Backlash Over Rebel Attacks Feared : ‘Beware of Tiger,’ Angry S. African Whites Warn

Dirk van Eck, who lost his wife and two children in a land-mine explosion traced to black nationalist guerrillas, issued a warning: “They must realize that if they mess with the Afrikaner people, they mess with a people who can hurt them a lot and who won’t be beaten.”

He said that, while standing in front of the graves of his family, he had “wondered how anyone could still wish negotiations with the African National Congress,” a reference to the group whose guerrillas have waged a long war against South Africa’s white minority government.

“You can tell Oliver Tambo,” he said, referring to the congress’ president, “to beware of awakening the tiger in the Afrikaner.”

This sort of anger is growing across South Africa. Whites, particularly the Afrikaners who are descended from Dutch, French and German settlers and who dominate the government, increasingly see themselves besieged as a nation. And they see their families endangered by the black nationalist group’s plans to escalate its guerrilla attacks into a full-scale “people’s war” against apartheid.

Afrikaners--from newspaper editorial writers to Cabinet members, from the men at the neighborhood bar to political scientists at the country’s leading universities--are warning that the series of recent terrorist attacks have pushed them to the limit. They say they are ready to strike back in reprisal if there are more bombs, more land mines, more sabotage.

Recalling the 1838 victory of outnumbered Afrikaners over Zulu warriors at Blood River, after the settlers had made a “covenant” with God, Dirk van Eck’s brother Michael said, “We must rededicate ourselves to God as we did on the original Day of the Covenant, and then we must go and fight the enemy because God will give us the strength to win against all odds.”

Among white liberals, themselves opponents of apartheid and advocates of negotiations between blacks and whites to resolve South Africa’s problems, fear is mounting of a violent backlash. They worry that the government may undertake tougher actions to curtail unrest at home and attack suspected guerrilla facilities in neighboring countries--measures that would lead to even greater racial polarization.

Stepped-up attacks by African National Congress guerrillas will “harden race attitudes, strengthen the right-wingers, invite repression and, I have no doubt, prolong and not shorten the life of apartheid,” Colin Eglin, chairman of the liberal white Progressive Federal Party, said last week when the black nationalists announced their intention to launch a “people’s war.”

Conciliatory gestures to the guerrillas, and even to blacks in general, are being ruled out by those who until last month had been calling for bold government initiatives to break the deepening cycle of violence. The sense of foreboding among liberal white businessmen, clergymen and intellectuals grows deeper by the day, and they now apportion equal shares of blame to President Pieter W. Botha’s government and to the black rebels.

Even some nonwhites expressed concern that the African National Congress is indeed going too far in provoking the Afrikaners and that they, not the guerrilla leaders, will suffer the retaliatory measures.

“History teaches me that countries made ungovernable, particularly through violence, remain that way for a long time,” Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of South Africa’s powerful and populous Zulus told six visiting U.S. congressmen last week.

Extensive Recruiting

Yet, the African National Congress has committed itself to the rapid escalation of its guerrilla attacks, to expansion of its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) by recruiting thousands of black youths--and to taking the unrest of the last year and a half more and more into the still largely placid white areas of the country.

“We must continue to make South Africa ungovernable and apartheid unworkable,” Tambo told reporters at his group’s exile headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. “In the attack, we must aim to weaken the regime drastically, to sap its strength, to take away from it even the capacity to launch a limited counteroffensive. We must build our forces into an ever-more-formidable united mass army of liberation, an army that must grow in strength continuously, able to deliver and actually delivering bigger blows at every stage. . . .”

This is not just revolutionary rhetoric. Since Jacoba van Eck; her daughter, Nelmarie, 8, and her son Ignatius, 2, and three members of another family were killed in a land-mine explosion near South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe, seven more whites have died in guerrilla attacks. Five were killed when a bomb exploded in a shopping center near Durban and two when their truck hit another mine.

Twenty whites have now died in the country’s continuing civil strife--a fraction of the more than 1,000 blacks, Coloreds and Asians killed in the last 17 months but a sizable number compared to the 37 white civilians who died in the four-year Mau Mau campaign against British settlers in Kenya in the 1950s, a campaign that evoked great fear and became synonymous with guerrilla terror in European and American minds.

“We do not derive any pleasure (from the white deaths), but we will have to accept this as an inevitable consequence of any war,” Tambo 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. . . . The whole of South Africa is beginning to bleed in the face of the persistence of the apartheid system.”

Quick Justification

Tambo professed little trouble in justifying the escalation in the attacks.

“Nothing else has worked, absolutely nothing,” he said. “When we were peaceful and nonviolent, we got nowhere. Now that we have the initiative . . . people say, ‘Ah, but we must be nonviolent, we must not launch our people’s war, we must not make the Afrikaner angry.’ But we know that the Afrikaner understands only violence.”

The African National Congress leadership, however, says it does not intend to hit “soft targets”--that is, white civilians with no military ties and well away from border zones, power installations, arms factories and the like.

“There is nothing in ANC policy or strategy that calls for attacks on civilians in, say, supermarkets or schools or cinemas unless these can in some way be regarded as military installations,” Tambo said. “Even then, the ANC wouldn’t attack children if they were in a military zone. . . .

“But the South African situation is one of violence. There is a war going on. That so far it has been confined to the (black) townships does not change the fact that it is a war. That situation, moreover, is beginning to drift out of the townships . . . and as that happens, South Africans of all races are going to be burying their loved ones.”

Wildcat Attacks

A problem, Tambo said, will be that individual guerrilla commanders may decide to launch attacks on their own, sometimes on civilian targets such as the shopping center south of Durban. There, a bomb killed five people and wounded 60. The individual commanders will do so, he said, even if such attacks run counter to strategy.

The guerrillas, he suggested, will react increasingly to events--often operating beyond the control of headquarters.

Put another way, Tambo was saying that many of the black militants in South Africa find the 74-year-old congress too cautious, too concerned with maintaining a moderate image, too concerned about securing at least some white support, and that the Zambia-based leadership, as a result, has difficulty in controlling them.

There was rejoicing among some blacks in South Africa after the shopping center blast, Tambo asserted, because they have wanted whites to suffer as they have suffered over the last year and a half. This, too, did not worry him very much.

“Let’s take (the conflict) beyond the limits of the townships and spread it through the country,” he said. “All South Africans must know the problems of the country and participate in resolving them.”

Other officials in Lusaka suggested that the guerrilla organization wants to make it clear to South Africa’s whites, particularly to the majority Afrikaners, that the only alternative to the abolition of apartheid and a democratic political system where race plays no role is a bloody civil war that blacks will win.

‘Negotiate With Whom?’

“Negotiations, yes, we believe in them,” a senior black nationalist official said, “but with whom, about what and when? We know all about frightened Afrikaners striking out viciously at anyone and anything, but quite frankly, that is how they behave most of the time. We also know that the Afrikaners are not going to come to talk about anything until that is made the only alternative to a war that they see they cannot win.”

The father of one victim, an 8-year-old boy killed in the Durban shopping center blast, seemed to confirm this logic when he overcame his bitterness after the death of his son and called on the government to negotiate with the rebels.

“Only through negotiations and compromise is peace possible,” Hennie Smit, 32, a Pretoria businessman, told the Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld. “I believe my son died as a hero for South Africa. I would be satisfied if his death and those of the others would lead to a better South Africa. Remember them as heroes, not as victims.”