Sweep Curbs Local Black Leadership

Jabu Ngwenya, Ismail Mononiat, Donovan Nadison, Amos Masondo, the Rev. Chris Nissen--none is a household name in South Africa, but in their communities these men are the leaders of the growing black protest against apartheid, and that has made them targets in the government’s crackdown on civil strife.

Ngwenya has been coordinating the Release Mandela Committee’s campaign to free political prisoners, a group named after the long-imprisoned patriarch of South Africa’s black nationalist movement, Nelson Mandela.

Of the others, Mononiat is on the executive committee of the Transvaal Indian Congress; Nadison is a leader of the Congress of South African Students in Port Elizabeth; Masondo is a key figure in both the Soweto Civic Assn. and the General and Allied Workers Union; Nissen is a minister in the small town of Graaff-Reinet in the eastern region of Cape province and has helped organize the United Democratic Front, the major multiracial coalition of anti-apartheid groups, there.

In Solitary Confinement

All have been detained without charges and are being held in solitary confinement under the sweeping powers given the police and army by President Pieter W. Botha two weeks ago when he declared a state of emergency in 36 magisterial districts around Johannesburg, in the Vaal River region south of here and in the troubled eastern Cape.

So far, almost 1,400 people have officially been detained, most of them leaders of the black community associations, political action groups, student organizations and labor unions that have formed much of the vanguard of the anti-apartheid movement in recent months. The detentions appear to be a government effort to destroy the United Democratic Front and as many of its 650 affiliates as possible.

Thirty-eight of the front’s national leaders had already been charged with treason and are facing trials that could lead to their execution or to long prison sentences.

That did not break the movement against South Africa’s system of racial separation or stem the continuing civil unrest. Still, one focus of the current crackdown is to remove hundreds of community leaders in the hope that the movement will fall apart and unrest will wither.

“They first tried to kill us through decapitation, arresting all our leaders,” the front’s acting publicity secretary, Murphison Morobe, said last week, “and now they are trying to kill us through dismemberment, detaining many officials of our affiliates.

“What the government fails to realize is that, if the United Democratic Front and its affiliates were not here giving expression to the anger people have toward the system, other groups would spring up to do so, and that if our leaders are detained or imprisoned, others will come forward to take their places. . . .

“Most violence results, in fact, from police action or from sheer rage, and without effective community leadership to control it, there is greater danger, not less, of this ‘spontaneous combustion.’ ”

This also worries moderate black leaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, last year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He warned last week that young blacks already see no point in negotiating with whites or pursuing a nonviolent road to reform. The detention now of so many local black leaders will compound this problem in several ways, Tutu said.

“The police have detained many of the very people who were dedicated to a peaceful solution of our problems and opposed to violence, who were trying to keep a lid on things,” he said. “Who is going to do that now?

“And when they get out, how are they going to feel about this government, about whites, about nonviolence and reconciliation? It is hard to see them emerging from detention full of Christian charity and patience.”

Thus, the government’s crackdown has already succeeded in decimating the leadership of the United Democratic Front and many of its affiliates--an estimated 80% of those held come from these groups and most of those not arrested have gone into hiding to avoid detention. Some organizations, including the front’s national headquarters, are no longer able to function because of the frequent police raids.

So thorough has the roundup been in some black townships that the leaders of the civic association, women’s organization, student and youth groups have all been detained.

Aim ‘to Intimidate’

“We thought of having a meeting to discuss the situation,” a minister in Duduza, southeast of Johannesburg, said last week, “but then we saw that only the clergy were left--everyone else was detained.

“The conclusion was inescapable that the government is trying to destroy the real leadership of the community. The aim is probably to intimidate us and make us docile, but it will take more than this to break the back of the struggle.”

An analysis by the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, a new group that monitors security arrests, found that 60% of the detentions were in eastern Cape province, 23% in the Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage area. It also indicated that youths, particularly members of the Congress of South African Students and various local youth congresses, accounted for 56% of those arrested.

Relatively few officials of the militant black-consciousness Azanian People’s Organization and its affiliates have been detained so far, leaving observers to wonder whether the government regards them as little threat to continued white rule.

Labor Leaders Held

At least 32 black labor leaders, mostly from unions affiliated with the United Democratic Front, have been arrested, several of them in the midst of negotiations with management.

Arrests under South Africa’s internal security laws have also been stepped up outside the emergency-rule areas, according to the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee and church groups, with the same groups as targets. They believe that total detentions exceed 2,000.

To the detentions under the emergency regulations and security laws must be added hundreds of arrests that have been made in the last two weeks on unrest-related criminal charges, such as public violence and participation in an illegal gathering. The Detainees’ Parents Support Committee has information on more than 700 such arrests but believes the actual total is 5 to 10 times that number.

“These are generally the rank-and-file members of the student organizations and the youth congresses, and they are arrested in medium-sized batches--wholesale, as it were, day after day,” a lawyer in Port Elizabeth said, asking not to be quoted by name.

“The intent is largely to get them off the street so that the security forces no longer have to contend with them, but also to intimidate the community as a whole by showing them the power of the state by taking away their children.”

The crackdown has other obvious aims--breaking the spiral of violence that has afflicted many communities for nearly a year, restoring local government and policing in what had become no-go areas, and reopening schools after long boycotts by students. However, the roundup of black leaders, as well as some Asian, Colored (mixed race) and white anti-apartheid activists, could have greater long-term impact, according to political analysts here.

“The police are attempting, very systematically, to dismantle the United Democratic Front and a number of related organizations,” said Tom Lodge, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand, who specializes in black politics.

“They seem to be getting exactly the right people--the leaders, the activists, the organizers--and are hitting every level from the national headquarters to civic associations and student groups in the smallest dorps (country towns). They seem to have very good intelligence and to have done a lot of homework. This was not a spur-of-the-moment operation, but one that had long and careful planning.”

That planning undoubtedly goes back almost a year to the emergence of the United Democratic Front as the leading anti-apartheid group in the country during elections last August for the Asian and Colored houses of the new three-chamber Parliament. A campaign by the front and its affiliates to boycott the elections because blacks were excluded from participation produced a voter turnout under 20%. This, government opponents argue, undermined the ruling white leadership’s claim that it was on the road to reform.

The front’s student groups organized school boycotts by hundreds of thousands of youths protesting inferior education and demanding student representative councils. Front-affiliated unions led a successful two-day general strike by black workers in Transvaal province in November. And other front organizations were instrumental in forcing the resignations of most of the black town councils, largely perceived in their communities as opportunists who collaborate with the government.

At its national conference in April, the front decided to broaden its base by recruiting new affiliates, to begin developing community groups that could replace the local governments that had resigned, to strengthen its ties with labor unions and to increase its activities in rural areas.

The leadership also agreed that campaigns of civil disobedience should be launched to force concessions from the Pretoria authorities on specific issues.

Offices, Homes Raided

President Botha’s men began their counteroffensive almost immediately, detaining more than 40 leaders of the United Democratic Front on the eve of the elections, detaining 30 others after the general strike, and raiding all the front’s offices and the homes of more than 100 members in February. The government has repeatedly threatened to ban the front as an illegal organization that is doing the work, above board, of the outlawed African National Congress.

Although the front’s top officials were awaiting trial, it and its affiliates continued to function, and the violence in the country’s black ghetto townships continued to worsen.

“The government clearly felt it needed a different strategy and concluded that a dramatic imposition of a state of emergency, backed by draconian regulations suspending almost all civil liberties, could accomplish what previous measures--themselves severe enough--failed to achieve,” John Dugard, a civil rights lawyer at the University of the Witwatersrand, said.

“These (emergency) powers are something the police have wanted for a long time because they basically remove all restraints, but police measures are not going to solve our problems. At best, the government can say it is restoring order and buying time for the political resolution, but it more likely is postponing that.

“If it wanted to talk, to whom could it talk? Who would be left? Every authentic black leader would be dead or in jail.”