South Africa Bars Students’ Meeting With Black Guerrilla Group

Confiscating the passports of eight white students who had planned to meet with the outlawed African National Congress this weekend, the South African government said Thursday that it will prohibit further contacts between the black nationalist movement and private citizens as a threat to national security.

Ron B. Miller, deputy foreign minister, said South Africa is at war with the guerrilla group and cannot allow citizens to meet with it, even to promote reconciliation between whites and blacks. Those violating the ban, he said, could be prosecuted and jailed.

In recent weeks, leaders of the white liberal opposition Progressive Federal Party and top businessmen have met with the African National Congress. The government of President Pieter W. Botha, now under as much criticism at home as abroad for its handling of the country’s continuing crisis, took action to prevent expansion of such private contacts with the outlawed rebel movement.

Would Gain Stature

Had the students from Stellenbosch University, the country’s leading Afrikaans institution, succeeded in their meeting, other groups would certainly have followed, and the congress, banned here in 1960, would have gained even wider acceptance as the authentic voice of South Africa’s black majority.

Meanwhile, two more blacks were killed in what appears, according to police reports, to be an upsurge of violence here, concentrated around Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth. The latest violence came just as government officials were boasting that the 14 months of unrest was coming to an end.

One man was shot and killed in Athlone, a Colored, or mixed-race, suburb of Cape Town that has been the scene of daily clashes between police and youths for the past week. Police said the victim was part of a stone-throwing mob they dispersed by firing shotguns. The second man was fatally wounded by soldiers who fired assault rifles at rioters burning a house in Little Soweto, a black settlement outside Port Elizabeth on the Indian Ocean coast.

Tear Gas, Birdshot

The police said they fought running battles with Colored youths all around the Cape peninsula Thursday, repeatedly firing tear gas grenades and birdshot. In one incident in Athlone, two white members of Parliament from the Progressive Federal Party who were monitoring police actions had to dive for cover as police opened fire on nearby youths chanting anti-government slogans. A British reporter, Michael Hornsby of the London Times, was wounded in the back and neck by birdshot.

The government may lose further support for its decision to bar further private contacts with the African National Congress. While some conservatives here were angered by the talks between the guerrilla leaders and the Progressive Federal Party and the businessmen, most white South Africans, anguished over the continuing civil unrest, saw such meetings as a possible way out of the deepening crisis.

‘Staggeringly Stupid’

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the Progressive Federal Party, who met with congress officials last weekend in Lusaka, Zambia, called the decision to prohibit the trip by the Stellenbosch students “staggeringly stupid” and “justifiable only in a police state.”

Members of the student parliament at Stellenbosch University, alma mater of six of South Africa’s eight prime ministers, gave an overwhelming vote of confidence to student leaders who would have made the trip. The government, to its embarrassment, found its only defenders in the extreme right-wing Conservative and Herstigte Nasionale parties.

Miller, the deputy foreign minister, reiterated Botha’s criticism of meetings with the African National Congress as “disloyal.” He said that channels are now open for the group to talk directly to the government and that it could participate in a government-organized forum on the future of the country if it foreswore violence. The guerrillas have rejected that condition as long as South Africa retains its system of apartheid.

Student Leader Replies

Government comments that the students should leave such affairs to the government brought an immediate retort from Hennie Bester, leader of the Stellenbosch delegation, who said, “If we are old enough to bear arms, aren’t we old enough as well to talk to those against whom we are now said to be fighting? Only those afraid of peace and reconciliation would be against such talks.”

In Pretoria, the government indicated it would proceed at dawn today with the execution of Benjamin Moloisi, 31, a black poet and supporter of the African National Congress who was convicted of murder in the 1982 killing of a security policeman.

Moloisi has admitted his involvement in planning the killing, but denied carrying it out. He said he had been coerced by congress guerrillas. Botha earlier this week turned down an appeal for a review of the death sentence despite calls here and abroad for clemency.

Moloisi spent his last hours writing poetry and rehearsing a freedom song he composed and plans to sing on the gallows at Pretoria Prison.

“He is strong, stronger than ever,” his tearful mother, Pauline, said late Thursday after a 20-minute final visit. “He will die like Jesus died, for his people.