S. Africa Says Crackdown Cut Violence

Political violence in South Africa has declined to its lowest level in 18 months, the government said Monday, crediting the four-month-old state of emergency with restoring law and order to most of the strife-torn country.

The government’s Bureau for Information, the only authorized source of news on the civil unrest and on police action to quell it, said that “most of the country is enjoying increasing stability.” It added that incidents of political violence are now “isolated and minor” and limited to a few areas.

The number of incidents reported by the police nationwide in September was the lowest since January, 1985, according to the bureau, and was 60% below the number in June, when President Pieter W. Botha declared a national state of emergency and gave the police and army virtual martial-law powers to quell the unrest.

The number of people killed and injured in the unrest last month was the lowest since February, 1985. In September, 28 people died in the civil strife, or an average of one person a day, according to the bureau’s figures, compared with 157 in May and 161 in June, when the average was more than five deaths each day. The government says that about two-thirds of the deaths now result from violence within the black community rather than police actions.

Mostly Stone-Throwing

Attacks on the security forces have declined, the bureau said, from 180 in the first week after the state of emergency was declared on June 12 to about 30 a week, two-thirds of them cases of stone-throwing.

On many days recently, fewer than a dozen incidents--and no deaths--have been reported from across the country. The violent incidents that are reported are often confined to Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, other areas east and west of the city, and eastern Cape province, particularly the black ghettos around the industrial center of Port Elizabeth, the bureau said. These areas together account for 70% of all unrest.

“For most South Africans, in most parts of the country, life is returning to normal,” Ronelle Henning, a bureau official, said, adding that the state of emergency is “proving increasingly successful in restoring stability.”

While accepting that violence has diminished substantially in recent weeks, the government’s critics argue that the cost has been unacceptably high in terms of abrogated civil rights, particularly for the country’s black majority.

Black townships often appear to be virtually under military occupation, heavily patrolled by police and soldiers in armored personnel carriers. In some places, residents are required to pass through checkpoints as they come and go. Virtually all gatherings are illegal, and township residents say the police often open fire without any warning to disperse them. Combat troops are stationed at many secondary schools.

More than 16,000 people have been detained without charge under the emergency regulations, according to civil rights groups, and a large proportion are 18 and younger. The leaders of hundreds of anti-apartheid groups, civic associations, labor unions and church organizations were arrested when the emergency was declared and are still reported held.

Terrorist bombings, largely in busy downtown areas now, continue despite an intense police effort to track down the African National Congress guerrillas believed responsible. ANC guerrillas have also carried out a number of bold operations, including several political assassinations, intended to demonstrate their increasing power.

And peaceful protests are continuing against South Africa’s apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

Student boycotts have made normal education impossible at hundreds of secondary schools and more than 4 million people in 54 black communities are refusing to pay rent for their government-owned houses. Also, an estimated 325,000 black miners, supported by several hundred thousand other labor union members, refused in their biggest show of power yet to go to work last Tuesday to protest what they believe are unsafe working conditions in South Africa’s mines.

“To say that the situation is returning to normal is laughable, completely ridiculous,” Murphy Morobe, the spokesman of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 650 anti-apartheid groups, said last week. “This ‘stability’ has been achieved by the police and army turning our townships into concentration camps. . . . If fewer people are being killed, it’s because the police are killing fewer of us, and that is truly your ‘negative gain.’ ”

Serious questions have also been raised about the accuracy of the government’s unrest reports and the assessments based on them.

The Bureau for Information does not include in its death tallies any suspected ANC guerrillas killed by the police or anyone killed in South Africa’s four nominally independent tribal homelands. Incidents involving municipal or township police are generally not included in the bureau’s reports, nor are incidents resulting from the eviction of rent strikers.

The independent South African Institute of Race Relations, using a more comprehensive reporting system, put the number of known deaths in May at 221, not the 157 reported by the bureau, and institute researchers thus believe that perhaps 600 people have died in the past four months, not the 341 reported by the government.