Tutu Helps Calm Crowd in Area Where 19 S. Africa Blacks Died

Bishop Desmond Tutu helped defuse a tense situation Tuesday in a strife-torn township where at least 19 blacks have died in three days of rioting, and the South African government provisionally withdrew charges against Winnie Mandela.

Mandela, wife of jailed African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, was to have appeared in court today on charges of violating a December order barring her from the city of Johannesburg and her home in the neighboring Soweto black township.

But Witwatersrand Atty. Gen. Klaus von Lieres und Wilkau said the charges were “provisionally” withdrawn because she was challenging the validity of the banning order before the Supreme Court.

Legal sources said the government’s next move in the case would probably be based on the high court’s findings.

Meanwhile, in the black township of Alexandra, which adjoins Johannesburg’s affluent white suburb of Sandton, Tutu and other clergymen calmed an angry crowd of about 30,000 angry blacks who attempted to stage a protest at a police station. They had marched from a stadium, where police had halted a demonstration.

“They took some of them to go and tell the police what they want and they told the rest to go back,” a resident said.

But at the police station, the senior officer refused to talk to the five-member black delegation, triggering fears of a rampage by the crowd waiting for their report.

As tensions rose, Tutu, the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, arrived with fellow clergymen Allan Boesak, Christian Beyers Naude and Catholic Bishop Manas Buthelezi to speak to the crowd.

“I told them we are going to be free and we need to show the discipline of those who are going to be free,” Tutu said later in a telephone interview with United Press International. “I told them we are going to disperse in a peaceful and orderly fashion. I told them not to kill one another and not to discredit our noble cause.”

Tutu said the crowd was demanding an end to emergency rule, the withdrawal of police from the township’s streets, an end to police harassment and access to a police mortuary to identify people shot in clashes with riot squad officers.

He said the situation in Alexandra, a squalid township of some 70,000 people, is “very tense, very, very delicate--it could go one way or the other.”

Witnesses said Monday’s rioting was the worst of the three days. Gangs of young blacks turned back black residents headed for work at nearby white-owned factories Monday morning, then beat returning workers Monday night with sticks and rubber hoses, witnesses said.

The toll of 19 deaths in Alexandra was announced Tuesday in Parliament by Adriaan Vlok, the deputy minister of law and order. It exceeded the latest police count of 10 dead.

However, Mike Beea, chairman of the Alexandra Civic Assn., said he feared that at least 30 people have died. Boesak, an anti-apartheid leader who was blocked from entering the black township because he is of mixed race, said, “As many as 300 have been injured and scores have died.”

Naude, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, said Alexandra residents told him 300 people were wounded, “of whom as many as 80 may have died.”