South Africa Arrests Editor for Interview of ‘Banned’ Black Nationalist Leader

A leading South African newspaper editor was arrested Friday under the country’s severe security laws for publishing a lengthy interview this week with the president of the outlawed African National Congress.

Anthony H. Heard, 47, editor of the Cape Times, the country’s oldest newspaper, was charged in Cape Town with quoting Oliver Tambo, the congress president, in defiance of South African laws prohibiting the press from publishing anything said by a “banned person.”

If convicted, Heard could be jailed for up to three years on this charge, and he is still open to more serious accusations, including “furthering the aims” of the African National Congress, for which he might be sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Heard, the most outspoken and liberal of South Africa’s beleaguered newspaper editors, immediately declared his readiness to go to jail in defense of a free press and the people’s right to full information on the country’s deepening crisis.

“There are very few things I am prepared to risk prison for, and one of them is freedom of expression in the press,” Heard said after his arraignment before a Cape Town magistrate. “I believe in maximum information. . . . I am not a propagandist for any cause, but I am a whole-hearted advocate of free expression.”

The 3,600-word article in question-and-answer format was the first substantial interview with Tambo published and freely available here since the African National Congress was outlawed in 1960. Heard justified its publication, a bold defiance of the country’s security laws, as “a contribution to peaceful solutions in South Africa in a matter of overwhelming public importance.”

Two other South African papers, the Sunday Times, the country’s largest, and the Johannesburg Star, had obtained interviews with Tambo earlier, but their editors decided not to defy the government by publishing the stories.

‘Let People Decide’

Heard, who is white, said he believes it is time “to let people decide for themselves” on the critical issues facing the country. “We’ve got the African National Congress according to everyone else,” he said, “but not the ANC according to the ANC. Why should one be afraid of listening to them? They might have something useful to say.”

Tambo, described by Heard as “an essentially moderate black leader,” was quoted in the interview as urging the government of President Pieter W. Botha to create a climate for talks with the African National Congress on resolving South Africa’s current problems.

“There is always a possibility of a truce,” Tambo told Heard in the London interview last week. “It would be very, very easy if, for example, we started negotiations.”

Heard, who had acknowledged at the outset the serious possibility of government prosecution, was arrested at his office in downtown Cape Town at lunchtime Friday by two lieutenants from the security police. Then he was hustled past picketing staff members holding placards declaring, “What’s the Government Afraid of?” and “Hands Off Our Editor!”

In court, he was arraigned and released on his own recognizance to reappear in a month.

The action against Heard, taken on the personal orders of Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, follows other government steps recently to stop South Africans, including delegations of white students and theologians, from talking with the African National Congress and to impose tight restrictions on reporting of the country’s continuing civil unrest.

On Friday, police in Cape Town took into custody seven journalists, two of them from the Cape Times, and a member of the Cape Provincial Council from the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party. All of them were questioned for 90 minutes about their presence in one of the city’s riot-torn Colored, or mixed-race, suburbs, although there was no unrest there and thus under the new rules for press coverage they were entitled to be there. All were later released.

In Pretoria, Louis Nel, the deputy minister of information, renewed the government’s criticism of international news coverage of the continuing unrest here. He accused foreign television crews of filming arson attacks staged for their benefit, paying children to burn their schoolbooks and helping a man escape from police custody.

Offers No Details

Nel provided no details to substantiate the allegations--except to say that the South African police had an informer, a South African, working with a foreign television network, to spy on the international press.