S. Africa Group Warns It May Use Force : Anti-Apartheid Coalition Could Change Its Policy, Shultz Is Told

The United Democratic Front, the largest coalition of anti-apartheid groups in South Africa, warned Thursday that it soon may be forced to abandon peaceful resistance to the country’s white-led minority government and turn to violence.

In an open letter to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, the organization called on the West, particularly the United States, to increase its pressure on South Africa to end apartheid, the system of racial separation and minority white rule, before the already extensive political violence escalates.

“We are being forced into a situation where all methods of resistance must be considered,” Murphy Morobe, the front’s principal spokesman, said in the letter to Shultz. “The United Democratic Front and the legal opposition movement are being thrust by the unrelenting repression of the regime into a position where they may have to review their nonviolent principles.

“It will be the failure of the United States and the world to use all ways in which the apartheid system can effectively be brought to an end that will leave us with no alternative but to turn from peaceful methods.”

The letter to Shultz, made public by Morobe, was the gravest warning yet that leaders of the United Democratic Front, like those of the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania before it, might turn to violence if they feel that their peaceful protests are failing and that the government is determined to crush such opposition. The ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress, once legal organizations, were both outlawed in 1960.

“The long experience of the people of South Africa has shown that, in the days and weeks to come, the mass democratic movement can anticipate fresh waves of brutality and hardship and more restrictions and bannings aimed at crushing us,” Morobe said. “One thing is clear: We cannot and will not abandon the fight against apartheid.”

Morobe’s appeal for greater American support comes before Shultz’s scheduled meeting in Washington next week with Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress. Morobe urged the United States to put the sensitive question of the ANC’s 25-year-old armed struggle in the context of “the violence and intransigence of the white minority government” in South Africa.

The meeting between Shultz and Tambo is in itself “a historic breakthrough,” Morobe said, but he added that it should also bring real changes in U.S. policy in southern Africa, not just the expected broad discussions and further American pressure on the African National Congress to drop low-level guerrilla war and terrorist attacks in favor of peaceful negotiations.

Although the African National Congress is frequently blamed for most of the political violence here, and its guerrilla attacks and terrorism are often cited as the principal barriers to peaceful political evolution, Morobe argued that “the immoral and unjust apartheid system is the source of violence in our country.”

“For too many years now, the world has stood by while the Nationalist government has inflicted brutal force on the majority of black South Africans,” Morobe said, challenging the United States to adopt “a real change of policy.”

“The death toll of our people,” he went on, “reaches thousands while the losses of millions of others in terms of dignity, civil rights, family life and peaceful existence cannot be calculated. . . .

“We question the intentions of the U.S. government in taking the ANC to task on the issue of violence when daily the South African regime makes known its intolerance of any form of opposition, violent and nonviolent. We ask how and when does Mr. Shultz envisage the end of apartheid and the winning of democratic rights for our people? Does he believe the minority regime is prepared to negotiate itself out of power? Or is it rather desperately clinging to that power by the use of terror and violence?”

Noting the intense pressure upon the United Democratic Front’s 700 affiliates during the seven-month national state of emergency--including widespread detentions of their leaders, prohibition of virtually all meetings, restrictions on the press and other measures--Morobe said, “The UDF and its affiliates now must ask the question--what avenues of legal and peaceful opposition are still open to the people of South Africa?”