Blacks shot in fight with S.A. police

Press, 28 August 1986, Page 10

Blacks shot in fight with S.A. police

Eleven blacks had been killed and 62 people wounded when South African security forces opened fire in street fights with residents of the country’s largest black township, the Government said yesterday.

The Government’s Bureau for Information reported two separate incidents yesterday in a section of Soweto, home for some two million people near Johannesburg. In one, a hand-grenade was hurled at the security forces.

Witnesses said fighting was sparked in the township’s White City section by an attempt to evict residents taking part in a rent boycott, a popular form of black anti-apart-heid protest. The flare-up of violence was the worst reported officially since emergency rule was declared on June 12 to quell nation-wide

riots which have claimed more than 2200 lives in 30 months.

The bureau, sole official outlet for news on unrest under emergency news media censorship, said four policemen were wounded when the grenade was thrown from within a crowd of some 300 who had barricaded White City streets. The police had opened fire in retaliation, killing seven and wounding 61. They later had fired on another crowd, killing four and wounding one. Witnesses said angry residents had poured on to the streets and set up barricades of blazing tyres and boulders to stop the eviction, launched by black township council employees and supported by troops and police in armoured vehicles.

Sources at the huge Baragwanath Hospital, near Soweto, said most of

the casualties were youths. Residents of White City, one of the poorest sections of the teeming, impoverished township, said security forces had fired in all directions as they were being pelted with missiles.

The troops were guarding local law enforcers, dubbed the “Blackjacks,” who had moved in to break up the boycott, which has cost the State millions of rand since it spread through many townships round the country in late 1984.

Rent increases at the time were largely blamed by township residents for the mass violence that flared across the country as poor blacks vented anger at the Government’s racial policies.

Pretoria declared the emergency after violence reached all corners of the country.