S. Africa Frees 20 Labor Leaders to Ease Strikes

In an effort to end a paralyzing wave of strikes, the South African government Thursday began releasing black labor leaders detained without charge under the two-week-old state of emergency.

About 20 union officials were freed after angry protests from businessmen who warned the government that the country would soon face widespread labor unrest if the unionists remained in detention.

Among those freed was Piroshaw Camay, general secretary of the all-black Council of Unions of South Africa, which represents about 180,000 workers. He estimated that at least 150 and perhaps 200 others were still being held.

“These detentions don’t prevent us from continuing trade union activities,” said Camay, back in his office after two weeks of solitary confinement. “We will go about our business as much as possible.”

More than 120 major retail stores have been struck by union members demanding the release of their leaders. The protests are spreading to factories and commercial farms, and three pharmaceutical plants east of Johannesburg were struck Thursday. Critical wage negotiations in the mining, chemical and metal industries have been seriously affected.

The country’s major labor federation, the multiracial, 550,000-member Congress of South African Trade Unions, most of whose leaders are either detained or in hiding, plans to test police pledges not to interfere in legitimate union activities by holding a public meeting here Tuesday.

But the government warned Thursday that the state of emergency, which gives the police and army almost martial-law powers, will be strictly enforced and not lifted soon.

Louis le Grange, the hard-line minister of law and order, told a political rally that the government has “determined to apply the state of emergency and all its regulations relentlessly.” Emergency rule will be lifted, he said, only after law and order and normal government administration are fully restored.

The police, using their emergency powers, closed the troubled Kwandebele tribal homeland northeast of Pretoria to everyone without a home or job there and imposed nighttime curfews on black townships across most of the northern Orange Free State.

In Kwandebele, where there has been much fighting over the homeland’s plans to accept nominal “independence” from South Africa in December, Brig. C.M. van Niekerk, the police commander, decreed that “no person may play, loiter or aimlessly remain on any public road.” This, in effect, makes it a crime punishable by 10 years in prison for an old man to sit by the side of the road and watch the passing traffic.

Five more blacks were reported killed in the civil strife, bringing the death toll to 66 by the government’s count since the emergency was imposed on June 12.