S. Africa Group Says It May Drop Nonviolence

The United Democratic Front warned the minority white government Wednesday that it is under mounting pressure to drop its commitment to nonviolence.

The front, a multiracial coalition of 680 anti-apartheid groups with more than 2 million members, said it “will not be able to ignore these calls forever.”

It accused the police of attacking many of its officials, firebombing their houses and killing some of its leaders, and said that many of its affiliates, particularly in the black community, are pressing for a review of its nonviolent stance “in the wake of the unmitigated violence against its officials.”

Samson Ndou, vice president of the front, said on behalf of its national leadership that, “while at this point we are still committed to nonviolent methods, we will not be able to ignore these calls forever.”

The front’s warning, the latest indicator of the prospects for wider civil strife and increased violence here, came amid accusations that the police had tortured the organization’s regional leader in northern Transvaal province last week and were responsible for his death.

Activist Died in Jail

Peter Mokaba, a front organizer in northern Transvaal, said the regional president there, Peter Nchabeleng, 59, a veteran opponent of apartheid and former political prisoner, was in good health when he was arrested early Friday, but within a few hours he was dead. The government said he had suffered a heart attack.

“This is the latest and worst of a series of attacks on the United Democratic Front in the northern Transvaal,” Mokaba said, “and shows how hard the government is pushing to exterminate us. . . . We, however, are prepared to fight back if these attacks continue. The people are ready to go to war.”

The Rev. C. F. Beyers Naude, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, went further. He said, “There is a situation of civil war in the northern Transvaal in which innocent and defenseless people are confronted daily with apartheid’s war machinery.”

This was a reference to the government’s acknowledged deployment of thousands of combat troops in the region.

Nchabeleng was among 67 people detained after the discovery of 35 charred bodies in shallow graves in the Sekhukhune district, about 180 miles northeast of Johannesburg. The police suggest that the dead were killed because they were political rivals of the United Democratic Front.

But Mokaba, denying any involvement by the front, said the victims, many of whom were elderly and blind, appeared to have been killed in a hunt for witches in a district where tribal superstitions are deeply rooted.

‘With Matches, Necklaces’

Ndou’s warning followed a controversial statement Sunday by Winnie Mandela, the black nationalist leader, who seemed to be urging black insurgents to kill their political foes, white and black, in their effort to end apartheid and overthrow the minority white government.

“Together, hand-in-hand with our boxes of matches, with our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” Mandela told cheering black crowds. She referred to the spread of arson attacks on white property and to the ritual killing of blacks thought to be government collaborators by putting a gasoline-filled tire around the neck and setting it on fire.

“We have reached a very serious stage in our struggle,” she said. “The time for speeches and debate has come to an end. This year, 1986, is going to see the liberation of the oppressed masses in this country.”

Mandela, wife of the imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who led the organization into its “armed struggle” against the minority white regime 25 years ago, said Wednesday that her remarks had been misconstrued as advocating greater violence, while speeches of Cabinet ministers and members of Parliament threatening to shoot blacks were ignored.

Early Wednesday, an estimated 700 policemen and soldiers moved in and sealed off the black township of Lamontville, a United Democratic Front stronghold outside Durban. They carried out a house-to-house search and checked the identity of all the residents in what the police called “a crime prevention operation.”