Rebel Group Calls for Escalation of Battle : Hit White Areas, S. Africa Blacks Urged

The African National Congress, the main guerrilla group fighting South Africa’s minority white regime, is calling upon the nation’s 25 million blacks to take their fight against apartheid into white areas and to attack police and soldiers in their homes.

The congress’ Radio Freedom, in broadcasts from Ethiopia this week, called for black attacks on white residential neighborhoods and on white resorts during the coming holiday season in what it said should be a major escalation in the fight against apartheid.

The radio also urged blacks to arm themselves with guns and other weapons seized from whites in preparation for these assaults. Gangs of youths should attack patrolling police and soldiers to get their weapons, the broadcast said, and domestic servants should steal their employers’ guns.

“Everyone must feel that the country is at war and that only the dismantling of the apartheid regime will guarantee everlasting peace and friendship in our land,” Radio Freedom declared in the latest of a series of increasingly militant broadcasts reflecting the harder line taken by the congress over the past four months.

Four more blacks, including a 3-week-old baby, were killed near Durban in South Africa’s continuing civil unrest, police reported Thursday. Three appeared to be victims of the fierce feud between members of the United Democratic Front and supporters of Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. The fourth victim was killed by police gunfire after driving through a roadblock, according to police headquarters in Pretoria.

In Cape Town, police fought running battles through most of Thursday with black and Colored (mixed-race) youths who pelted cars and trucks with stones, threw firebombs at buses, attacked stores, banks and police posts with rocks.

Campaign Stepped Up

Although whites are now being caught up in the continuing civil unrest as targets of stone-throwing and occasional firebombs, only five have died in the past 13 months, compared with more than 750 blacks, Indians and Coloreds, most of them killed by security forces.

At a conference in Zambia in June, the congress decided to step up the intermittent, often desultory guerrilla campaign of sabotage and terrorist attacks it has waged since being outlawed 25 years ago and to begin hitting civilian, or “soft,” targets as well as government, military and police installations.

“The regime’s police and soldiers who have been massacring our people in the millions over the years still return to their homes and spend comfortable nights in the warmth of their beds,” Radio Freedom said this week. “These angels of death have always regarded our townships as foreign countries away from theirs where they can commit untold crimes and return to the calmness of their residential areas. That myth must be shattered. . . .

“We must attack them at their homes and holiday resorts just as we have been attacking black bootlickers at their homes. All along, it has only been black mothers who have been mourning. Now the time has come that all of us must mourn. White families must also wear black.”

Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, explained its strategy Thursday during a visit to Algeria: “The demise of apartheid is imminent, but we must improve our methods of fighting. We must arm our people so that they can fight back, and the struggle must be extended beyond the (black) townships to the rest of the country.”

Nearly 1 million South Africans, 90% of them whites, have gun permits and most have several weapons. With the continuing unrest, more whites have bought guns. But blacks are scrutinized carefully when they apply for gun permits, and generally only local officials and shopkeepers get them.

While police will probably interpret the call to steal whites’ guns as testimony to their success in blocking the flow of smuggled weapons into the country and in apprehending anti-government guerrillas, South Africa’s 4.9 million whites are certain to be frightened by the prospect that they might be attacked in their own homes and with their own firearms.