S. African Bishop Acquitted in Defamation Case

Archbishop Denis E. Hurley, president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, was acquitted Monday of charges that he defamed a special counterinsurgency police unit in Namibia by accusing it of continued atrocities, including the murders of suspected opponents of the government there.

The case was widely seen as an attempt to silence Roman Catholic Church criticism of apartheid--South Africa’s policy of racial segregation.

However, the state prosecutor announced at the start of Hurley’s trial in Pretoria regional court that the government had no evidence to back its charges. Some of Hurley’s harshest comments, the original basis for the case, had been exaggerated by the press and misquoted after a news conference here two years ago, the prosecutor said.

Magistrate W. J. Vandenbergh promptly acquitted Hurley, 70, who might have been sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000 if convicted under a South African law against deliberate defamation of the police.

Despite widespread international opposition, South Africa continues to administer Namibia, also known as South-West Africa, under an outdated League of Nations mandate.

Frans Roets, the prosecutor, made no attempt to defend the counterinsurgency unit against the allegations of continuing atrocities. However, he said that Hurley, the archbishop of Durban, has “wallowed in the glamour attributed to him” by the case.

Hurley said later that he hoped his acquittal would help bring an end to the alleged atrocities by the 2,000-man Koevoet police unit in Namibia and also to the continuing conflict in the territory. Guerrillas of the South-West Africa People’s Organization have fought an 18-year war against South African rule.

Had the case come to trial, Hurley’s defense attorneys planned to cite dozens of specific atrocities by the police unit, most of them documented during previous trials and inquests or by sworn complaints, to show that the archbishop had reason to believe that his accusations were true and thus permitted under South African law.

Why the government of President Pieter W. Botha even took the case this far is a political puzzle, because Hurley now stands vindicated and the truth of his charges has been implicitly acknowledged.

When Hurley was charged in mid-October, political observers thought that the police and--probably--hard-line members of Botha’s Cabinet wanted to intimidate the Roman Catholic Church, which was then warning of growing unrest that eventually left nearly 200 dead.

But the church, 85% of whose 2 million members in South Africa are black, merely stepped up its criticism, preparing a well-documented report on police brutality in December that accused the regime of waging a virtual war in the country’s black townships.