Emergency Regulations Are Amended

President Pieter W. Botha amended South Africa’s emergency regulations Friday to permit regional police commanders to ban political meetings, restrict the activities of government critics and impose nighttime curfews, among other prohibitions.

Botha acted after courts here had ruled twice--and were preparing to do so again--that such police orders were unlawful, even under the seven-week-old state of emergency, because the government had violated basic legal principles limiting the delegation of authority. The courts held that the national police commissioner, acting under authority delegated by the president, was not entitled to further delegate those powers to local or regional police commanders.

Botha’s move was immediately denounced as “high-handed and cynical” by Tiaan van der Merwe, a member of Parliament from the white opposition Progressive Federal Party. “A head of state who takes this sort of action is becoming more and more of a dictator,” Van der Merwe said in Cape Town, “and he is committing his country into the ways of a police state.”

The court rulings had invalidated three-quarters of the operational regulations enforcing the state of emergency, and the government had faced the dilemma of finding the quickest, least embarrassing way to reinstate them, or allowing them to lapse.

Retroactive to June 12

As published in the Government Gazette late Friday, the amended regulations give local police commanders authority, retroactive to the beginning of emergency rule June 12, to take whatever measures they regard as necessary to end the two years of civil unrest here. The regulations have the force of law, and those convicted of violating them can be jailed for up to 10 years.

Civil rights lawyers, who had brought the lawsuits that overturned the local regulations, at least for a few days, had hoped the government would now agree to have all the measures issued through a central office at police headquarters, where they could be reviewed for legality, clarity and common sense.

“What is quite disgraceful,” the leader of the Progressive Federal Party, Colin Eglin, commented, “is the fact that Mr. Botha makes his new regulations retrospective, and in doing so he nullifies the judgments already given by the courts of law.”

4 More Killed

Four more people died in the country’s unremitting political violence. According to the government’s Bureau for Information, the bodies of two black men were found outside a church in Kwazakele, a black ghetto township near Port Elizabeth, and that of a third man in a cemetery in another Port Elizabeth township.

The fourth fatality was reported in the nominally independent tribal homeland of Transkei as a result of an attack Wednesday by black insurgents on a police station in Umtata, the Transkei capital. Eight people have now died as a result of the assault, presumed to be the work of the African National Congress.

Ten people were seriously injured when a firebomb was thrown at the bus in which they were riding in Kwandebele, a much-troubled tribal homeland northeast of Pretoria, where residents have been fighting government plans to give it “independence” in December. A local government minister was assassinated there this week, and more than 160 people reportedly have been killed in Kwandebele in the past three months.

In Soweto, the black satellite city outside Johannesburg, police and soldiers are reportedly using dogs and whips to keep high school students in their classrooms and break up daily protests against strict new government regulations banning politics from black schools.

Pictures of Dog Bites

Emergency regulations prohibit detailed reporting of the security forces’ actions to cope with the spreading class boycotts, but local newspapers published pictures of students with deep dog bites on their legs and arms.

Affidavits filed with the Supreme Court in Cape Town by the Western Cape Teachers Union and other organizations said that schools there are in a “desperate crisis,” effectively under occupation by the police and army.