Rebels Attack Energy Plant in South Africa

Black nationalist guerrillas attacked one of South Africa’s most important energy installations early Thursday, firing as many as six large rockets at a complex that converts coal into oil and petrochemicals.

The attack, along with a series of land-mine explosions earlier this week, a gun battle Thursday in which four suspected guerrillas were killed and a surge in the number of bombings in major cities, appeared to be part of a new offensive by guerrillas of the African National Congress against the minority white government.

But Gen. Johan Coetzee, the South African police commissioner, said that the rockets failed to do any damage to the Sasol Ltd. coal-to-oil complex at Secunda, 60 miles southeast of Johannesburg.

He said that three of the suspected attackers were killed in a gun battle with the army while trying to escape across the border to neighboring Swaziland.

In another incident, four blacks were killed and two seriously wounded in a fierce, two-hour gunfight with police near Rustenburg, about 55 miles northeast of here, in Bophuthatswana, one of South Africa’s nominally independent tribal homelands. Police said they seized a large cache of arms and ammunition but refused to provide further details.

A black tractor driver died Thursday in northern Transvaal province after the fifth land-mine explosion this week near South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe.

Seven people were wounded in earlier explosions, but the tractor driver was the first fatality. Two more mines were found Thursday in a continuing police and army search of the area, bringing to four the number found and safely defused by the military since Tuesday.

Two more people were reported killed in the country’s continuing unrest. An 18-year-old Colored, or mixed-race, youth was killed, police headquarters in Pretoria said, when police fired shotguns to disperse a crowd stoning vehicles in Mitchell’s Plain, outside Cape Town.

The badly burned body of a black man, about 25 years old, apparently killed as a suspected government collaborator, was found at Dubu, a village in the Xhosa tribal homeland of Ciskei.

Arson, Stone Throwing

Unrest was reported Thursday from more than a dozen places around the country, according to police headquarters, which described it largely as arson attacks and stone-throwing but added that it also included repeated sniping at policemen in the black townships around Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth.

The land-mine explosions, all within a six-mile radius north of the town of Messina, have raised widespread fears among farmers in the border area about the safety of their families. They now question the effectiveness of the border security system with its electrified fencing and elaborate sensors.

“We remember the Rhodesian (the name of Zimbabwe before independence) war, and we know that these land mines are just the beginning of the attacks on us,” one farmer’s wife at Weipe, west of Messina, told journalists Thursday. “They could be coming for us in our beds in a few months.”

Psychological Blow

Although apparently unsuccessful, the bold rocket attack upon the Sasol Ltd. complex at Secunda was another psychological blow for white South Africans--a reminder of the vulnerability to guerrilla attacks of even their most closely guarded areas and an indication of the willingness of the African National Congress guerrillas to take big risks in hope of spectacular results.

Coetzee said that four to six 122-millimeter rockets were fired at the Sasol plant about 1 a.m. but caused no damage.

Later, a security policeman at Piet Retief, about 110 miles southeast of Secunda near the border with Swaziland, spotted what appeared to be the insurgents’ pickup truck and began to pursue it. After coming under gunfire, he forced it off the road, according to Coetzee, and its occupants ran into a grove of trees.

Troops then arrived and, at dawn, tracked the guerrillas to a spot half a mile from the Swaziland border and killed them in brief gun battle. Secunda has come under attack twice before--in 1980 when limpet mines caused about $1.5 million in damage and again in 1983 when there was no damage--and the $6-billion strategic complex is now one of the most heavily guarded in South Africa. Coetzee said one of the three men killed had been involved in the 1980 attack on the complex.

Sasol’s three oil-from-coal plants have the capacity to produce about 42% of the country’s annual petroleum requirements, enabling South Africa to substitute its plentiful coal for expensive oil and thus beat an international embargo on oil sales.