S.A. movement worries Govt

Press, 14 August 1989, Page 10

S.A. movement worries Govt

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg Three years after South Africa imposed emergency rule to crush dissent, an amorphous protest group has emerged and is causing serious concern in Pretoria’s corridors of power.

The Mass Democratic Movement, an informal umbrella group of hundreds of anti-apartheid organisations, is masterminding a civil disobedience campaign that has struck telling blows against the Government’s race segregation laws. Eschewing the violent township uprisings that characterised anti-Gov-ernment protest in the early 1980 s, the M.D.M. plans that its campaign will culminate in peaceful protests against the racially based general elections on September 6 that exclude the black majority. As part of the campaign, black protesters have illegally demanded treatment at whites-only hospitals, and “restricted” activists have risked imprisonment by breaking banning orders to appear and speak at political rallies.

The M.D.M. has promised that it will target other segregated facilities such as schools, buses, parks and swimming pools. “If the Government cannot desegregate all facilities, we will do it for them,” a doctor, Aslam

Darsoo, said. Activists say the movement has succeeded in mounting the campaign

because it has not presented the Government with a fixed target. The M.D.M. has no constitution or offices. Instead of having one leader, it has scores. The Law and Order Minister, Adriaan Vlok, has accused the M.D.M. of being a faceless group controlled by the banned Communist Party. “It is faceless. It has no address and it has no leader. Activists from radical organisations speak for it ...” he complained in a speech at an election rally this month. Legal experts said the M.D.M. is so structured that it will be difficult for Pretoria to restrict or ban it.

“It will be like restricting the movement of water. The water could simply disappear into the soil and reappear somewhere else,” a lawyer, Peter Reynolds, said.

A prominent activist and M.D.M. spokesman, Murphy Morobe, said the phrase M.D.M. was coined by activists in detention cells to refer to all organised resistance to apartheid. When released, they transformed the phrase

into a movement. "The M.D.M. was never formed. It just unconsciously and spontane-

ously came into being, first as a term, more of a process to describe antiapartheid forces than a structure,” Mr Morobe said. Key features of the M.D.M. were its collective leadership, support for a future non-racial democracy and rejection of the tri-cameral Parliament which excludes the country’s 26 million blacks, he said. “The M.D.M. is composed of most community, health, welfare and workers’ organisations which subscribe to all those principles,” he said. Its core constituents are the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the country’s biggest labour organisation, and the banned United Democratic Front anti-apart-heid coalition. It embraces many other groups. “The M.D.M. is broader because it can mobilise people of a range of persuasions. Because it is a movement rather than an organisation, it is hard to establish its borders,” the C.O.S.A.T.U. general secretary, Jay Naidoo, said. Mr Morobe said the defiance campaign showed that anti-apartheid resistance was still on its feet. This month 20 former

detainees broke the terms of their restriction orders by attending a 1200-strong evening church service as part of the M.D.M. campaign. All 20 are forbidden to address gatherings of more than 10 people or take part in political activity. Some of the M.D.M.’s “affiliated” groups are among the 34 organisations currently banned under emergency rule. Many of the affected groups, which range from obscure regional associations to the sprawling U.D.F. and the high-pro-file Detainees’ Parents’ Support Committee, were already operating underground because of emergency rule decreed in June, 1986. “Emergency rule has slowed the tempo of activity, but we see people beginning to contend with the constraints,” Mr Morobe said. A Soweto community leader, Nthato Motlana, said: “The notion that apartheid resistance can be killed off by bannings is ludicrous. If South Africa’s history of the last 30 years is any guide, opposition wjll dissolve, regroup and eventually re-emerge in a different way, probably in a more dangerous form.”