S. African Crackdown Sparks Rebel Offensive : ANC Takes State of Emergency as Declaration of War; Urban Bombings Increase Sharply

When President Pieter W. Botha imposed a nationwide state of emergency to curb South Africa’s continuing civil strife, the African National Congress took it as a declaration of war and responded with a sharp upsurge in its guerrilla and terrorist attacks.

In the month since, 14 bombs have exploded at shopping centers, restaurants, bus stops and a police station, killing three people, injuring 123 others and bringing the once-remote conflict into downtown Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban.

The sharp escalation in ANC action was “to be expected and is being dealt with,” a government official said. But he conceded nevertheless that “urban terrorism is likely to get worse before the situation improves.”

One senior official, asking not to be quoted by name, said: “We have desperate men in the ANC who are willing to take enormous risks, and a few will continue to slip through our security net, however tight we make it. If a man is willing to die, to commit suicide, he can always take others with him. . . . We see the ANC gradually being reduced to just a bunch of such fanatics with less and less support among the people.”

Suspects in Killing

The guerrillas are suspected in the assassination last month of Brig. Andrew Molope, a senior police commander in the nominally independent black homeland of Bophuthatswana, and in the attacks earlier this month on security patrols in two black townships southeast of Johannesburg in which five policemen were killed and 12 wounded. Two of the attackers were also killed.

The police have reported four major gun battles with heavily armed guerrillas, including two near the Botswana border, one north of Durban and the latest, last Friday, outside King William’s Town in eastern Cape province. Seventeen insurgents were killed and one was captured in the clashes, police said. They speculated that the insurgents were heading for urban areas to carry out further attacks.

Ten people were killed in Bophuthatswana two weeks ago, seven of them when explosives, apparently being carried by guerrillas en route to Pretoria or Johannesburg, were set off accidentally in a minibus taxi.

The series of bomb attacks, most of whose victims were civilians, have aroused considerable anxiety here about the long-term strategy of the African National Congress.

The government has accused the group of embarking upon “a campaign of utterly callous and undisguised terrorism” and has declared that this will only strengthen the “resolve of all peace-loving South Africans” to fight the rebels.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, and other anti-apartheid activists have deplored the increased violence and the loss of innocent lives. Liberals have warned that urban terrorism could quickly discredit the African National Congress and stiffen white resistance to change.

Rebel headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, in a change of policy, has refused to confirm its involvement in the bombings and other recent actions except to tell Johannesburg newspapers recently that there has been no change from its announced policy of not directly targeting civilians.

Mike Hough, director of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Pretoria, who says that nearly half of the insurgents’ attacks this year have been on civilian targets, believes that the ANC wants to avoid public responsibility for them to avoid tarnishing its image here and abroad.

“Everything from the types of weapons to the methods of their use points to the ANC,” Hough said.

The African National Congress, which began what it calls its armed struggle a year after the government outlawed the organization in 1960, has won increasing recognition here and abroad during the last two years as the principal group fighting apartheid.

Military Wing

The group’s military wing, Spear of the Nation, had stepped up its attacks before the state of emergency in an avowed move toward “people’s war.” The ANC believes it can bring down the white-led government either through an eventual armed insurrection or by forcing it into negotiations on the “transfer of power.”

In the first six months of this year, the University of Pretoria’s Institute of Strategic Studies recorded 124 ANC-style attacks, compared to 136 such incidents throughout 1985, itself an increase of 34% over the previous year.

A dozen large caches of arms and explosives were found earlier this year outside Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and other cities, indicating that the rebels plan an even greater escalation in its armed attacks. Also, Spear of the Nation cadres have been training many youths from the townships in short courses on the use of weapons and explosives. And local black communities, particularly those with strong guerrilla leadership cells, began forming local “defense units” in May.

In May, after South African military raids on reputed rebel facilities in neighboring Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the ANC leadership called for intensification of “armed attacks at all levels.”

Tambo Rallies Forces

“More and more contingents of our people must be armed,” African National Congress President Oliver Tambo said in a statement broadcast from the organization’s headquarters in Lusaka and reported by international news agencies at the time.

“Efforts must be redoubled to obtain arms from the enemy and from any other source. We must multiply the formation of people’s defense militias everywhere so as to meet more effectively the assault by the enemy’s armed forces. . . . Our people’s army, strengthened by the emerging popular militia, must intensify and spread its armed actions across the country.”

But the police have claimed considerable success in the past month in tracking down insurgents, and they attribute this to their increased powers under the state of emergency.

Five suspected members of Spear of the Nation have been arrested in connection with a series of land mine explosions that killed two and injured 13 in eastern Transvaal province from April to June.

Land Mine Explosion

Four people have been arrested in connection with a land mine explosion outside the black township of Soshanguve on the outskirts of Pretoria; four others are in jail for alleged involvement in several recent Durban bombings and possession of a large arms cache, and two more have been arrested on charges of smuggling weapons and explosives into the country from neighboring Swaziland.

Four men, all reputed ANC guerrillas who were caught in one of the first police sweeps at the start of the state of emergency, have been charged with treason and terrorism, accused of planning to shoot down South African air force planes at a base outside Pretoria with hand-held SAM-7 ground-to-air missiles. According to police, the four were also responsible for a major car bomb explosion in central Johannesburg and the assassination of a senior black security policeman in Durban.

The government also asserted that its massive deployment of security forces under the state of emergency preempted rebel plans for violent nationwide protests on June 16, the 10th anniversary of the start of a period of black rioting, known as the Soweto uprising, in which 575 people were killed.

(These accounts of ANC activities come from official announcements by police headquarters and the government’s Information Bureau. Under the state of emergency, only government-authorized accounts of security force actions may be reported, and newsmen are barred from first-hand reporting of any unrest and from quoting “subversive statements” by the government’s opponents.)

Approaching Civil War

Even the reports of security force successes against the rebels add to the feeling of a nation being drawn increasingly into a civil war.

“Most of the ANC’s armed actions are calculated primarily for psychological impact on both whites and blacks,” said Tom Lodge, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand here and a leading academic specialist on the African National Congress.

“Among blacks, the attacks are intended to enhance the ANC’s standing as the organization that can bring them liberation, and they do seem to encourage even greater resistance, particularly among the youths in the townships. Among whites, the bomb explosions and other urban terrorism appear intended to spread the conflict out of the townships and into the cities. . . .

“Such attacks as we have seen so far are not aimed at defeating the government militarily, though some people here do mistake them for that and as a result conclude that the ANC’s armed struggle can never succeed. Instead they should be seen as part of a broader ANC strategy intended over some time to increase all-around pressure on the regime to the point where it can no longer hold on.”

Inspiration to People

A black political scientist, who asked not to be quoted by name although he describes himself as “more an ANC critic than sympathizer,” assessed the upsurge in guerrilla attacks this way:

“When Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) hits a target, particularly something like a police patrol or Brigadier Molope in Bophuthatswana, our people are inspired. Even if they don’t support violence--and I definitely don’t--they feel we can fight back, that Umkhonto will exact retribution.

“In other words, armed actions are a good part of the ANC’s credibility today. That is why it was bound to try and strike back after the state of emergency was declared and why the government will do everything to try and stop it. The ANC is in a life-and-death battle right now.”

Only 100 in Country

Until recently, the African National Congress rarely conducted more than two military operations at once, and police intelligence officers said they doubted whether Spear of the Nation had more than 100 of its 3,000 trained guerrillas in the country at any time. The current upsurge, although still limited in scope and numbers, thus represents a major escalation in rebel activity.

Also, the attacks have moved from border regions and remote rural areas to the country’s cities and the black townships that surround them, following closely the rebels’ declared goal of increasing the level of violence until it reaches that of an armed insurrection.

And although police say they have received help from the black community in tracking down “these trained terrorists” who have been arrested recently, many more are clearly being sheltered in the townships. People who might have informed the police before are now threatened with death if they do so.

“We moved into a new phase of the ANC’s armed struggle in the past few months,” Lodge commented, “but the state of emergency appears to be accelerating the transition. We are far, far from a full-fledged guerrilla war, an armed insurrection or anything like that, but we do seem to be moving more according to the ANC strategy than the government’s.”

‘Loss of Command’

Lodge speculates that the apparent rebel decisions to infiltrate more guerrillas into the country from their bases elsewhere in southern Africa, to recruit more black youths for the Spear of the Nation and train them here and to distribute more weapons in the country’s black ghettoes have all contributed to “a loss of command and control . . . and of discipline.”

“These bombings and the other attacks on ‘soft’ or civilian targets are too recent and still too few to form a definite pattern, and they may be just a few units striking back against the state of emergency,” Lodge said. “But once your operatives cross such a threshold and are not punished, they will likely cross that threshold again and again. . . . That would make all this the start of urban terrorism on a broad and frightening scale.”

Joe Slovo, a member of the top rebel leadership, chief of staff of its military wing and chairman of the South African Communist Party, acknowledged the possibility in a recent British Broadcasting Corp. interview in London that undisciplined units, angered by the government crackdown under the state of emergency, might be responsible for the bombings and, if so, the leadership would bring them back into line.

No ‘Campaign of Terror’

“We are not moving toward a new strategy in our military activity,” Slovo said in the BBC interview. “We are not now embarking upon a campaign of terror against civilians.”

Civilian deaths were “tragic,” said Slovo, who is white and a member of the guerrillas’ old guard leadership, but were “virtually unavoidable.” If ANC units were responsible, he said, the organization would try to restore discipline.

“I wouldn’t condemn them publicly,” Slovo added. “I would understand why they did it, and I would hope that the broad policy that we all support would be pursued without these kinds of diversions. . . . But without armed struggle, I’m afraid, there is no way forward for us.”