Long Detentions Mark S. Africa Emergency Rule

Zwelakhe Sisulu, a journalist and father of two, stands charged with no crime. Yet he has been in prison for two Christmases, two wedding anniversaries and a dozen family birthdays.

He is not allowed letters, but keeps track of 8-year-old Moyikwa’s new karate moves and 5-year-old Zoya’s first report cards in 30-minute glimpses each Monday through the thick glass of a visitors’ cubicle at Diepkloof Prison.

Touching is not allowed during visits, though, and when the overhead light hits that glass pane, the children sometimes have to strain to even see him.

“Zwelakhe has been cut off in the prime of his life,” Zodwa Sisulu said of her 37-year-old husband, a newspaper editor and former Nieman fellow at Harvard University. “His children cannot wait to grow. They are growing now. They need him.”

Zwelakhe, behind bars now for 1 1/2 years, is one of the 32,000 people who have been detained at various times since a state of emergency was declared in South Africa two years ago. About 18,000 have been held for at least a month, 1,000 for more than a year and 250 for the entire two years, according to groups that track detentions.

Detention without charge or trial is the linchpin of Pretoria’s sweeping emergency regulations, which give the government broad authority to suspend civil liberties in the name of public order. Through detentions, restrictions on anti-apartheid organizations and censorship, the government has hushed the voices of its leading opponents among the nation’s black majority.

As the state of emergency starts its third year, 2,500 people sit in South African jails because the government considers their freedom a threat to the country’s stability.

Zodwa Sisulu has tried to keep her children from becoming embittered by the system that put their father in jail with no trial and no time limit.

‘An Unfair Detention’

“The government doesn’t trust everyone’s safety if your father’s around,” she tells them.

“But it gets difficult when they start probing me for more information, because the government hasn’t said what he’s done to make it unsafe,” she said recently. “And I personally think it’s an unfair detention. If he’s done a crime, he should be charged with it.”

The longer his detention, the more emotionally trying it becomes for Zwelakhe as well. He has lost a lot of weight and his attorney said he recently was hospitalized for depression.

The system also has put Zwelakhe’s father, Walter Sisulu, a leader of the African National Congress, behind bars for the last 24 years, serving a life sentence on a sabotage conviction. And it has banned the political activities of Zwelakhe’s mother, Albertina Sisulu.

The number of people detained by the police has fallen in the past year, however. About 25,000 people were detained in the first year of the emergency and about 7,000 more in the second year.

Some of those being held today are teen-agers, but most are in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Some are highly educated; others never finished high school. They include students and lawyers, deliverymen and professors. Most, if not all, are part of what anti-apartheid groups here call “the struggle.”

The emergency regulations, the government says, are designed to take potential troublemakers out of circulation and clamp down on the anti-apartheid activities of nearly everyone else to keep the political temperature in the black townships cool.

To a large degree, it is working.

Two years ago, the townships were in flames. Blacks clashed almost daily with police, and each day brought more reports of arson, gasoline bombing, stone-throwing and “necklacing,” the practice of putting gasoline-soaked tires around the necks of suspected government collaborators and setting them on fire.

But all that has changed. Unrest-related incidents fell by more than 80% last year and, despite fighting between black groups in Natal province, only slight increases were recorded this year, the government says.

Although the black townships have grown comparatively quiet, the white-designated cities have not. Bombings and other forms of sabotage have increased sharply.

The government puts the number of “acts of terror” at 234 for 1987 and 230 for 1986, the worst years for terrorism in South African history. But the severity of the explosions, which are usually caused by Soviet-made limpet mines, has decreased.

Some political scientists believe the bombings have increased in South Africa because the emergency regulations have smothered most peaceful forms of protest. Others say the ANC, whose guerrillas are blamed by the government for most bombings within South Africa, is trying to increase its pressure on Pretoria.

But Law and Order Ministry officials point out that the country’s security forces, often with the help of black informants, arrested 484 terrorists in 1987, killed 47 others and uncovered arms caches with hundreds of mines, rifles and hand grenades. (Some academics put the arrest figures much lower.)

Although the riots and black uprisings of 1984 to 1986 have disappeared, the government thinks the emergency regulations still are necessary because of what it calls the “revolutionary climate” in the country.

As a ready example, government officials point to the three-day general strike by more than 1 million blacks last month. It was organized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a labor federation that is among 18 anti-apartheid groups restricted from engaging in political work of any kind.

Some South Africans believe that putting top black leaders in jail ruins any hope the government might have of negotiating a peaceful solution to the country’s problems.

Boycott Has Dragged On

A 2-year-old rent boycott in Soweto, for example, has dragged on partly because the group that organized it, the Soweto Civic Assn., is banned from political activity and most of its leaders are either in hiding or detention.

Many of those who have been in detention for months, and now years, have lost hope they will either be charged or released any time soon.

“There is no intention of taking these detainees to court. They are not chargeable,” said Max Coleman, a retired Johannesburg businessman long active in detainee causes. “There is no intention of releasing them, either. They are prisoners of war, and only when the war is over will they go free.”

(Coleman is president of the Detainees Parents Support Committee, but he is prohibited from speaking in that capacity because the organization’s activities have been banned under emergency regulations.)

The Sisulu family had hoped for Zwelakhe’s freedom when the state of emergency expired last month, but after President Pieter W. Botha’s extension of the emergency, the family members were back at Diepkloof Prison for their regular Monday visit.

The children brought greetings from Zwelakhe’s mother, Albertina, co-president of South Africa’s largest anti-apartheid group, the United Democratic Front. The UDF, a coalition of 700 groups, was banned from political activity earlier this year.

Albertina Sisulu lives under a restriction order, issued by the minister of law and order, that prohibits her from, among other things, talking to reporters, addressing groups of 10 or more, leaving the Johannesburg area or venturing outside her Soweto house after 6 p.m.

Zwelakhe Sisulu was first detained after leading a nationwide strike by the Media Workers’ Assn. of South Africa in 1980. He spent eight months in solitary confinement.

In 1984, he received a prestigious Nieman fellowship for journalists at Harvard, and he and his family moved to Cambridge, Mass., for a year.

Shortly after his return, he became founding editor of New Nation, a weekly newspaper published by the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The government recently shut down the New Nation for three months for publishing “systematic and repeated subversive propaganda.”

The editor was detained in June, 1986, at the beginning of the state of emergency, but was released 22 days later. Then, a few days before Christmas, he was detained again. Court appeals for his release have been rejected.

The government cites Sisulu’s alleged affiliation with the National Education Crisis Committee as a reason for his detention. In a 37-page appeal to the minster of law and order last year, Sisulu said he was not an officer in the NECC but added that, in any case, the committee was a legal group that had held negotiations with the minister himself.

A Child’s View

Asked why his father is in prison, Moyikwa Sisulu says simply, “State of emergency.” Pressed for his feelings about that, the 8-year-old responds, “I think it’s dom ,” which means stupid in Afrikaans, the first language of the majority of South Africa’s white population.

Zodwa Sisulu’s weekly visits to Zwelakhe generally take most of a day, beginning with a taxi-van ride from her home to the prison, on the other side of the sprawling black township of Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Zodwa, a radiologist at Baragwanath Hospital, takes the day off and, every other week, she takes the children out of school to take them along.

Moyikwa’s teacher says he is inattentive at school on the days that his mother visits his father by herself, and his schoolwork is suffering. Zoya, 5, has trouble sleeping the night before a visit to prison, but her mother worries more about Zoya’s new aggressiveness.

“She wants to fight everybody,” Zodwa said. “It’s very painful to watch that bitterness coming through in your children.”