Deaths, attack on Zulus reported

Press, 1 July 1986, Page 6

Deaths, attack on Zulus reported

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg South Africa's Bureau for Information has reported 13 more deaths in week-end political violence, and more than 30 people were hurt when radicals attacked supporters of the Zulu chief, Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The bureau said yesterday that 34 people were hurt after a petrol bomb was hurled at a bus taking Zulus home from a Buthelezi rally in Johannesburg’s black satellite city, Soweto.

Although the bomb did not ignite and the bus did not stop, another behind it slammed on its brakes and a third bus and minibus were sandwiched into a pile-up, said the bureau. Mr Buthelezi, who says he opposes apartheid, is condemned by black radicals for agreeing to rule one of 10 homelands set up for blacks.

The bureau which controls reports of what it terms “unrest” under censorship imposed when the state of emergency was declared 18 days ago, said

seven blacks were killed by other blacks at the week-end, two were shot by the police in riots, and four black nationalist guerrillas died in a skirmish with the police. The latest deaths bring the official toll since the emergency to 88, including three white women, victims of a bomb blast in Durban.

The injured Zulus were among more than 40 busloads of people who made a 500 km bus trip from Mr Buthelezi’s tribal homeland, KwaZulu, to hear him speak in Johannesburg’s densely populated township, where black political divisions are particularly marked.

Mr Buthelezi told the rally: “I am here because I know that if we do not do something about the high toll of deaths of blacks at the hands of blacks, we are on the verge of a civil war situation which will never be stopped, even if liberation is achieved tomorrow.”

Many men in his audience were armed with spears, knobkerries

(carved clubs) and traditional hide shields. A building housing the headquarters of a group seeking the release of the jailed black nationalist leader, Nelson Mandela, was set alight over the week-end, said the bureau. Fire broke out in Freeway House, a Johannesburg office block where the Release Mandela Campaign has its headquarters, early on Saturday morning. A plastic container with turpentine was found in the building, the bureau said.

Union sources reported the detention of two leading black trade unionists at the week-end, but their names cannot be published without official authorisation, which has not been granted so far. Civil rights groups estimate that thousands of people have been detained without trial since the emergency, 700 of them black trade unionists who went on strike to protest against a first wave of detentions.