Durban Rioting Worsens; Blacks Raid Asian Towns

Seventeen blacks were killed and hundreds of other people were injured Thursday as police battled black rioters throughout the day around the port city of Durban, in some of South Africa’s worst bloodshed in a year of civil strife.

Combat troops were ordered into the black townships north and south of the Indian Ocean port, situated about 300 miles southeast of Johannesburg, after police were unable to restore order and could barely contain the rioting.

For the second day, thousands of youths rampaged through the black ghetto townships of Umlazi, Kwamashu and Inanda--burning government buildings, looting stores and then setting them ablaze, and stoning cars and trucks.

Then they began to attack Indians living in Inanda and in Phoenix, a nearby Asian township, setting fire to their homes and stores until complete neighborhoods were razed. Hundreds of the Asian families fled for their lives, and the men began arming themselves with guns and clubs as they went back to try to protect their property.

The violence, which has taken the lives of at least 24 people since Tuesday night, is the worst since police shot 20 blacks to death in a funeral procession at Langa, near Uitenhage in the eastern region of Cape province in March, touching off several days of intense rioting.

So great were the casualties Thursday, with hundreds of badly injured people brought to Durban-area hospitals, that the precise death toll was uncertain. Police said they could confirm only eight deaths Thursday, but hospitals reported 17; seven people had died earlier.

By nightfall, the two major hospitals in the area reported having treated more than 400 people, nearly half of them for gunshot wounds, over the previous 24 hours.

With pillars of dense smoke billowing from the riot areas, police and troops in armored cars sealing the townships off, military helicopters hovering overhead and hospitals full of casualties, Durban had the appearance of a city at war.

But President Pieter W. Botha said in Pretoria that he sees no need at present to extend to Durban the 19-day-old state of emergency, which gives the security forces virtual martial-law powers.

“We are quite capable of controlling the situation,” Botha declared.

The government, however, did introduce tough new regulations elsewhere in the country that make it a crime for students to be out of their classrooms during school hours. The step was an effort to end prolonged school boycotts by black youths.

Other new regulations impose overnight curfews on many of the black townships in eastern Cape province, bar non-residents from entering them and prohibit the possession of gasoline outside a fuel tank.

In other developments Thursday, a mob of about 100 black youths stormed through a shopping center at Pietermaritzburg, north of Durban, breaking windows and looting stores after a memorial service for Victoria Mxenge, a prominent black civil rights lawyer, whose assassination in Umlazi last week has touched off the violence.

In Cape Town, police used whips to break up an anti-government demonstration by 1,000 university students, most of them white, who were demanding that the state of emergency be lifted. They had been marching to the president’s official residence in Cape Town with such placards as “Botha is a terrorist” and “Forward we shall march to a people’s government.” Twenty-two were arrested.

Police headquarters in Pretoria reported that the number of people held under the emergency regulations permitting detention without charges had been reduced to 865 from the total of 1,485 originally detained; the others have been released, according to the police figures.

Until this week, the Durban area had been largely unaffected by the civil unrest of the past year, but trouble flared after Mxenge’s murder. Most blacks were angry and blamed ultrarightist death squads, if not the government itself. Memorial services, school boycotts and demonstrations were organized to protest the assassination, leading to the clashes with police.

Umlazi and Kwamashu both lie within the Zulu tribal homeland, Kwazulu, and Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader and Kwazulu’s chief minister, was angered by these protests and the spread of the unrest to the area, informed black political observers in Durban said.

On Wednesday night, after the chief denounced the protests, 400 of his supporters--armed with spears, clubs and shields-- attacked participants in a memorial service for Mxenge, causing many casualties. Nearby riot police did not intervene, according to clergymen present.

“If Buthelezi orders his impis (Zulu warriors) to keep things quiet, all the fighting will stop tomorrow,” a Roman Catholic priest in Umlazi said late Thursday. “The restoration of order depends more on Buthelezi than on the police and army.”

Durban’s Asian community appears to have become the target for the rioters largely out of the blacks’ rage over apartheid, the widespread unemployment among black youths and a longstanding feeling that Indians, many of them shopkeepers, are exploiting them and have compromised politically with the minority white regime. Most of South Africa’s 900,000 Indians live in Natal province, many of them around Durban.

Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, rushed to Durban on Thursday morning to confer both with Buthelezi and with Amichand Rajbansi, the chief minister of the Indian House of Delegates in the tricameral Parliament. Later, he ordered military reinforcements airlifted from other parts of the country to bolster the police, but he ruled out any extension of the state of emergency to Durban.

“I am satisfied that the police and security forces are gaining control,” Le Grange said, “although the situation in Inanda is still not stable.”

Amid the fire and chaos of Inanda and Phoenix on Thursday, Indian families streamed out of the two communities seeking safety elsewhere. Trucks made trip after trip to rescue the terrified Asians and take them to shelter at community halls. Many families lost everything except what they could carry.

The first Indian to die in a year of unrest was killed Wednesday, but no further fatalities were reported among the large ethnic group Thursday. A number of people were injured.

However, a dozen families from Inanda who were trapped there by the rioters were rescued and given refuge by their black neighbors until they could be rescued, Asian sources in Durban said.