S. Africa Launches Major Crackdown

Police began a nationwide roundup Friday of suspected members of the outlawed African National Congress and their sympathizers in a major crackdown on the government’s opponents.

President Pieter W. Botha, addressing the nation on television, said the tough new security measures are necessary to prevent what he described as a bloody terrorist campaign by black guerrillas against whites over Christmas.

Dozens of black community organizers, labor union officials, student leaders and other anti-apartheid activists were reported arrested overnight in the start of what appeared to be a major assault on the African National Congress and its supporters in both South Africa and neighboring countries.

Gen. Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner, said that “various arrests” of ANC members and “other violent elements” had been made in pre-dawn raids and that “a large number of documents and subversive material” had been seized. He gave no further details.

Black Editor Held

Among those held were Zwelakhe Sisulu, editor of the black newspaper New Nation and the son of imprisoned African National Congress leader Walter Sisulu; and two Swiss, who had been reportedly abducted along with two or three other persons from neighboring Swaziland by unidentified gunmen said to have come from South Africa.

“Our security forces have, over the past 24 hours, been compelled to conduct certain preventive security measures (directed at) the terrorist alliance, which has as its aim the fomenting of revolution in our country,” Botha said on television.

“These security measures were aimed at South African Communist Party-African National Congress structures that are involved in the planning, coordination and execution of revolutionary violence,” he added.

Coetzee said that the arrests were intended to prevent the ANC from carrying out an alleged campaign of terrorist attacks over the Christmas holidays that would have resulted in “destruction and mutilation regardless of who the victims were.”

Protests Prohibited

Later, regional police commissioners began issuing orders prohibiting protests that call for an end to the six-month-old state of emergency, for the release of political detainees, for legalization of the African National Congress and for the withdrawal of troops from the country’s black townships. The orders, issued under provisions of the state of emergency, also make it illegal to take part in a “Christmas Against the Emergency” campaign called by several anti-apartheid groups.

Government spokesmen here refused, however, to provide further details of the crackdown, and South Africa’s new censorship regulations prohibit unauthorized reporting of security force operations. This story has been written to conform with the government’s new regulations, imposed on Thursday under the state of emergency.

Botha said in his television address that captured African National Congress documents proved the guerrilla group was “striving to divide our black communities and to incite them against whites and to encourage the committing of acts of violence against whites, even if these were to include large-scale bloodshed.”

He added that ANC plans call for terrorist attacks on the country’s urban centers, on white residential neighborhoods and on white farms, particularly those in border areas.

Hints at Foreign Raids

“The state cannot allow overt and underground structures created for the execution of violent revolution to function undisturbed, neither within nor outside the country,” Botha said, declaring his government’s intention to pursue the African National Congress wherever it can be found.

The focus of the combined police and army operation, Botha said, was “on underground units specifically responsible for acts of sabotage, murder and terror.”

And he implied several times that South Africa is prepared to strike across its borders at suspected ANC offices and bases in neighboring countries and might even attack the organization’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.

“No one should accuse us of flights of fantasy,” he added, anticipating widespread criticism here and abroad. “The results of these bloody inhuman acts are visible for all to see.”

The South African government had based this operation, Botha said, on “irrefutable information” on both the ANC’s plans and its organizational structure here and in neighboring countries. “These were therefore not actions directed against innocent persons and bystanders,” he said.

2 Dead in Swaziland

In Swaziland, however, Prime Minister Sotja Dlamini said that two people, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed in “brutal, aggressive and illegal” overnight raids on five homes of South African refugees and suspected ANC supporters around Mbabane, the Swazi capital.

At least four people, including a Swiss graphic artist and his fiancee, a junior hotel manager, were abducted by the unidentified gunmen who drove them across the border into South Africa. The others abducted were political refugees from South Africa, Dlamini said.

Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha said here later that his government had detained two Swiss citizens on suspicion of helping the African National Congress gather intelligence and plan terrorist attacks here. The Swiss government said that both were abducted from Swaziland, and demanded an explanation from South Africa.

Army Security Tightened

Among those detained in the nationwide roundup Friday was a South African soldier, apparently a white conscript, who is suspected of providing intelligence to the African National Congress. A top military commander said that security had been tightened within the army to prevent further ANC infiltration.

President Botha sharply criticized those South Africans, whites and blacks, who have either come to support the ANC or entered into a dialogue with it in recent months and warned that the government would act “against those who allow themselves and their organizations, especially the United Democratic Front, to be misused and misguided by the forces of terror.”

In a briefing for reporters here, Stoffel van der Merwe, deputy minister for information, also stressed links between the African National Congress, outlawed a quarter century ago, and the United Democratic Front, a three-year-old coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups claiming more than 4 million members, and cited ANC statements on using the coalition for mass mobilization within the country.

Citing excerpts from several documents he said were obtained by South African intelligence, Van der Merwe said the African National Congress had concluded that its strategy to seize power here depends on “an integral balance between mass action and armed struggle,” that an intensified political struggle is now required and that this was to be led by the United Democratic Front and its affiliates.

The documents, along with intelligence gathered from interrogations of prisoners and defectors and information provided by its own informers, proved conclusively that the ANC was attempting to escalate its political and military activities in South Africa, officials here said, and faced with this mounting threat, the government concluded it had to act preemptively against the organization.

Criticized for Factions

Among the documents was a speech, reportedly made by ANC President Oliver Tambo, at a conference at the group’s headquarters in Lusaka in late September, in which he criticized the United Democratic Front for its internal divisions and ineffectiveness.

In other developments, British historian Philip Bonner, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was unexpectedly released from detention and an order for his deportation was rescinded. His arrest and a similar order for his wife’s deportation had provoked considerable protests here.