Cape Town Whites Fire on Blacks : Homeowners Shoot at Youths Hurling Gas Bombs, Stones

Racial violence spread today to white areas for the first time in South Africa’s yearlong wave of unrest with whites opening fire on black and mixed-race youths who hurled gasoline bombs, police said.

Whites in Cape Town’s Kraaifontein district fired revolvers and shotguns at about 100 youths hurling gasoline bombs and stones at their homes in the first racial attack on white houses since countrywide rioting erupted in September last year, officials said.

The homeowners drove off the mob before police could arrive, one resident said.

Two men of mixed-race, or “Coloreds” as they are officially designated in white-ruled South Africa, later told police that they had been hit by shotgun pellets but there were no reports of other injuries.

In the town of Amalinda in eastern Cape province, two white residences were attacked by black youths hurling gasoline bombs, and the Durban home of Fatima Meer was firebombed. Meer is an activist against the South African system of racial discrimination and separation known as apartheid.

2 Rioters Killed

In Cape Town’s Elsies River suburb, police said they fired pistols to disperse a large mob of mixed-race people throwing rocks, killing two of the rioters and seriously wounding another.

Police closed four main roads in Cape Town and fired shotguns, rubber bullets and tear gas in repeated clashes with rioters in the ninth day of violence in and around the port.

Police said they arrested at least 35 people in scattered overnight violence, mostly near Cape Town.

Meanwhile, the government warned today that the approval of sanctions by the U.S. Congress would impede the process of racial reform in South Africa and harm the economies of other African countries.

Deputy Foreign Minister Louis Nel told reporters, a week before expected final congressional action on sanctions legislation, that the U.S. choice “is between sanctions on the one hand and political, social and economic progress on the other.”

‘Catastrophic’ Consequences

Nel distributed a document outlining potential “catastrophic” consequences of sanctions on neighboring black countries, which rely heavily on South Africa’s economy.

He repeated a warning by the white-minority government that if sanctions undermine South Africa’s economy, the government will have to send home many of the estimated 1.5 million foreign black workers.

While arguments that South African blacks and blacks from neighboring countries would be hurt first were not new, Nel said for the first time that sanctions could sidetrack what the white-minority government views as a racial reform program.

“Let us be practical: We cannot do what we want to do and contend with the impact of sanctions or disinvestment at the same time,” Nel said.

Some South African black leaders and U.S. politicians have called for sanctions as an effective means of pressuring South Africa’s 5 million whites to grant equal right to the country’s 24-million-member black majority.