Police Evict Strikers at S. Africa Hospital

More than 900 striking black student nurses were evicted from their dormitories at South Africa’s largest hospital here Tuesday by soldiers using dogs and rifles to prod them out of the hospital gates.

The tough government action was intended to break the weeklong strike by the student nurses and 800 non-medical workers at Baragwanath Hospital, which serves Johannesburg’s black satellite city of Soweto. But instead it brought an immediate warning from black staff physicians and senior nurses that they would join the protest today, probably closing Baragwanath, if the students and support workers were not reinstated.

The government dismissed more than 1,700 strikers last Friday.

The largely black General and Allied Workers Union, representing most of the non-medical workers, threatened sympathy strikes by its members at 10 other major hospitals, including several white facilities, in one of the potentially most serious confrontations yet between South Africa’s white minority government and its increasingly restive black majority.

As a precaution, the government reportedly has begun calling up physicians, nurses, medics and other hospital personnel in the army reserves and alerting others that also may be needed for active duty.

Hundreds of soldiers were moved into Baragwanath over the weekend to replace the student nurses and support personnel after they went on strike and were dismissed.

As troops, riot police and armored cars ringed the 2,700-bed hospital Tuesday morning, white soldiers took the nurses two and three at a time to their rooms to pack and then, pushing them along and prodding them with rifles, escorted them to the hospital gates.

When nurses refused to go when summoned to the dorms, the soldiers used snarling dogs to force them along.

European Guidelines

(In Brussels, meanwhile, the European Community issued stricter guidelines to companies of member nations employing black workers in South Africa, wire services quoted Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos as saying Tuesday.

(Poos, president of the Common Market’s ministerial council, said a 1977 code of conduct will be reinforced by urging firms to increase contacts, negotiate with black trade unions and bar discrimination against blacks in pay scales.

(Although not mandatory, the code has been a major part of the market’s efforts to bring an early end to apartheid. Reports submitted by 218 European companies employing more than 131,000 people in South Africa indicated a greater willingness to recognize black trade unions, whose membership in 1983 rose by one-third to 700,000.)

Six more blacks were reported killed in the country’s civil unrest as the violence, now in its 15th month, continued to spread to new areas Tuesday.

Three persons, two men and a woman, were shot and killed when police clashed with squatters at Leandra, 55 miles southeast of Johannesburg, according to police headquarters in Pretoria, the capital. Told they had to leave the area, the squatters looted and burned a beer hall and several stores to protest the threatened eviction. Police opened fire on the squatters with shotguns. A fourth black may have been shot to death by a white shop owner, witnesses said.

In Queenstown, the scene of bloody clashes over the weekend that left at least nine dead, a black man was shot and killed and five were seriously wounded in what police described as renewed rioting.

And at Molteno, another small town in eastern Cape province, 45 miles northwest of Queenstown, the body of a black woman who had been stabbed to death was found by the police as well as that of another woman, still alive but badly burned, who had been doused with gasoline and set afire, again apparently as a suspected government collaborator.

In Pretoria, the ruling National Party held a special secret caucus to hear President Pieter W. Botha outline steps the government has taken to curtail the continuing strife as well as the political, economic and social reforms he plans to put before Parliament when it convenes in January.

Botha told newsmen afterward that the caucus, made up of 280 white National Party members of Parliament, the President’s Council and provincial councils, had endorsed both his actions to restore order as well as the envisioned reforms, but he gave no details.

The Baragwanath strike began last week when support personnel--cooks, janitors, porters, laundry workers and others--were told that their request for a pay increase would not be considered by the government before March and would not be granted before July, three years since their last raise.

Their pay averages about $65 a month, and to cope with inflation approaching 20% a year they were seeking increases of nearly $40.

The student nurses joined the strike in sympathy and to protest the hospital’s strict discipline on them, including an 8 p.m. curfew. Nursing aides immediately threatened to strike in sympathy with the students if they are not reinstated.

The hospital’s staff physicians and senior nurses, a largely conservative group, have come under mounting pressure within the community to back the strikers, and when their attempts at mediation were rebuffed by hospital administrators both Monday and again Tuesday they warned that they, too, would strike if the dispute is not resolved today.

The workers’ union representatives are also seeking a court order that would reinstate them on grounds that they did not receive a fair hearing and that their dismissal was arbitrary.