S. Africa School Heads Assail Crackdown

The presidents of English-language universities urged the government Friday to end the state of emergency and free detainees. Three of them called special assemblies of students, white and black.

At the multiracial University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, more than 3,000 students and staff members crowded into the main hall for a special general assembly that was only the fourth in its 64-year history.

“It takes a crisis of huge proportions and devastating impact to justify such a gathering,” said Prof. Phillip Tobias, one of the speakers. “Today in the emergency, freedom is under siege as never before.”

Alan Mabin, faculty association chairman, called the emergency the most repressive crackdown in South Africa’s history and declared, “The peace that is being created is the peace of the prison and the cemetery.”

Friday’s academic protest of the emergency imposed June 12 included the statement signed by the five university vice chancellors and simultaneous assemblies at Witwatersrand, the University of Natal in Durban and the University of Cape Town. The other schools involved were Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town.

Vice chancellors are equivalent to university presidents, and the chancellorship is an honorary position. Those issuing the joint statement are white, as are nearly all university faculty members.

Most students at the University of the Western Cape are of mixed race, or Coloreds, in official South African terms. Enrollment at the other four is multiracial but predominantly white.

In other developments Friday:

--An anti-apartheid newspaper, the Weekly Mail, said all 601 emergency detainees at Modderbee Prison east of Johannesburg had gone on hunger strike. Prison officials denied that all were fasting but acknowledged some hunger strikes.

--Police said officers killed four “terrorists” who were trying to enter the country from Swaziland on Thursday night. The government uses the term terrorist to describe guerrillas of the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress, but no further identification of the slain men was released.