White Dissidents in South Africa Criticize Crackdown

CAPE TOWN, South Africa —  White opposition politicians accused the South African government on Friday of secretly detaining thousands of black nationalists, torturing schoolchildren and imposing a reign of terror on the country’s black ghettos under the 10-week-old national state of emergency.

Helen Suzman, a veteran anti-apartheid campaigner from the Progressive Federal Party, told Parliament that the government has deliberately concealed the true extent of the security forces’ actions and now tolerates police brutality on an unprecedented scale here.

South Africa has joined “the ranks of Third World countries where people go missing and their relatives are left agonizing in anxiety,” Suzman said during a three-hour debate on the state of emergency and the government’s management of the economy and foreign relations.

She told about a 12-year-old boy imprisoned without charge for more than a month and subjected to electric-shock torture as a suspected government opponent. When the boy was released, she said, he was denied readmission to school because he had not re-registered on the prescribed date, which passed while he was detained.

Says Hundreds Detained

Hundreds of children have been rounded up in police sweeps during the past 2 1/2 months, Suzman said, and many are still held, often brutally treated, sometimes in cells for adult criminals, sometimes in solitary confinement.

The government this week told Parliament that more than 8,500 people had been detained without charge since the state of emergency was proclaimed June 12, but Suzman said the actual number was more than 12,000. She said the government detained more people during the first eight weeks of the current emergency than it did in eight months of the previous one.

The government, Suzman said in an attack on President Pieter W. Botha and his Cabinet, is clearly made up of “men drunk with power . . . with no regard whatsoever for the law of natural justice.”

Colin Eglin, leader of the Progressive Federal Party, accused the white-led minority government of repeatedly bungling and then covering up its misdeeds with lies.

Eglin cited as an example the government’s account of an “unrest incident” in the eastern Cape province town of Adelaide where police, allegedly attacked by 300 blacks, opened fire on the mob, killing one, after a policeman was killed.

Account by Witnesses

The truth, Eglin said, quoting witnesses interviewed by his party’s members of Parliament, was that four policemen, drunk after spending several hours in a local black-run speak-easy, had attacked black players in a local soccer match and, after encountering some resistance, shot and killed one of the players and wounded his grieving mother. The crowd then beat one of the policemen to death.

Eglin said that such incidents can be counted in the hundreds.

Suzman said that, despite the government’s claimed reduction in incidents of political violence, the country is further than ever from normality under the state of emergency.

Tens of thousands of other black children go to school every day under the guns of the army and police, Suzman said. “What kind of schooling does a child have when he comes out of class to face soldiers with guns?” she asked.

Suzman, Eglin and other Progressive Federal Party members were prepared to provide more examples but were stopped when the ruling National Party won a decision by the Speaker barring any discussion of regulations or cases now before the courts.

“Had we been able to tell all we know, even P.W. Botha would have been so sickened that he would have had to leave the chamber,” another Progressive Federal member complained.

Emergency rule has been made worse, Suzman said, by government incompetence. She cited regulations that do not conform to laws the government itself has written, actions that are outside those regulations, arbitrary detentions and others made in bad faith.

The imposition of emergency rule, Suzman said, was itself “a strong indictment of the government in its total inability to rule the country unless it uses Draconian powers, which in fact have done little or nothing to bring peace and stability.”

Eglin asserted that the Botha government “is leading the country into a long dark tunnel . . . with reduced freedom and receding options for democratic alternatives.”

The debate raged back and forth, with the government also under attack from the far-right Conservative Party, which accused the Cabinet of being too accommodating and bowing too much to pressure.

Botha sat quietly through the debate, listening impassively, responding to none of the allegations and allowing his ministers to reply with suggestions that Suzman, Eglin and the other liberals were simply advancing communist arguments.

In Johannesburg, Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, defended himself against recent government attacks, saying that “Tutu-bashing” has become the country’s political pastime.

“It is sad to discover that we still think we can solve the serious problems of this country by looking for scapegoats either outside or internally,” Tutu told a press conference.

Tutu, the Anglican archbishop-elect of Cape Town, has been condemned for calling on the West to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. One Cabinet member, Manpower Minister Pietie du Plessis, warned Tutu that he was close to treason, and pro-government newspapers called for his prosecution on charges of promoting economic sabotage.