Tutu Calls for International S. Africa Curbs

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, called Wednesday for the immediate imposition of international economic sanctions on South Africa to force the minority white government here to end apartheid and share power with the country’s black majority.

“We face catastrophe in this land, and only the action of the international community by applying pressure can save us,” Tutu said, calling for the first time for punitive economic sanctions on South Africa and risking criminal prosecution under the country’s security laws for doing so. “I have no hope of real change from this government unless they are forced.”

1,400 Die in Violence

Tutu, the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, appealed particularly to the United States and Britain, two of this country’s largest trading partners. Both Washington and London oppose punitive sanctions in the belief that they will not work and might add to the racial violence, in which more than 1,400 people have died in the last 19 months.

“Our children are dying; our land is burning and bleeding,” the black prelate, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against apartheid, told a news conference, “and so I call on the international community to apply punitive sanctions against this government to help us establish a new South Africa--non-racial, democratic, participatory and just. This is a nonviolent strategy to help us do so.”

Warning on Tour

While touring the United States last year, Tutu declared that if the South African government did not adopt substantial measures by the end of March to stop apartheid, he would call for the sanctions. Earlier, he had simply called for international “pressure” on the government of President Pieter W. Botha.

Louis Nel, South Africa’s deputy minister of information, later commented that “sanctions would be particularly disastrous for black South Africans as well as for the people of neighboring countries.”

Nel said sanctions would “increase polarization and escalate violence” here and that the government “will not succumb to pressure from whatever quarter, but continue along the difficult path of peaceful constitutional development.”

Rejection by U.S.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb rejected Tutu’s proposal. “The United States does not believe that punitive sanctions will promote change in South Africa,” Kalb said.

Meanwhile, Winnie Mandela, wife of imprisoned black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, was freed from government orders that placed tough restrictions on her for most of the last 23 years, barring her from political activities and preventing her from living in her Soweto home outside Johannesburg.

Winnie Mandela Returns Home

Mandela, 49, has become one of the country’s most prominent black leaders in her own right. She returned Wednesday afternoon to her small brick house in Soweto to a tearful yet jubilant homecoming after the government said it would not oppose a court appeal calling her “banning orders” illegal.

Ismail Ayob, her attorney, said that the government had, in effect, withdrawn the orders after a landmark court decision two weeks ago. That decision requires the minister of law and order to give specific reasons when a person is banned from politics, put under house arrest or detained by the police under the country’s severe security laws.

Except for 18 months in the mid-1970s, Mandela had been banned since 1963, following her husband’s imprisonment. For the last eight years, she has been forced to live in internal exile in the remote farming community of Brandfort, 225 miles southwest of Johannesburg in the Orange Free State. She remains a “listed person” who may not be quoted by the South African news media.

Sees No Concession

“I should never have been away from home,” she said as she returned to Soweto. “I am grateful to no one for this action. No one is grateful for recognition of a right, and it was my right to be at home. This is not any particular step toward a change in this government’s policies. Make no mistake, it is no concession.”

Mandela was dragged from her Soweto home by security police twice in late December after taking refuge there after firebomb attacks on the house where she had been living in Brandfort. She was charged with violating the banning orders. In recent weeks, she had been staying at a hotel north of Johannesburg to comply with an amended order letting her move around the country but barring her from Johannesburg and Soweto.

In another development, a black guerrilla belonging to the African National Congress was sentenced to death Wednesday for planting a bomb in a shopping center south of Durban last December that killed five whites--two women and three children--and injured 48 other people in a crowd of Christmas shoppers.

Andrew Sibusiso Zondo, 19, a clergyman’s son, had admitted planting the bomb in retaliation for a raid a few days earlier on the Lesotho capital of Maseru in which nine people, mostly political refugees from South Africa, were killed.

Students Return to Class

Hundreds of thousands of black students returned to classes around the country Wednesday after Easter vacation, heeding the call of black community leaders last weekend to remain in school and not resume the boycotts that contributed to rapid escalation of violence in South Africa’s black ghettoes last year.

Education Department spokesmen in Pretoria, the capital, said that attendance was 80% or higher in all but 136 of its 7,360 black schools, and that there had been only isolated incidents of unrest, mostly around Durban, Cape Town and a few towns in eastern Cape province.

Winnie Mandela said the students’ return to school reflects the black community’s decision to broaden the struggle against apartheid with mass-action campaigns rather than let the whole burden fall on the younger generation alone.

Scattered incidents of violence--firebomb attacks on homes, stores and factories, the stoning of cars and trucks, clashes with police patrols and the fatal burning of a black as a suspected police informer--were reported by police from 19 places around the country Wednesday.

Hundreds of black youths, some younger then 10 years old, were detained in mass arrests at Zolani, a much troubled black township near Ashton, north of Cape Town, according to residents. Police and troops swept through the community late Wednesday afternoon after a march on local government offices by unemployed people demanding jobs. Police refused to comment on the report that more than 300 had been arrested.

Dismisses Botha Reforms

In calling for economic sanctions, Bishop Tutu dismissed President Botha’s proposed reforms as insufficient to convince the country’s 25 million blacks that the government will ever abolish the country’s apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

“Nothing that Mr. Botha has said has made me believe that he and his government are serious about dismantling apartheid,” Tutu said.

On the contrary, each of the promised measures seems to be undercut by other qualifications, he said, noting that repeal of the hated “pass laws” requiring blacks to carry government permits to be in urban areas will be accompanied by a program for “orderly urbanization,” which will probably mean continued restrictions on blacks and not whites.

Tutu emphatically rejected government arguments, put forward as well by the Reagan Administration, that economic sanctions would hurt blacks the most--that trade embargoes, the withdrawal of foreign investment and other measures would increase unemployment and that more violence would result.

“I hope that those who use this argument would just drop it quietly and stop being so hypocritical,” Tutu said, noting that two recent surveys of black opinion showed that more than 70% of urban blacks supported economic sanctions. “It is amazing how everybody has become so solicitous for blacks and become such wonderful altruists. It is remarkable that in South Africa, the most vehement in their concern for blacks (when economic sanctions are proposed) have been whites.”

‘Heard Hardly a Squeak’

Yet, when blacks, some only children 3 or 4 years old, are killed by the dozen in confrontations with the police, “I have heard hardly a squeak from the whites who claim they are concerned for black suffering,” Tutu said.

His appeal to the United States, he said, was not directed to President Reagan--”although of course you don’t give up on anyone”--but to “the people, especially the young people in the universities, who have already helped change the moral climate . . . against apartheid.”

Faced with congressional adoption of sanctions against South Africa last September, Reagan imposed a series of compromise measures. These included a ban on U.S. bank loans to the Pretoria government and state companies, prohibitions on importing gold Krugerrand coins, measures to ensure fair employment practices at U.S. companies here and bans on exports of nuclear technology, computer sales to state agencies enforcing apartheid and on arms purchases and sales.

Most West European countries also imposed sanctions late last year, but the majority stopped well short of cutting off trade or ordering their companies to pull out of South Africa.