Tutu Invites 165 U.S. Apartheid Foes to His Installation

Bishop Desmond Tutu, in his latest challenge to the South African government, is inviting 165 churchmen, entertainers, athletes and politicians from the United States and Europe, all firm foes of apartheid, to his installation next month as the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.

The guest list, published here Wednesday, includes entertainers Lionel Ritchie, Stevie Wonder and Harry Belafonte, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Gary Hart (D-Colo.), five black mayors, including Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, and Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Others on the list are U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean McBride of Ireland and New York Mayor Edward I. Koch.

Actor-comedian Bill Cosby, former tennis star Arthur Ashe and Mrs. Jackie Robinson, widow of the first black player in major league baseball, have also been invited.

The invitations pose a major political problem for the government: If Pretoria allows them to come, dozens of the world’s most prominent anti-apartheid campaigners will gather in Cape Town and effectively turn the occasion into a major international protest against the country’s system of racial separation and continued minority white rule.

But to refuse visas to such distinguished guests would be almost as embarrassing to the government as letting them come and would make South Africa appear even more beleaguered internationally.

Stoffel Botha, the minister for home affairs, said Wednesday that he has “no objection in principle” to allowing Tutu’s guests to come to South Africa.

“In the absence of a list of guests, however, I am not in a position to give the assurance that all invited guests will have no difficulty in obtaining visas to enter South Africa for that occasion,” Botha added.

60 Visa Requests

He said his ministry has received more than 60 requests for visas from invited guests and is processing them “as swiftly as possible.”

The government’s most likely course, according to political observers here, will be to approve visas for churchmen and less controversial figures but to delay action on most requests until after the Sept. 7 ceremony.

Such politically sensitive visa applications normally require six to eight weeks for processing, and the government probably turns down more requests now than it approves.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert A.K. Runcie, will officiate at the ceremony, attended by 1,650 guests, at St. George’s Cathedral and then preach at a second service at a local sports stadium.

Tutu, who won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against apartheid, is currently the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg. In April, he was elected archbishop of Cape Town and head of the Anglican church in southern Africa.

Only last week the government warned him that his repeated calls for economic sanctions against South Africa to bring an end to apartheid border on high treason. Pro-government Afrikaans-language newspapers have called in recent editorials for Tutu to be charged under security laws and emergency regulations with “economic sabotage,” a crime punishable by life imprisonment.

Terry Crawford-Browne, an Anglican Church press officer, said Wednesday that arrangements are being made to broadcast the ceremony worldwide, although the state-run South African Broadcasting Corp. has decided not to cover the event.

Meanwhile, the government acknowledged Wednesday, in a dramatic announcement in the Natal provincial Supreme Court, that its order two months ago prohibiting newsmen from firsthand coverage of political unrest here is invalid.

The government also conceded to the court that another order, which permits only authorized reports on police and army activities to deal with the continuing unrest, is invalid as well.

Neither regulation had been properly promulgated by the police, a government attorney told the court, although both South African and foreign newsmen had been warned by the government’s Bureau for Information that they could be jailed for 10 years if they did not obey the orders.

The legal defect can be remedied, however, by formal publication of the regulations in the Government Gazette, lawyers involved in the case said.

Challenges by the country’s English-language newspapers to all the emergency regulations, including two other curbs on the press, will be decided next week, the court said. The other bans prohibit any quotation of “subversive statements” and reporting of the names of those detained under the emergency regulations before the government discloses their identities.

Film Tampering Charged

Two American television bureaus here and one British bureau complained Wednesday that recent news film was stolen or tampered with en route to New York or London. ABC, NBC and British Independent Television News said that politically sensitive tapes were being taken from their air-freight pouches. The U.S. Embassy here said it has lodged a protest with the South African government.

The opposition Progressive Federal Party on Wednesday accused the government of failing to report all those detained under the emergency regulations, as required by law, and thus of trying to minimize the number held without charge.

Excluded from the government’s list of 8,501 detainees are more than 1,000 unionized workers who were held for more than a week before being released, according to Neil Ross, manager of the party’s “missing persons bureau.”

Ross estimated that at least 12,000 people have been arrested and held without charge since the state of emergency was imposed June 12.

Times staff writer Paul Houston, in Washington, contributed to this article.