30 More Die at Durban; Gandhi Shrine Attacked

Fierce rioting continued Friday in the black townships around the South African port city of Durban with 30 more blacks reported killed in the fourth day of fighting, arson and looting here.

The violence intensified as angry Indians, scores of whose homes and stores have been destroyed, began to counterattack, arming themselves with pistols, rifles and shotguns and forming vigilante groups to protect their communities and strike back at the blacks.

A shrine to the late Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi was badly damaged in fighting between blacks and the Asian ethnic minority.

Uncontrolled Violence

Although reinforced by combat troops, police were unable to halt the rioting in major black townships near the city--Umlazi, Kwamashu and Inanda--or to prevent its spread northward to two other townships, Clermont and Kwangedzi, near Pinetown. New groups of rioters seemed to form as quickly as police dispersed others with tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot.

After four days, the death toll in this area was at least 55, all blacks except for two Asians, according to police, hospital and mortuary officials. The Durban violence is the worst in a year of unrest that has killed more than 500 people nationwide.

Hospitals and clinics here have treated more than 1,200 injured. At least 300 Indian families, and perhaps two to three times that number of blacks, are believed to be homeless.

A crisis committee was formed Friday in Durban--with representatives from all races, the major churches and a number of political groups, including the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party--to prevent further violence. Its first goal is a stronger police presence between the blacks and the Asians to prevent further communal clashes.

“The deaths we have seen so far could be multiplied 10, 20, 50 times over unless this violence is stopped now,” warned Billy Nair of the United Democratic Front, the multiracial coalition of anti-apartheid groups.

“The danger is very, very grave, and the explosion could engulf this whole city and sweep across the entire country,” Nair said. “It would not just be a civil war but a race war.”

On Friday, blacks and Indians clashed repeatedly along the border of the Indian township of Phoenix, north of Durban, and near Inanda, a black township where Asians had also lived until this week, when they were burned out and driven away.

Gandhi Shrine

The focus of much of this fighting was the shrine in Phoenix to Gandhi--known as the Mahatma--and his belief in nonviolence and racial harmony. Gandhi had established the settlement just after the turn of the century, when he lived in South Africa, and it had become a community center.

The clashes began when more than 300 Indians, armed with clubs, tried to drive out 60 blacks who had been given refuge in the Gandhi settlement after the earlier unrest.

“They wanted revenge,” said Mewa Ramgobin, director of the center and the husband of Gandhi’s granddaughter. “They wanted to make these blacks suffer, as their families had suffered. . . .”

This, in turn, brought an attack by blacks living in a nearby shantytown, and led to the fighting with stones, clubs, machetes and occasional guns that continued through most of the day.

Documents, Books Destroyed

The library and school at the settlement were burned late Friday; the houses where the blacks have been staying were razed, and Gandhi’s own home was looted and set afire--with many documents, books and photographs destroyed. Only the settlement’s clinic was spared.

“Mahatma Gandhi’s great bequest to us was destroyed,” said Ramgobin, a leading member of the United Democratic Front, who is now on trial on treason charges, “and I am not talking about what is tangible--the documents, the books and so forth--but about his ideals and his spirit.”

Indians were bitter Friday about the attacks on them by blacks and the destruction of more than 300 of their homes and stores. Many said the alliance they had tried to forge against apartheid and white rule had been destroyed; others formed themselves into more than 20 vigilante groups, each of 150 men, who armed themselves and prepared to guard their communities.

“If they are angry about the (apartheid) system, we understand and are with them,” said Dave Maharaj, a teachers’ union official, who was burned out of his home Thursday, “but there is no excuse for this violence against us.”

C.R. Pillay, an English teacher at the Gandhi settlement, said the reason for the attacks by blacks lay in the “great frustration they now feel because of high unemployment, rising prices, the political situation in general. . . . We were the nearest target and the most vulnerable.”

Warning by Buthelezi

The intensified violence brought a sharp warning from Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of the country’s 6 million Zulus, who predominate in the Durban area, that far-reaching political, economic and social reforms are urgently needed if the country is not to plunge into civil war.

“Just as it is wrong for blacks to turn their anger into murder and destruction,” Buthelezi said, “it is wrong for whites to maintain a political system in which rising black anger is an inevitable consequence of whites’ refusal to share power.”

Although rumors abound now that President Pieter W. Botha will soon announce major steps toward significantly reforming apartheid, South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial separation, government officials refused on Friday to comment.

One widespread rumor, however, has Botha scrapping “group areas” laws, which continue to segregate much of South African life. Another has him unconditionally releasing the jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela to participate in a national forum on the country’s future.

Buthelezi sent several thousand Zulu tribesmen, armed with spears and shields, into Kwamashu and Umlazi on Friday afternoon in order to halt the rioting there.

The move could lead to more conflict, however, because Buthelezi has blamed his political rivals for the trouble and his Zulu warriors, called impis, are noted for the ruthlessness with which they deal with enemies.

The unrest here began with the assassination 10 days ago of Victoria Mxenge, a prominent black civil rights lawyer, and escalated when a memorial service for her in Umlazi was disrupted this week, reportedly by Buthelezi supporters angered over a rival group’s political activities in what they regard as their territory. Mxenge is to be buried near King William’s Town in a funeral Sunday that will be attended by leading anti-apartheid officials from all over the country.

Meanwhile, blacks began organizing consumer boycotts of white-owned businesses to start Monday in Johannesburg, the country’s business center, and in Pretoria, the capital, in an effort to force the government to end the state of emergency imposed three weeks ago in several regions of the country.

Black consumer boycotts are already under way through much of eastern Cape province and are proving effective there.

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