First Soldier Killed by S. African Rioters

A white soldier, stabbed to death by black rioters near Port Elizabeth, has become the South African army’s first fatality since it was ordered into violence-torn black townships a year ago.

Cpl. Johan Schoeman, 19, was attacked late Sunday afternoon in Kwazakele, a black ghetto township outside Port Elizabeth, defense headquarters in Pretoria announced Monday. He was killed while pursuing on foot youths who had pelted his patrol’s armored car with rocks. Another soldier who tried to rescue him was stabbed.

Schoeman was the sixth white killed in 14 months of civil unrest in which more than 750 have died in South Africa. His death is certain to add to the raging controversy over the use of troops to combat domestic violence and over calls on young whites to refuse to serve in the army.

Demand for Withdrawal

After the army’s delayed announcement of Schoeman’s death, the End Conscription Campaign repeated its demand that troops be withdrawn from the black townships.

“They are playing a directly repressive role,” the committee said, “and (this) forcibly draws young conscripts into the conflict.

“Give them the choice as to whether they want to fight and die for apartheid,” the committee added. It urged an end to the two years’ military duty served by all white South African men beginning at age 18.

South Africa’s whites feel increasingly threatened by the unrest as the anger of the country’s blacks, Asians and Coloreds (persons of mixed-race) boils out of their ghettos and spreads into white areas.

In Cape Town on Monday, about 60 Colored youths, angered by police action to break up a protest meeting at a local high school, stormed through the racially mixed community of Wynberg, smashing the windows of white-owned shops and the windshields of cars.

Homes, Cars Targeted

The homes of whites near Johannesburg and East London have been hit by firebombs, apparently thrown by black youths, several times in the last month. White motorists have also recently become targets of firebombs around Cape Town and in eastern Cape province.

The African National Congress, the main guerrilla group fighting South Africa’s minority white regime and its apartheid system of racial separation, has called upon the country’s 25 million blacks to “take the battle right into their (whites’) homes, into their kitchens and bedrooms.”

In a broadcast on Radio Freedom from Ethiopia last week, the African National Congress urged blacks to attack police and army patrols and to seize their weapons. It also asked domestic workers to steal their employers’ weapons.

“All along, it has only been black mothers who have been mourning,” the broadcast said. “Now, the time has come that all of us must mourn. White families must also wear black. 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 country.”

Before the Kwazakele clash in which Schoeman was killed, five whites had died as a result of the unrest here, according to police reports.

Stoned by Rioters

Three of them--a baby, a woman and a man--were killed in separate incidents during the last year when their cars were stoned by rioting youths attacking autos passing black areas.

Two more men were stabbed to death and their bodies then burned last month after they drove their car into a crowd of black mourners returning from funerals for victims of earlier unrest. Thirteen black youths were seriously injured.