South Africa Ignores Pledge, Orders Blacks to Move From Their Homes

The South African government, which pledged last year to end the forced removal of blacks from their homes, Friday officially abolished a black township northwest of Pretoria and decreed that its 10,000 residents must move immediately.

J. Christiaan Heunis, the minister of constitutional development and planning, announced the “deproclamation” of Oukasie, a 55-year-old township at Brits, about 30 miles outside Pretoria. The government has long sought to move Oukasie as part of its plans for racially segregated residential areas.

Heunis explained that the cost of improving the “poor hygienic conditions,” of installing electricity and paving the roads at Oukasie was too great, and that the residents could be better accommodated at a newer township, Lethlabile, 12 miles from Brits.

May Cut Utilities

The order allows the local authorities to cut off all utilities to the township and end municipal services there. The next likely step would be a government declaration that the residents are squatters, followed by the demolition of their houses and their transportation along with the belongings salvaged from the wreckage of their homes to Lethlabile.

Oukasie’s leaders, angrily denouncing the government action as a breach of its pledge to end forced relocations, said they believe the real reasons for the move are that whites in Brits feet that Oukasie, only 250 yards from white neighborhoods, is too close to them and that they want the township land to build new houses.

A ‘Blatant Example’

“This is a classic and blatant example of a forced removal,” said Alan Morris, a member of the Transvaal Rural Action Committee, a civil rights group that has been helping residents fight the long-threatened move.

The government pledged in February, 1985, to halt the forced removals of blacks, long one of the most criticized programs in the apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule. Since 1950, more than 3.5 million people, mostly blacks, have been moved, according to reports critical of the resettlement policy. Oukasie is one of the few so-called “black spots” remaining in a predominantly white area.

The Brits Location Action Committee, which represents the 1,400 families still living at Oukasie, an Afrikaans contraction for “Old Location,” said it had asked Heunis to delay implementation of his order to give them time to prepare their own improvement plans. The group said it will seek a court order barring their forced relocation.

“We are not going to take it lying down,” Sello Ramakobye, the committee secretary, told newsmen here. “We are going to challenge it all the way. . . . Even if it means violence, we will have to resort to it because the government has forced it on us.”

Activists’ Homes Attacked

Community leaders said that violence has flared several times this year, with attacks, apparently by pro-government vigilantes, on the homes of local activists at Brits.

“We expect there will be a lot more violence,” said Levy Mamabolo, another committee member, “although we have tried and will keep trying to prevent it. . . . The people are angry. They won’t let the government steal their houses. They won’t be moved.”

Geoff Budlender, a lawyer for the committee, said the government had harassed residents repeatedly over the past year by shutting off water, ending garbage collection and trying to make Oukasie “generally uninhabitable.”

“The government’s response (to the request to defer implementation of the order pending the residents’ proposal on upgrading the township) will be a test of whether its real reason is cost,” Budlender added, “or rather what the residents suspect: that white people in Brits don’t want black people living too close to them.”

Heunis said his department had consulted with the township’s black community council, that it had agreed to the move, and that 1,505 families had already left Oukasie for Lethlabile.

Loans Offered

He said the government would give loans of $2,400 to families moving to the new township to build new homes, that it had already built schools and churches there, and would pave the road from Brits to Lethlabile and subsidize bus service.

In another development, the government confirmed its intention to detain indefinitely and without charge a 13-year-old black schoolboy on grounds that he “endangered and undermined the security of the state.”

Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, said that Zacharia Makhajane, a student leader at a primary school in Sebokeng, a black township about 50 miles south of Johannesburg, had “intimidated students and teachers on a regular basis” at the school. That was the reason, Le Grange said, for Makhajane’s arrest two months ago and for his continued detention under the national state of emergency declared June 12.

‘Radical Organization’

Le Grange said the elected student representative council on which the boy served was “a radical organization intent on obstructing and eventually replacing the education structure with an alternative structure, namely, people’s education.”

Makhajane’s lawyer, Azhar Cachalia, said the boy was being held in a prison hospital with criminals and other political detainees, all adults, and had been severely affected by the experience.

“Detention is having a detrimental effect on this child,” Cachalia said. “He is very bitter, and I seriously doubt that he will ever fully recover.”

Cachalia had sought a court order freeing the boy, but a panel of three judges said they had no authority to release him despite sworn and uncontested accounts of police beatings.

According to the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, which monitors security detentions, about 40% of the estimated 20,000 people detained in the first four months of the state of emergency were under 18 years old. About 9,000 are still believed to be in custody under regulations that permit indefinite detention without charge and with only limited access to the country’s courts.

Meanwhile, the government Bureau for Information reported three more deaths, including those of two black policemen, in the country’s continuing unrest. The body of a black police constable, abducted a week ago, was found in a shallow grave in a black township outside Port Elizabeth, the bureau said. The charred bones of a second policeman, who had been attacked and abducted Oct. 11, were found in another Port Elizabeth township. The burned body of a third man, apparently killed as a suspected police informer, was found outside the eastern Cape province town of Fort Beaufort.