S. Africa Guerrillas Vow to Escalate Attacks, Hit White Areas

The African National Congress, the main guerrilla group fighting to overthrow South Africa’s minority white government, disclosed plans here Thursday for a sharp escalation of its attacks throughout the country as a step toward a full “people’s war.”

Oliver Tambo, president of the congress, said that many more guerrillas will be recruited, trained and armed to expand the congress’ military wing, “drawing millions of our people into combat,” and that their attacks will be extended well beyond South Africa’s black townships into white areas.

Tambo made clear the African National Congress’ determination not only to increase the pressure on President Pieter W. Botha’s government--already badly shaken by a year and a half of unremitting civil unrest--but also to force white South Africans to choose between the continuation of apartheid and a bloody civil war with the country’s black majority.

‘Give No Quarter’

“We have called for a rapid and extensive escalation of our military and political offensive,” Tambo told a news conference marking the congress’ 74th anniversary.

The orders given to Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Zulu name of the congress’ military wing, and “to the masses of our people,” Tambo said in a message broadcast earlier to South Africa, are “attack, advance, give the enemy no quarter--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!”

“Even the most stubborn racist can now see that we are no longer prepared to live as slaves and are determined to liberate ourselves, whatever the price we have to pay in human lives,” Tambo said in the broadcast.

More than 1,000 persons, most of them blacks, have died in the unrest of the last 16 months. About two-thirds were killed in clashes with South Africa’s security forces, but many of the rest were killed by other blacks who considered them government collaborators.

Botha’s promises of political, social and economic reforms, Tambo said, will not deflect the broadened offensive.

“We are convinced that the Botha regime has no intention whatsoever to accede to the demands of the majority of the people of South Africa,” Tambo told the crowded news conference. “This regime is intent on increasing the brutal repression of our people while playing about with reform. We say apartheid cannot be reformed, but must be abolished in its entirety.”

Spurns Negotiations

Tambo ruled out negotiations with Pretoria, or even a discussion of such a possibility, until Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, and other political prisoners are freed. He said the congress will not give up its “armed struggle” without a matching commitment by the government to end apartheid and accept a democratic political system not based on race.

“We must fight,” he said. “We must organize and arm ourselves to fight harder and better for the overthrow of the apartheid regime.”

The African National Congress, like many other liberation groups, has in the past deluded itself with its own rhetoric into thinking victory was near. But its officials appear to be convinced that, as Tambo said: “Nearly four decades of illegal rule by the heirs of Hitler are coming to a close and with them centuries of colonial and racist white minority domination. There is nothing the Pretoria regime can do that can change this historic outcome of our struggle.”

The new strategy stems largely from a planning conference the organization held here in June, when it decided on bolder and broader attacks on the Pretoria government. But it also reflects an effort by the congress, outlawed in South Africa in 1960, to catch up with the militant black youths who have moved to the fore in the struggle against apartheid during the past year.

Military Units Increased

Calling for a “real people’s war,” Tambo said the congress intends to launch “a military offensive that will push the enemy into a strategic retreat” by the end of this year.

In preparation for this offensive, congress officials said the organization has already increased the number of its military units operating in South Africa. And it is recruiting more guerrillas for a further expansion and has begun establishing “mass combat units” as part of “a vast army” in the country’s black townships, which are being turned into “insurrectionary zones” that are no-go areas for the police and army.

Although the guerrillas’ targets will remain “armed enemy personnel” and strategic installations, Tambo warned that more white civilians will probably be killed as the attacks increase and they are “caught in the crossfire.”

Thirteen white civilians, seven of them children, have been killed and scores more injured in a series of land-mine and bomb explosions over the last month, bringing accusations from Pretoria that the African National Congress has shown itself to be nothing but a terrorist organization.

“We do not derive any pleasure from (these white deaths), but we will have to accept this as an inevitable consequence of any war,” Tambo, 68, a one-time Johannesburg lawyer, said. “We will still have to calculate in any operation what the attacks will mean in terms of civilian casualties, but in the future it may not be possible in an escalating struggle to avoid civilian casualties.”

Border Military Zones

Tambo justified the planting of land mines on roads in border areas on grounds that the government had long ago declared these to be military zones and recruited local farmers into militia units. Six people from two families were killed last month in one mine explosion; two more died last Saturday in another.

But he did not attempt to justify in terms of the congress’ strategy the bomb that exploded in a crowded shopping center south of Durban two days before Christmas, killing five people and wounding about 60. “We don’t know yet who was responsible,” he said, explaining that no guerrilla unit in the Durban area had reported planting the bomb.

What may have happened, Tambo suggested, was that local guerrillas may have gone against African National Congress policy and placed the bomb in the shopping center in revenge for a raid, apparently by South African commandos, on congress supporters in the tiny mountain kingdom of Lesotho a few days earlier when nine people were killed. Such incidents could become frequent as black anger rises, Tambo warned.