S. Africa Judge Takes Hard Line With 19 Blacks

Leaders of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups, were told here Thursday that they had “a case to answer” on criminal charges that they were responsible for much of the political violence that has engulfed South Africa for more than two years.

Justice Kees van Dijkhorst of the Transvaal provincial supreme court rejected defense requests that he dismiss charges of treason, terrorism, subversion and murder against 19 national and local leaders of the three-year-old front, its affiliates and other anti-apartheid groups.

With 171 witnesses, more than 8,000 pages of testimony and about 15,000 pieces of documentary evidence, state prosecutors had established over the past year a basic, prima facie case against the men, all of whom are blacks, under the country’s severe security laws, Van Dijkhorst said.

There was also considerable evidence, he said, that they had illegally “furthered the aims” of the outlawed African National Congress, the principal rebel group fighting minority white rule here.

And he added that some, if not most, of the defendants might well be convicted of murder as a result of the deaths of four local town councilors, who became targets of attack almost immediately after the unrest broke out in the Vaal River region, south of Johannesburg, on Sept. 3, 1984.

Where the prosecution’s evidence was uncertain, Van Dijkhorst said, defense testimony might “amplify” it, providing the information necessary to convict the men, and he would not use his judicial discretion to dismiss the charges against them.

Van Dijkhorst, however, did acquit three of the original 22 defendants, ruling that the prosecution had failed to show they had any links to the violence or were leaders of United Democratic Front affiliates that the state has blamed for starting and continuing the civil unrest. The three were local activists from black townships in the Vaal region.

Van Dijkhorst also released on bail six other defendants, most of whom had been held in prison for two years. But the bail conditions demanded by the security police prohibit the six from entering any of the six black townships in the Vaal area, although several of them live there and are effectively barred from going home despite their release on bail.

Defense of the 19, likely to take another year in what already is one of South Africa’s longest and most complex political trials, will become an attack on apartheid and an appeal for broader support for the United Democratic Front, according to the two top UDF leaders on trial, general secretary Popo Molefe and publicity secretary Patrick Lekota.

With the UDF now denied major public forums by regulations under the state of emergency, Molefe and Lekota said that they and other defendants will use the trial as an opportunity to elaborate the organization’s nonviolent philosophy and to challenge the government to negotiate with it.

“For us in the UDF, we have reached the point where we cannot afford to dilly-dally any longer,” Lekota told reporters from the prisoners’ dock at the courthouse here. “Otherwise, South Africa will degenerate into the degree of violence that consumed Vietnam for so many years. Already, the dead are piling up in our (black) townships, and the authorities have detained more than 20,000 people under the state of emergency in an attempt to maintain order. . . . Do they realize how close what they call ‘unrest’ has come to civil war?”

When the case resumes in January in this sleepy farming community about 60 miles east of Johannesburg, Molefe said, “we will be putting the state and the (apartheid) system on trial.”

In another Thursday development, the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, a civil rights monitoring group, reported that about 4,000 children under age 18 are being held without charge under the state of emergency imposed June 12. The group estimated that about 8,000 have been detained altogether in the past 5 1/2 months.