Non-whites stop laws

Press, 12 June 1986, Page 10

Non-whites stop laws

NZPA-Reuter Cape Town South Africa’s white-led Cabinet was meeting today amid tension over how it will handle a potential flash-point of violent protest when blacks commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Soweto riots next week. The Government suffered a serious defeat yesterday when Coloured and Indian representatives stopped a Parliamentary committee from reaching consensus on sweeping! new powers sought for the Minister of Law and Order, Mr Louis le Grange. The black majority has no say in Parliament. The Government wanted the new laws, allowing Mr le Grange to declare "unrest” areas where he could make whatever regulations he deemed necessary, in time for Monday’s anniversary of the uprising in 1976 by black students in Johannesburg’s Soweto township. Leading opponents of

apartheid have vowed to defy a Government ban on commemorating June 16. The Government is committed to a tough crackdown. Today’s. Cabinet meeting, a regular weekly session, may be used to review the options open to the Government in handling the Soweto anniversary after two years of unprecedented black revolt The extra powers for Mr le Grange could be made law with the backing of the President’s Council, which the Government controls and which can adjudicate in Parliamentary deadlocks. But the South African press — including conservative Afrikaans-lan-guage newspapers — say the choice could be between a state of emergency or martial law. On Tuesday, official sources leaked letters from the Foreign Minister, Mr Roelof Botha, criticising a peace plan by Commonwealth mediators. The plan urged a suspension of violence,

the release of the jailed black leaden Nelson Mandela, lifting the ban on his African National Congress, and negotiations. Mr Botha said Pretoria would discuss sharing but not transferring power, but the A.N.C. rejected this as a basis for talks. The South African sources who leaked the letters said they were responding to: Commonwealth leaks in London, ‘ where informed sources ’ said the mediators had decided that Pretoria was not interested in serious talks with blacks, and were suggesting stepped-up pressure through economic sanctions. The latest focus of violence is Crossroads shanty town, a few kilometres from the Parliament: in Cape Town. The police say 17 blacks .have died there in two days as vigilantes battled .. squatters loyal to radical .leaders. Some 80,000 people are now homeless after black vigilantes razed three

camps last month and captured a fourth yesterday and set it ablaze. The Government has long planned to build new homes on the areas that have been devastated. Refugees say the houses have been promised to the vigilantes, who live in the core settlement of Old Crossroads. The Government says the homeless must go to a more remote and better guarded township that it is building, but many squatters have strenuously resisted the move. The latest vigilante attacks are in defiance of an interim court order barring them and the police from making or allowing assaults on refugees from last month’s battles. The police yesterday repeated denials that they were partisan, saying that they had fired birdshot and tear-gas at both factions. But witnesses said they saw the police aiding vigilantes yesterday by firing tear-gas at radicals fighting to save their homes.