Terror and Repression

By George Russell

Black guerrillas step up their attacks inside the laager

The light brown imbuia wood paneled Supreme Court chamber in Pretoria's imposing Palace of Justice was crowded with black spectators and white plain-clothes officers last week as Judge Charl Theron entered the room. Guilty of high treason, said Theron, referring to the three young black men in the dock, all members of South Africa's long-banned black liberation organization, the African National Congress (ANC). The sentence: death by hanging.

The condemned men--David Moise, 25, Johannes Shabangu, 26, and Anthony Tsotsobe, 25--responded to the sentence with forced smiles, a clenched-fist salute and the first strains of a freedom song ("What shall we do to the Boers who shot the people of Soweto?"). Outside, police, occasionally using attack dogs, dispersed a crowd of blacks waiting in Church Square. There were scuffles, and several people were arrested. A small group of women, swathed in brightly patterned blankets, began singing Nkosi Sikelele Afrika (God Bless Africa), the ANC's anthem.

The courtroom where South Africa's harsh justice was meted out last week was the same in which, 17 years earlier, ANC Leader Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage, including the 1962 bombing of a Cabinet minister's office in Pretoria. The charges against last week's prisoners were graver--an index of how the ANC, long ago an advocate of peaceful change, now reaches for the gun. Moise was charged with the 1980 bombing of fuel storage tanks at South Africa's SASOL coal liquefaction plant, the most spectacular guerrilla attack ever staged in the country, with damage estimated at $7.2 million. Shabangu had thrown a grenade into the home of a black policeman in the sprawling black township of Soweto, near Johannesburg. Tsotsobe had been involved in an armed assault on a Johannesburg police station and in several bombings. As the authorities made clear during the trial, the three men were only part of an increasingly warlike campaign against the government: there have been 38 ANC attacks in South Africa this year, 34 of them in the past three months.

The last of those assaults occurred on the morning of the sentencing. A bomb blast ripped up a section of rail line outside the coastal city of East London--one more sign that the ANC, which was outlawed in 1960, is trying harder than ever to induce a climate of terror among whites in the South African laager. From neighboring Zimbabwe, ANC Acting President Oliver Tambo, 63, served notice that such violence will increase. Said he: "South Africa is a highly developed industrialized state. A few determined guerrillas can do a lot of damage--and we have more than just a handful of people in the country."

Railway lines, power stations and shopping centers have been the most frequent targets for the ANC, though damage in almost all cases so far has been slight and human injuries have been minor. Two weeks ago, ANC militants fired four 122-mm artillery rockets into the Voortrekkerhoogte military base outside Pretoria: three failed to explode and only one person was hurt. But the attacks have proved 1) that the ANC insurgents, however badly trained they may be on the whole, are well armed and can handle heavy weapons and explosives, and 2) that they do not shy away from inflicting civilian casualties, including among blacks. Assessing the increase in the frequency of assaults, South African counterinsurgency experts say that the ANC is stepping up the violence in order to win greater international recognition for the movement, which still does not have anything resembling the support accorded to South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) guerrillas in the disputed territory of Namibia.

The government's response to the ANC campaign has been to tighten up already formidable security measures against the repressed black majority. Last week, more than a hundred police swooped down on a black squatters' encampment near Cape Town and trucked 1,300 homeless black men, women and children off to jail, before sending them to rural reservations. On the military front, Defense Minister Magnus Malan has warned South Africans that "the revolutionary effort against us has reached an extremely dangerous phase." The Pretoria government two weeks ago raised the defense budget by 30% to an all-time high of $2.6 billion. Said Finance Minister Owen Horwood: "In light of recent developments in and around South Africa, defense must remain one of our very highest priorities."

What complicates the government's antiguerrilla efforts is the fact that most of ANC's fighting strength, an estimated 6,000 men equipped mostly with Soviet or Communist bloc weapons, is outside South Africa in the "frontline" states of Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. The South African military of 86,000 on active duty and 400,000 potential reserves is already kept busy fighting a brushfire border war against SWAPO guerrillas infiltrating into Namibia. More and more frequently of late, the South Africans are employing "hot pursuit" tactics: military incursions into neighboring black-ruled countries that bring the conflict closer to conventional war. Earlier this year South African commandos crossed the frontier into Mozambique and destroyed what they claimed to be an ANC headquarters near the capital of Maputo. In a more recent clash along the Angolan-Namibian border, several Angolan army regulars and at least two South African soldiers were killed. Such actions have provoked a pointed Angolan response: South African military observers report the deployment in southern Angola, allegedly with Cuban and East German aid, of sophisticated radar and surface-to-air missiles to guard against South African air attacks. Says Major General Charles Lloyd, commander of the South African forces in Namibia: "We are preparing ourselves mentally and physically for a more serious war."

--By George Russell.

Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne

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