S. Africa Blames Agitators for Camp Riots

Blaming agitators for the two days of riots that left at least 16 dead at the Crossroads squatters’ shantytown outside Cape Town, South Africa’s minister for law and order warned Wednesday that police will take even tougher action to curb future unrest.

Louis le Grange, the law and order minister, said the police have orders to halt immediately any attempt to “defy the maintenance of state authority” and will not tolerate “any violence, whatever the reasons, whatever the circumstances.”

Le Grange’s hard-line declaration followed the roundup of more than 15 anti-apartheid activists, at least six of whom will be charged today with treason for opposing South Africa’s policies of racial segregation.

Lacking in Conscience

Referring to the clashes Monday and Tuesday at Crossroads, Le Grange said that “certain people have no conscience and have instigated communities to violent confrontations with the police . . . in calculated attacks on state authority.”

Only a few isolated incidents were reported at Crossroads on Wednesday as a truce appeared to be holding between the police and militants in the black community of 65,000. Barricades were removed from the highways around the shantytown in the morning, and later the police retreated from the settlement’s perimeter.

Timo Bezuidenhoud, Cape Town’s commissioner for cooperation and development, who is in charge of black affairs in the region, said, “We are close to working our problems out, given good faith on both sides. Further violence must be avoided because the consequences would be truly tragic.”

The bodies of three more blacks killed in the fighting were found Wednesday, bringing the official death toll to 16. Police spokesmen acknowledged that the total number of casualties might be twice that figure when all are known. The police said that at least 237 persons, including six police officers, had been injured in the clashes.

The conflict was set off by rumors that the government intended to forcibly remove the residents of Crossroads, about 10 miles east of Cape Town, to a new settlement being built for blacks about 25 miles east of the capital, and that some would be returned to the rural tribal homelands they left to seek work in the metropolitan area.