Blank Spaces in S. Africa Papers Protest Censorship

Blank spaces have begun appearing in South African newspapers where readers normally would expect news and comment about the country’s civil strife.

Barred under the six-day-old state of emergency from telling their readers what they know about the continuing violence, some newspapers are leaving blank spaces in their news and editorial columns to protest the harsh government restrictions.

“All that we and the other media have to contribute at this time when the country is facing its worst-ever crisis has been effectively banned,” the black-edited newspaper Sowetan said in a one-paragraph comment Tuesday in the space for its daily editorial.

Business Day, a financial newspaper read by the country’s top executives, told its readers in a front-page note, “This newspaper has been produced under restrictions that amount to censorship.” It cited government prohibitions on publishing news about security force actions and any unrest.

Even the fiercely pro-government Citizen, launched with secret government funds 11 years ago, complained in an editorial, “We cannot see how the media can fulfill their basic function of keeping the public informed of what is going on.” It added that newspapers “are not publishing all the news fit to print, but only the news that the authorities believe should be printed.”

On Tuesday, the government’s information bureau tightened restrictions on foreign television networks by barring live reports from here in an effort to prevent the broadcasting of what it regards as “subversive statements.”

The ban was specifically aimed at ABC’s “Nightline” program, which had planned an interview this week with Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela. In addition, Winnie Mandela was confined to her home in Soweto each night and barred from talking to the press for the rest of this week.

Also banned was this week’s edition of Newsweek, the cover story of which was entitled, “South Africa’s Civil War--the Making of a Bloodbath.”

Among the restrictions imposed in the past week are bans on any photographic or television coverage of unrest, on any report of actions by the police or army unless provided by the government and on any first-hand coverage of any unrest. Reporters also are forbidden to enter any black township to gather information.

Violation of the regulations, which apply equally to the South African and foreign press, can result in a 10-year prison sentence and a fine of $8,000.

The restrictions have come with repeated government warnings that action will also be taken against foreign correspondents who use such terms as “minority white regime” to describe the government and who refer to the country as “riot-torn” and to the emergency regulations as “Draconian.”

The regulations appear to have several objectives. Although most observers here have said that the main intention seems to be to let the police operate “beyond scrutiny or criticism,” in the words of the Cape Times, the government contends that the media, both domestic and foreign, have become “part of the violence syndrome,” encouraging protests by their presence and “rewarding” the anti-apartheid movement by their extensive coverage.

“We do not believe we can break the cycle of violence and end the unrest and get on with the business of reform, of constitutional negotiations and all the other things we have to do without these restrictions,” Louis Nel, the deputy minister of information, reportedly told a meeting of South African editors on Saturday. “That’s unfortunate, but that is the way it is.”

This is the only political rationale the government has offered for the press restrictions so far, and Nel’s comments could not be confirmed with the information bureau. Its spokesmen avoid questions on why such curbs have been imposed.

South African newspapers, meanwhile, have been reminded by the government that under the emergency regulations any issue can be seized and that they can even be closed down. Foreign newsmen have been warned that they can be expelled if they do not adhere closely to the new regulations or if the information bureau finds their reporting to be other than objective.

Willem de Vos, a CBS cameraman, was deported Tuesday night “in the interests of the state.” Last Friday’s issue of the Sowetan, the country’s largest black newspaper, was seized by the security police. It had called in a front-page editorial for the government’s resignation over the state of emergency. Also seized was an issue of the politically liberal Weekly Mail.

Demands for Review

Last Saturday, security policemen went to the newsrooms of City Press, another black newspaper, and the Sunday Tribune in Durban, demanding to review their stories before publication.

The Sowetan found itself Tuesday in the position of having its reporters and photographers turned back when they went to cover routine sports and women’s stories in Soweto, the sprawling black township southwest of Johannesburg where most of the staff live. Then they were required to fill out a request for a police permit to do each story.

“Nobody can tell me this is not active censorship, when you have to ask the police for permission even to cover a story,” said Thami Mazwai, the Sowetan’s news editor.

Some newsmen have begun to fight back with what one editor called “our little guerrilla war against these boys from the ministry of truth.”

The Johannesburg Star, prohibited from printing photographs of the police clashing with black youths in townships around the city, instead published a photograph on the front page Tuesday of a South African diplomat beating a young woman demonstrator with a stick outside the South African embassy in Canberra, Australia. The diplomat has now been ordered to leave Australia.

Blank spaces have appeared in a number of newspapers around the country, sometimes accompanied by cryptic notes about the stories that would have appeared if the government information bureau had not refused to approve them for publication. The government is reportedly considering a ban on such blank spaces. One editor says he will begin serializing the Bible if that happens.

At the state-run South African Broadcasting Corp., known among local journalists as “its master’s voice” for its close adherence to the government line, two television newsmen defied orders to portray Monday’s general strike by black workers as a failure and may now face disciplinary action.

Editors and publishers, arguing that the diminished public credibility of their papers along with radio and television will quickly diminish the government’s credibility as well, plan a new appeal to the government to relax the restrictions.

“If the government were forthright and honest in its reports of unrest, then we might be able to accept these restrictions during a state of emergency,” the assistant editor of a major Afrikaans-language paper commented Tuesday. “But the fact is that the government got it wrong from Day 1, sometimes through ineptitude but also through sheer falsehood, and we in the press feel we have been had and the people feel they are being had.”

Even that comment, the editor said, asking not to be quoted by name, “might be subversive enough of a statement that we couldn’t publish it. I wouldn’t dare print this conversation without running every word by our lawyers.”

The workings of the new government information bureau, which has become the only authorized source for news on the country’s civil unrest, have become a topic of complaint even among the pro-government news media that accepted the need for the state of emergency last week.

Newsmen have accused the bureau of delaying publication of information unfavorable to the government, such as major clashes between the police and black protesters. On Monday evening, for example, Nel, the deputy minister of information, said there were no serious incidents in Monday’s strike, although 11 blacks were killed. The information was released only late Tuesday morning, after the strike was over.

Other Cover-ups Suspected

Now, suspicion is growing that there have been cover-ups of other incidents, such as the detention, reported abroad, of a whole congregation of 250 men, women and children at a prayer service Sunday evening in an Anglican church outside Cape Town.

Brigadier Leon Mellet, an information bureau spokesman, said at press briefings Monday and Tuesday that he had no information on that incident and that the bureau could not comment on every incident around the country.

The briefings, now the principal source of news on the state of emergency and unrest around the country, have already become known as the “11 O’Clock Follies,” named after the “5 O’Clock Follies” that the American military held in Saigon through most of the Vietnam War.

And the acerbic repartee between the government briefers--David W. Steward, chief of the information bureau, and Mellet--and South African and foreign newsmen is starting to resemble the ironic, occasionally angry, sometimes bitter exchanges between the American majors and colonels and the reporters they were sent to brief in Saigon.

Mellet at one point Tuesday in effect decreed that correspondents could not report their own questions at the briefing on grounds that these involved police actions that had not been announced. He also said he has no idea what many of the new government press restrictions mean in practice and told newsmen to consult their lawyers.