks held under the laws would be released forthwith and no more charges laid against black peole under the laws from this week. An estimated 20 million blacks have been arrested

this century under the laws, which have been in force in one form or another since the eighteenth century. Their main purpose was to restrict the movement of blacks to the cities from the country, propping up a migrant labour system that has divided black families while attempting to deprive them of political or land rights in the “white” core of South Africa. All adult blacks were obliged to carry the hated pass books, or reference book?, which stated where

they were allowedto live and work. But mhy defied the law in tfeir attempts to escapl rural poverty and unmployment. Hundreds of thousands of arrests have been made each year, prosecutions hat recently declined sine Government indication that the laws would pe replaced by softer measures. L “The present sjftem is too costly and haslecome obsolete,” Mr Bota said in January. Government (finals

have said that Pretoria, worried by a rapidly growing black population in rural areas, will now encourage urbanisation in an effort to reduce the birth rate. Blacks have protested for years against influx control, which does not apply to other races. In the most notorious incident the police in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, shot dead 69 blacks protesting against the pass laws in 1960. Under the pass laws blacks could not visit an urban area for more than

72 hours without permission; those who wanted passes to live in a specific township had to meet certain requirements under the complex section 10 of the Urban Areas Consolidation Act. Blacks could not legally live in Soweto, near Johannesburg, for example, unless they were either born there and lived there since birth, or worked for one employer for 10 years running, or had been granted a labour contract. Blacks have been told by white

National Party Governments to exercise their political rights in small, autonomous tribal homelands, and blacks can therefore live legally in the homeland to which — in the eyes of the official-, dom — they belong. In addition to legal restrictions on black movements, civil rights groups say the authorities have also limited the number of available houses to curb migration and numbers of people have been evicted from cities and farms under anti-squatting laws. T- 5