Strauss says S.A. will free 14 detainees

Press, 1 February 1988, Page 8

Strauss says S.A. will free 14 detainees

NZPA-Reuter Munich The Bavarian Prime Minister, Franz Josef Strauss, said on Saturday that the South African Government had promised him it would free 14 jailed blacks within a week and review the cases of 121 more.

“In 14 cases, I have (Foreign Minister Pik Botha’s) signature that they will be released within a week,” Dr Strauss told reporters on his return from a controversial tour of southern Africa, made at the request of Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The trip was welcomed by the white minority South African Govern-, ment, but strongly condemned by black groups, who said Dr Strauss had shown himself up as a supporter of apartheid. Dr Strauss, a long-time opponent of sanctions against South Africa, said Pretoria had agreed to his request for the release of 14 jailed blacks from a list of 18 he took with him to South Africa. He said Pik Botha told him in a letter that a further 121 black detainees’ cases would be reviewed.

The news did nothing to calm some West German

politicians’ anger over the tour, which included stops in the black homeland of Bophuthatswana — recognised only by Pretoria — and Namibia, ruled by South Africa in defiance of the United Nations. “The South Africa trip ... can be described as a scandal unusual even by Strauss’s standards,” the opposition S.P.D. party leader, Hans-Jochen Vogel, said. A Government spokesman, Friedhelm Ost, said that Dr Strauss would report back to Dr Kohl before any official comment could be made, but Mr Ost said Dr Strauss’s stop in Namibia was a private visit.