U.S. Ties S. Africa Policy to Violence : 350 Believed Held as Arrests of Leaders Go On

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Police continued their arrests of black community leaders and anti-apartheid activists Monday, reportedly detaining more than 200 under the state-of-emergency regulations that South Africa adopted over the weekend to quell nearly a year of sustained civil unrest.

Among those reported arrested were national and regional leaders of the United Democratic Front, a broad, multiracial coalition of groups opposed to South Africa’s policy of apartheid.

Also held were labor union officials, civil rights lawyers, teachers, clergymen, community organizers and youth leaders from the Johannesburg area, the Vaal River region south of here and from the eastern region of Cape province.

Authorities Are Vague

Although police refused late Monday to disclose either the number arrested or their names, the total now held under the emergency regulations, which permit indefinite detention without trial, is believed to be at least 350--and includes many of the most influential national and local leaders of the anti-apartheid movement.

The Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, which monitors security detentions, estimated that more than 100 people were arrested in the Johannesburg area Monday and nearly as many in the industrial center of Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage in the turbulent eastern Cape. Church groups said about 40 people were detained in the Vaal region. On Sunday, police reported 113 arrests.

The emergency measures, which suspend most civil liberties and put the affected regions under virtual martial law, were strongly criticized again Monday by religious leaders and by the white-minority government’s liberal opposition.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel peace laureate, said the National Party leadership has responded to the unrest with “an iron fist,” rather than by making effort to resolve the country’s fundamental problems.

“The government is mistaken if it believes that true security and peace can come from the end of a gun barrel,” Tutu said. “The unrest in our land will continue to be endemic, and the violence which all of us deplore will occur until the cause is removed, and the cause is apartheid--a vicious, immoral and evil policy.”

He offered again to help initiate talks among “the authentic representatives and leaders of every section of our society” to work out a peaceful resolution of the country’s problems.

However, President Pieter W. Botha, rejecting a call from the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party that Parliament be reconvened to discuss the state of emergency and the underlying causes of the unrest, declared that after a year of violence, the time had come for action, “not further debates.”

“It is and it remains the responsibility of the government to ensure the safety of its people,” he said. “My government will not shirk this responsibility.”

Most of Monday’s arrests came in pre-dawn raids, and the detentions are expected to continue through the week as police continue what a senior officer called “a thorough cleansing of all the radicals and revolutionaries . . . responsible for the unrest of the past year.”

Those arrested in Port Elizabeth included the top regional officials of the United Democratic Front and of the Azanian People’s Organization, a black consciousness group; leaders of the auto workers union there; black Anglican and Methodist clergymen; the president of the Interdenominational African Ministers Assn. of South Africa, and the president of the Port Elizabeth Women’s Assn.

In Johannesburg, leaders of the United Democratic Front, the Congress of South African Students, the Transvaal Indian Congress and the End Conscription Campaign were reported to be among those detained. In the Vaal River region, 50 miles south of here, 10 clergymen were said to have been seized, along with staff members of the South African Council of Churches.

Civil Liberties Issue

Under the emergency rules, the names of those detained may not be published until written permission is given by the police--a provision that has been sharply criticized by civil rights lawyers here as compounding what they believe is already an arbitrary deprivation of freedom.

Official sources said Monday that police, supported by combat troops, are preparing in the next phase of the emergency operation to seal off a number of black townships in eastern Cape province, the focus of much of the unrest over the last six months. This is reportedly intended as a prelude to the arrests of a large number of youths regarded as “troublemakers and ringleaders” and to the use of house-to-house weapons searches.

Many of the small black townships in the eastern Cape now appear as if they were under military occupation. They are patrolled by heavily armed riot policemen and soldiers in armored cars, firing volleys of tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot to break up any groups that might gather. Tension has also increased in most of the black communities around Johannesburg, which had largely been calm Sunday after the state of emergency was proclaimed.

Clashes--most arising from protests by groups of black youths against the emergency measures or from the stoning of police, local officials and their homes--were reported from more than 20 places around the country Monday.

Police said that five blacks, including a man defending his home from a mob trying to burn him out, were killed and that 50 were arrested on charges of public violence, arson and assault.

In the largest incident reported by national police headquarters, more than 4,000 residents of Tsakane, a ghetto township southeast of Johannesburg, attacked the home of a black policeman regarded as a collaborator of the white regime before they were turned back by police and soldiers.

Police Defend Tactics

However, Gen. Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner, said Monday in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, that there was less unrest Sunday, the first day of the emergency, “than we have had for quite a long period.”

Coetzee denied that the government’s measures reflect “an escalating situation” that could not be contained any other way.

“We had a dragging-on of this violence, an ebb-and-flow situation for the past year,” he said, and the authorities concluded that this was the most effective way to bring it to an end quickly.

“There was no particular incident, none of any kind, that was the reason we imposed the state of emergency,” he went on. “The overall security situation had to be improved--that was the reason.”

Under a proclamation signed Saturday by President Botha, security forces are given the authority to make arrests without warrants and detain those arrested for indefinite periods without access to courts, their attorneys or their families. They may also make searches and seizures without warrants, close businesses, seal off areas to travel, and impose curfews.

The state of emergency is in effect in 36 of South Africa’s nearly 300 magisterial districts and includes about a quarter of the country’s 32 million people.

But Coetzee agreed with South African newspaper editors at a lengthy and often heated meeting in Pretoria on Monday not to impose police censorship on news related to the unrest, as the emergency decree allows. Instead, he asked for their cooperation in limiting coverage and ensuring that it is unemotional.

He also agreed, in a second concession meant to blunt the criticism of the government’s actions, to report on a daily basis the number of people detained under the emergency regulations and to provide their names and addresses. On Monday night, though, police spokesmen in Pretoria said the release of this information had not yet been authorized.

Coetzee warned both the South African editors--and, in a later meeting, foreign correspondents--that access to troubled areas and coverage of the security forces’ activities there will be sharply curtailed in the interest of “cooling things off as quickly and as effectively as possible.”