No ‘Pictoral Evidence’ of Brutality : S. Africa Restricts Media but Violence Is Unabated

When South African policemen shot and killed 20 blacks during a funeral procession at Langa eight months ago, the world reacted with outrage, denouncing the minority white government here and its apartheid policies.

But when policemen shot 14 blacks on a Sunday night in Queenstown last month and 13 more during a peaceful protest march in Mamelodi outside Pretoria four days later, the incidents went almost unnoticed abroad.

The main reason for that muted international reaction, many here believe, was the restrictions the South African government imposed a month ago--before the Queenstown shootings--that sharply limit the news media’s coverage of the country’s continuing civil strife.

“The government and the police seem to believe that if no one is watching, they can get away with murder, sometimes literally,” said Jan van Eck, a member of the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party’s unrest-monitoring team in Cape Town.

“Barring the news media from the major unrest areas has removed the independent witnesses to the police action--really a war now--against our black and Colored (mixed-race) communities. And preventing the taking of any photographs or videotapes of those actions has ensured there will be no pictorial evidence of the increasing police brutality here.”

Using his broad powers under the state of emergency decreed in July, Louis le Grange, the minister for law and order, prohibited photographers and television crews from being at the scene of any unrest in the districts--now 30 in all--under emergency rule. And he required reporters to obtain police permission to be present during any unrest or police action to deal with it.

Le Grange justified the action with the argument that the presence of journalists, particularly television crews and press photographers, had become “a catalyst to further violence.”

“While the government has no intention of curtailing the right of the public to be informed of current events,” Le Grange said, “it has decided to curb the presence of television and other audio-visual equipment during unrest situations in emergency areas.”

Policemen during the last month have frequently interpreted Le Grange’s orders as prohibiting all journalists from entering unrest areas.

At Mamelodi, a black township outside Pretoria, the capital, which is not under emergency rule, they forced most reporters, photographers and television teams to leave at gunpoint. At Queenstown in eastern Cape province, which also is not under emergency rule, the police sealed off the black township, arrested a CBS television crew and local journalists and held them until police headquarters issued instructions to release them.

‘Arrest Warrant’

“A camera to a policeman now is virtually an arrest warrant, if not an invitation to commit mayhem,” a veteran South African photographer said, asking not to be quoted by name. “Even before the restrictions, the police had been targeting us with tear gas, rubber bullets and even birdshot, and now they feel that they have ministerial approval for whatever they want to do against us. . . .

“They quite obviously regard us as a check on their actions, and when they could not remove us through intimidation and even violence, they managed to do so through the law--by making it illegal to photograph unrest or police actions to deal with it. From my point of view, they simply do not want people, both in South Africa and abroad, to know what they are doing.”

Police have also tried to prevent local newspapers from publishing photographs of other disorders--an unruly crowd waiting for a clothing sale to begin, a soccer riot, a traffic accident--in what South African journalists see as moves toward formal press censorship.

Writers Restricted

Foreign correspondents, meanwhile, have found themselves effectively put “on probation” by J. Christoffel Botha, the minister for home affairs. He has ordered that no journalists be granted entry visas or allowed to remain in South Africa through renewal of their work permits without his personal review of their dossiers.

Fewer than 40 visas and work permits have been granted or renewed in the last two months, according to government officials, and more than 700 cases are pending in his office.

Louis Nel, deputy minister of information, said last week that the new restrictions have proved neither “so onerous . . . nor undermined democracy” and have helped bring a substantial, 49% reduction in the number of “serious incidents of unrest,” from 2,790 in October to 1,435 in November.

In Cape Town, Le Grange asserted last week, the police are gradually bringing the unrest under control and restoring law and order to the country’s troubled black and mixed-race ghettos. The state of emergency would be progressively lifted, he said, noting that President Pieter W. Botha (no relation to the home affairs minister) had ended it in eight districts last week and six others in late October.

Lethal Month

Yet, November was the second most lethal month in 15 months of sustained racial unrest.

Ninety-nine people, all black or of mixed-race, were killed in November, compared to 85 in October, according to figures compiled by the independent South African Institute of Race Relations from police reports, newspaper accounts and other sources. Only the month of August, when 163 were killed, mostly in extensive rioting around Cape Town and Durban, was worse since the civil unrest began in September, 1984.

The institute also notes that the death rate has more than doubled, increasing from an average of 1.67 a day in the first half of the year to 3.44 since the July 21 proclamation of a partial state of emergency, which gave the police virtual martial-law powers in emergency areas.

According to the institute’s figures, 940 people were killed from September, 1984, to the beginning of last week.

“The unrest has not ended nor even been reduced significantly,” David Dalling, a member of Parliament from the Progressive Federal Party and its spokesman on media affairs, said last week. “The violence continues, the tensions are spreading, the polarization is deepening. The restrictions on media reporting have had no effect on the actual unrest. And the argument that they would help reduce it was always spurious.

“But from the government’s view, the measures have been very effective. They have wiped South Africa off the television screens and front pages of the world. . . .”

Californian’s Advice

The government’s strategy in restricting news coverage was based in large part, officials have said, on advice from an American professor of international relations, John Hutchinson of UCLA, who in seminars here advised South Africa to limit television coverage of the civil unrest.

“Get those riot sjamboks (long whips) off the TV screens,” Hutchinson told one group of foreign policy and information specialists, referring to police whippings in Cape Town of anti-apartheid demonstrators, many of them clergymen. “They are doing the same damage to South Africa’s case overseas that TV scenes of the Vietnam War did to the morale of the American people. . . . If I were your government, I would really have tried to do something about it.”

Many in the ruling National Party had long favored media curbs or outright censorship, and according to well-placed party members and government officials, the advice of Hutchinson and other conservative foreign visitors persuaded the Cabinet that, after initial protests, such restrictions would be accepted.

Aside from some press complaints here, criticism came from the American and West European governments, from press groups around the world, from human rights groups and from the Swiss banker who is trying to reschedule South Africa’s big foreign debts. He called the media restrictions “the dumbest thing yet.”

To counter this, the government apparently planted a letter in the conservative Daily Telegraph of London purporting to be from an English visitor to South Africa who told of seeing a foreign television crew encourage black youths to riot so they could be filmed. But it was soon learned that the letter, cited by Nel during a television debate, was not written by the man whose name was signed to it.

Challenged to provide the names of the foreign journalists it accused of fomenting unrest and encouraging violence, Nel declined to provide any but the vaguest details of the alleged incidents.

Afrikaners Dismayed, Too

In South Africa, most newspapers, including the Afrikaans-language press usually loyal to the Afrikaner-dominated government, expressed their dismay that they would no longer be allowed to fully inform their readers on what was going on in the country during a critical period in its history and that this was the first step toward ending press freedom here.

One newspaper, the liberal Cape Times, challenged the government in a major--and unexpected--way by publishing a lengthy interview with Oliver Tambo, president of the outlawed African National Congress.

Tambo, a “listed person” under South Africa’s severe security laws, may not be quoted in this country, and to publish an interview with him also might be construed as furthering the aims of the black nationalist congress, another crime.

The paper’s editor, Anthony Heard, who conducted the interview in London, was charged under the security laws and faces trial next year. If he is convicted, he could be sentenced to three years in prison.

Government Claims Success

However, the protests over the restrictions on reporting unrest are dying quietly, the government says.

“We had an avalanche of letters and cables and telexes for about 10 days,” a senior government information official said recently. “But we simply made up our mind to ignore them and nothing much happened. Now, the restrictions are accepted and the media, both the local and the foreign, are under better control.”

Television crews and photographers, barred from the scene of unrest in emergency areas--which include Johannesburg, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth--have worked more around Pretoria, Durban and East London, which are not under emergency rule, and have gone into the emergency areas when there is no unrest.

“We are still getting in; we are still doing stories, and we are still getting on the air,” Bill Mutschmann, the CBS bureau chief, said, “but it is harder, riskier and not as complete as we would like.”