S. Africa Bulldozes Crossroads Shanties

Large sections of the Crossroads squatter settlement outside Cape Town were demolished by bulldozers Monday as South African authorities acted to prevent the settlement’s estimated 70,000 homeless black refugees from rebuilding the shantytown.

Brigadier Christoffel A. Swart, regional police commander in Cape Town, used his powers under the current state of emergency to order bulldozers to level whatever remained of the structures after the fierce fighting in several sections of the settlement over the last five weeks. He also barred anyone, including former residents and relief workers, from entering the area.

Police then began serving criminal summonses on charges of “harboring blacks” on clergy at local churches, mosques and synagogues where several thousand Crossroads residents were given shelter. The summonses were an apparent effort to force the refugees to leave and move to Khayelitsha, a new black township farther from Cape Town.

Use of Force Feared

But the squatters are refusing to move to Khayelitsha, where they would be given temporary shelter in tents and allowed to rebuild their shacks. Relief workers fear that authorities, who had set a Monday deadline for them to move voluntarily, will now force them to go at gunpoint if necessary.

The refugees were driven out of Crossroads by conservative black vigilantes who wanted more land for upgrading of their section of the shantytown. With reported police assistance, the vigilantes, known as Witdoeke, defeated militant black youths, called the Comrades, in a series of recent clashes, in which about 90 people died.

Only a few thousand refugees have moved to Khayelitsha, which is 18 miles southeast of Cape Town, about six miles farther away than Crossroads but without good transportation. Most have found temporary shelter in the already crowded black townships adjacent to Crossroads.

Labor Leaders Acquitted

Meanwhile, in Pietermaritzburg, the government suffered a significant political setback when four black trade union leaders were acquitted of treason charges in a trial that had lasted more than a year.

The prosecution had charged that the four acted as agents of the outlawed African National Congress and South African Communist Party and were engaged in a “revolutionary conspiracy” to overthrow the country’s white-led minority government.

The president of the Natal provincial supreme court acquitted the four black labor union leaders of treason after state prosecutors admitted, a year into the trial, that they did not have sufficient evidence to prove their case. The four are all leaders of the 30,000-member South African Allied Workers Union, one of the country’s most militant trade unions.

Two more blacks died in the continuing civil strife, according to the government information bureau, sole authorized source of news about unrest under the state of emergency. The new deaths brought to 57 the number of people reported killed since the state of emergency was imposed June 12.

The information bureau said the past weekend was the quietest in several months.

In another Monday development, the government ordered Richard Manning, 35, Newsweek magazine’s correspondent here, to leave South Africa by midnight Thursday. Stoffel Botha, minister of home affairs, gave no reason for his order except that it was “in the public interest.” A CBS cameraman was deported last week on the same grounds.

Tutu Interview

Over the weekend, authorities nearly closed the Johannesburg bureau of ABC after Roone Arledge, president of ABC News, said that the network had defied emergency regulations by broadcasting a live interview with Bishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace laureate.

In the interview, Tutu criticized the United States and Britain for not imposing economic sanctions on South Africa. Publication or broadcast of such views is specifically barred by the emergency regulations, as are such live broadcast interviews.

Taking Arledge’s remarks as a direct challenge to its authority, the government was reportedly preparing to close ABC’s bureau and order its foreign staff to leave when the network sent authorities a message saying that Arledge had been quoted out of context. ABC would “do everything in its power to retain its staff in South Africa and realizes that this involves compliance with the emergency regulations,” the network said in its message.

There were strong protests in South Africa’s Parliament on Monday over the government’s apparent plans to force the Crossroads refugees to move to Khayelitsha. Members of the white opposition Progressive Federal Party and the main Colored (mixed-race) Labor Party criticized the measure as heartless and brutal.

Shame of Evictions

The squalor of Crossroads had long been a disgrace to Cape Town, the Labor Party’s David Curry told the Colored house in the three-chamber Parliament, but the evictions would shame the whole country. “Don’t go about evicting children from the only shelter they have,” he pleaded.

The Rev. Geoffrey Quinlan, pastor of All Saints Anglican Church in Plumstead, a Cape Town suburb, said he received a summons charging him with illegally “harboring blacks” under one of South Africa’s laws restricting blacks from entering areas reserved for whites.

“We have nearly 80 homeless, destitute women and children and one elderly man to whom we have given sanctuary, and I have no intention . . . of turning a single one of them out,” Quinlan said.