Pretoria Moving Toward Stricter Curbs on the Press

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Angered by continuing opposition attacks on its policies, President Pieter W. Botha’s government is preparing to impose even greater restrictions on the South African press amid fears that these are only part of a new and tougher crackdown here.

The Newspaper Press Union, which includes the country’s four major newspaper chains, apparently has agreed under heavy pressure from Botha to harsher self-censorship, to stronger measures to enforce it and thus, in Botha’s words, to “discipline the press.”

“The press union fully realizes that South Africa is being subjected to a many-pronged but well-coordinated revolutionary onslaught,” the group said in a statement released by Botha’s office in Cape Town. “We accept the need to do everything in our power to avoid giving support and encouragement to those seeking revolutionary change by overt as well as covert means.”

According to newspaper executives here, the new controls, expected to be imposed shortly, could go as far as to prevent publication of any criticism of the government outside of a few “privileged” forums, such as Parliament, and to limit news on the country’s continuing civil unrest strictly to the brief reports prepared by the government’s Bureau for Information.

Several newspapers, among them the liberal New Nation and Weekly Mail and the right-wing Die Afrikaner, could be shut down under the measures, according to sources familiar with two heated meetings that Botha recently had with the country’s top newspaper executives.

Moreover, newspaper editors and reporters might be required to get “certificates,” or licenses, from a watchdog media council, according to other local press sources, and journalists without them would be barred from working. Foreign correspondents would also be subject to further restrictions, these sources believe, and many of them could be ordered to leave South Africa.

“The press is fighting for its life,” the Star, the country’s largest daily newspaper, said today in a front-page commentary entitled “Closer to Tyranny.”

“If newspapers are muzzled with dozens of other democratic organizations, then everyone will be muzzled,” the Star said, calling on South Africans to “persuade a misguided government to regain its equilibrium” by becoming “vocal and visible about their rights.”

“The threat to the last vestiges of liberty come partly from the extreme left, not yet from the extreme right,” the Star said. “But suddenly the main threat to freedom is the ‘reform’ government, acting in the name of ‘security.’

“President Botha seems to have put aside reform in favor of repression. And now the pressures for more and more ‘security’ are getting out of hand. If this is allowed to continue, there will be no way back--even for the government.”

The Black Sash, a group of liberal white women that in its 31 years has become one of the foremost foes of apartheid, said that it was “frightened” by new press restrictions and the government’s apparent determination to silence all opposition.

“We do not know if ever again within South Africa we can publicly condemn the totalitarian rule that has so rapidly enveloped this country in the last few months and that will reach its zenith with the total co-option and annihilation of the already fragile concept of a free press,” the group said.

In an equally pessimistic column, the Star’s editor, Harvey Tyson, described the planned press controls as part of a much broader government crackdown on its opponents, both whites and blacks, that began 10 days ago. “Ominous political clouds have gathered, and there is almost certain to be a storm, if not this weekend, then before Christmas,” Tyson wrote Saturday.

Dozens of anti-apartheid activists, many of them whites, have been detained without charge in the past week under the six-month-old national state of emergency, and others have been served with police orders prohibiting them from participating in anti-government protests.

The offices of many anti-apartheid organizations, as well as the homes of their members, have been raided in recent days, and university officials have reportedly been told to end political protests on their campuses, which have been among the few relatively free political forums remaining under the state of emergency.

Within well-informed political circles, speculation was widespread that the government intends not only to detain many hundreds more activists or to place them under severe restrictions, including effective house arrest, but that it will also shut down scores of opposition groups, either by declaring them illegal or prohibiting them from receiving funds from abroad.

“There are other signs that the laager gates are swinging closed,” Tyson wrote, using the image of the circled-wagon defense, the laager, of pioneering Afrikaner settlers as a metaphor for the country’s new retreat in the face of growing demands from whites as well as blacks for an end to apartheid.

Murphy Morobe, spokesman for the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups, said his organization has information that “the state has been planning a massive operation against all democratic forces” in the coming 10 days.

Morobe said the government is establishing camps for “mass detentions,” has recruited “vigilantes” to attack local anti-apartheid activists and is trying to provoke rival black political groups into fights with each other.

The new press restrictions were designed to hide the government’s activities in this coming crackdown, Morobe asserted. “No journalist worth his or her salt should accept such blatant curtailment of their right to free journalistic expression,” he added, criticizing the newspaper publishers for “meekly capitulating” to further controls on the press.

Meanwhile, 14 blacks, 10 of them gold miners, died in the country’s continuing civil strife. The miners were killed in fighting at the Vaal Reefs Gold Mine, about 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, apparently between supporters and opponents of the National Union of Mineworkers; 51 people were injured.

The clash appeared to be a renewal of last month’s fighting at Vaal Reefs when 13 people were killed after union stewards tried to enforce a boycott of the mine’s beer garden over the objections of other miners. Vaal Reefs, the world’s second largest gold mine, is operated by Anglo American Corp. and employs 47,000 people.

Two officials of the Metal and Allied Workers Union and the daughter of a third union member were abducted and killed early Saturday near Pietermaritzburg in Natal province, allegedly by members of a rival group, Inkatha, the Zulu political movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. The three were shot and their bodies then burned inside a car. A fourth person died in further fighting between union and Inkatha members.

One of the union officials was Phineas Sibiya, 32, chairman of the shop stewards’ committee at a British-owned tire plant where workers went on strike last year but so far have failed to win recognition for the union.