11 Blacks Hacked to Death in S. African Tribal Clash

At least 11 blacks were hacked to death with machetes today in a bitter tribal clash in a densely populated shantytown south of Durban, police and hospital sources said.

Five bodies were brought to a Durban hospital and police found six others at Malagazi, where 20,000 squatters, most of them black, have set up shacks on hilly scrubland.

The victims had been hacked to death with pangas, a type of machete, in the fighting between Zulus and Pondos.

Police said the battle broke out after months of simmering tension between Zulus and Pondos. Zulus want Pondos, whose tribe originates in the eastern cape, to get out of Malagazi. The stabbing of a Pondo chief apparently provoked the battles.

Local shopkeepers told the Reuters news agency that many of the black squatters were fleeing the area in fear of further violence.

Police described Malagazi as tense and said they were maintaining a strong presence there after pleading with the squatters to end the violence and allow them to investigate the deaths.

Zulus and Pondos claimed that their tribes were victims of unprovoked attacks, police said.

Elsewhere, police arrested 29 people overnight for stone-throwing and arson in black townships. There were no new reports of deaths related to racial violence.

Mobs of blacks stoned police vehicles in Queenstown and Hanover in Cape province, police said. In Soweto, the black township near Johannesburg, police said vehicles were damaged by stones.

Arsonists set fire to two black schools in Kwanobuhle, a gasoline bomb damaged a delivery vehicle in Langa and an arsonist set fire to a home in Stutterheim, police said. All those communities are in Cape province.

Police also said the Muslim Assembly Center in Phillipi near Cape Town was hit by a gasoline bomb that caused extensive damage.

In another development, representatives of striking black hospital workers warned that their dispute could spread and lead to a breakdown in health care. Doctors and nurses not involved in the strike demanded that the strikers who were dismissed for refusing to return to work be reinstated or they too would strike, despite threats of tough legal action against them.

Hospital superintendent Dr. Chris Van den Heever agreed to meet a small group of about 300 doctors and nurses still working at the hospital today to discuss the crisis.