16 Dissidents Go on Trial for Treason in South Africa

Sixteen leaders of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement went on trial here Monday, charged with the capital crime of high treason, in the country’s most important political trial in two decades.

The government is attempting to prove that, as leaders of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups, the 16 had formed “a revolutionary alliance” and were plotting the violent overthrow of the state by making the country ungovernable through prolonged civil unrest. The government also contends that the black and Indian defendants were working with the outlawed African National Congress.

If convicted of treason, the defendants could be sentenced to death. But rather than guilty verdicts for the 15 men and one woman on trial here, the government’s main goal appears to be the destruction of the United Democratic Front as the country’s major anti-apartheid organization.

The defense is trying to use the trial to broaden the right of political protest here, arguing that the defendants were well within the limits of political criticism of the government that are traditionally allowed to whites.

In other developments Monday, Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, began extending the detention without charge or trial of hundreds of people detained in the past two weeks under sweeping, state-of-emergency regulations. Police said that a total of 1,428 people have been detained but that 109 have now been released.

In Durban, the home of Amichand Rajbansi--a member of the national Cabinet and the chief minister of the Indian chamber in the tricameral Parliament--was attacked with a hand grenade late Sunday. No one was injured, and damage was limited.

3rd Grenade Attack

The grenade attack was the third recently on members of the Indian and Colored, or mixed-race, chambers in Parliament. In May, a Colored Cabinet minister was seriously injured in a similar attack, and another leading Colored politician narrowly escaped injury when a grenade was hurled into his house in Cape Town.

“I have a pretty good idea who is responsible,” Rajbansi said later Monday. “It seems they were just waiting for me to come back. . . . But their calculations are wrong--this has just strengthened my resolve to follow what I believe is the correct course for this country.”

Although Rajbansi refused to make more specific accusations, his political associates saw the grenade attack as an attempt at revenge for the assassination last week of Victoria Mxenge, one of the defense lawyers in the Pietermaritzburg treason trial.

Police apparently have made little progress in tracing the four black men who allegedly shot Mxenge in the head and then split her skull with an axe. Anti-apartheid activists in Durban, angered by the murder, are blaming “the system,” as they call the minority white regime and the Indian and Colored politicians like Rajbansi who are seen as collaborating with it.

Violence in Durban

Later Monday, youths in three of Durban’s black ghetto townships attacked police, stoned cars, buses and trucks, set fire to schools and looted shops in an spasm of violence, unusual for Durban, which has been largely free from unrest. Local observers attributed the violence to Mxenge’s murder. Police said they used tear gas to disperse mobs in the townships.

Justice A. John Milne, president of the Natal Provincial Bench of the South African Supreme Court, opened the treason trial here with a brief tribute to Mxenge. “It grieves me,” he said, “to have to record that one of the most recent victims of the tragic and deplorable violence that is afflicting our country is Mrs. Victoria Mxenge, an attorney of this court, who was one of those representing the accused in this case.”

Crackdown on Coalition

The treason trial, which could last up to two years, is part of the government’s crackdown on the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 650 anti-apartheid groups around the country. With a second treason-and-murder case, involving 22 of the front’s officials, due to go to trial in September or October, the government has effectively paralyzed the organization’s top leadership. Local leaders by the hundreds are, meanwhile, being detained without charge under the current state of emergency.

Those on trial here include Archie Gumede, 70, a Durban lawyer, and Albertina Sisulu, 66, a retired nurse and the wife of jailed African National Congress leader Walter Sisulu; Gumede and Albertina Sisulu are co-presidents of the United Democratic Front. Other defendants include the Rev. Frank Chikane, a theologian, who was vice president of the Transvaal province committee of the front, and Cassim Saloojee, a social worker and the front’s treasurer. Dr. Aubrey Mokoena, chairman of the Release Mandela Committee, is also on trial along with several other leaders in the Indian community and five labor union officials whose organizations are allied with the front.

In legal arguments at the opening of the trial--the most important since black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason in 1964--the head of the legal defense team, Ishmail Mahomed, urged Milne to quash the whole indictment or order the prosecution to reduce its scope. Mahomed argued that the prosecution had linked together wholly unrelated events in an attempt to establish a conspiracy and that most of those actions were, in fact, normal political protests.

‘Release Mandela’

Citing the distribution of a pamphlet calling for Mandela’s release that is the basis for including Mewa Ramgobin, 52, an insurance broker, in the alleged conspiracy, Mahomed said: “Why should anyone distributing a leaflet like this be accused of trying to overthrow the state by violence? Since when does anyone go to jail for saying, ‘Release Mandela’?

“Surely, there must be a lot of people who would be advocating the release of Nelson Mandela precisely to avoid overthrowing the state by violence,” Mahomed continued. And Milne commented, “For example, the leader of the official (parliamentary) opposition.”

Mahomed broadened his argument to stress that, despite its strict security laws, South Africa has a tradition of “furious and passionate debate on its national destiny” and that the anti-apartheid movement falls well within it.

Milne commented that, on the basis of two pamphlets that are supposed to tie Ramgobin and George Sewpersahd to the alleged conspiracy, “I see difficulties in how the distribution of these two documents could constitute evidence of intent to overthrow the state by violence.”

Independent Jurist

Regarded as one of South Africa’s most independent judges and keenest legal minds, Milne also appeared open to many of Mahomed’s arguments that the basic indictment against the 16 is too loosely constructed to establish that a “revolutionary alliance” was ever formed or that it planned to overthrow the government and carried out actions to achieve that goal.

South Africa’s largest and longest treason trial began in 1956 and took four years to complete--when the court acquitted the 156 defendants.