Tutu Defies Latest Curbs, Urges Release of Detainees

Archbishop Desmond Tutu defied new government regulations Monday by urging South Africans to join with him in calling for the release of the thousands of political detainees imprisoned here without trial.

Tutu was joined by other Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religious leaders in a dramatic challenge to South Africa’s white-led minority government. Over the weekend, the government had prohibited all protests against its practice of detaining anti-apartheid activists and other political opponents and holding them without charge, sometimes for periods approaching a year and often in solitary confinement.

Tutu drew the support of U.S. Ambassador Edward J. Perkins, who attended the special noontime prayer service along with opposition politicians and other foreign diplomats.

The Anglican archbishop courted arrest with his strong words, but later in the day, the government backed down on the explosive issue.

“I will continue to urge, as I do now, the authorities to release all detainees or to bring them to court,” Tutu told a congregation of more than 1,000 at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Cape Town. “And I hope you support me in such a call. Do you?”

A thunderous “Yes!” filled the church, which is only a few hundred yards from the office of President Pieter W. Botha. Then the congregation broke into applause for Tutu’s deliberate defiance of the new regulations, which specifically prohibit any organized protest against political detentions and any encouragement to join such a protest.

“I will urge my congregations to launch a campaign, a peaceful and nonviolent campaign, whatever the consequences,” Tutu said. He described the government’s new regulations as immoral, totalitarian and “blasphemous,” and added:

“Christians cannot obey them without dishonoring God. I warn the government again to just remember one thing: You are powerful--perhaps very powerful, even--but you are not God. You are mere mortals. Beware when you take on the church of God. Others have tried and have bitten the dust.”

Boesak Goes Further

The Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and moderator of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church here, went even further. He told the multiracial, interdenominational congregation, “I say quite simply and openly, South Africa’s people should rise up in revolt against this ban to show our love for our people.”

Rather than compliance with the new regulations, Boesak said, there should be an intensification of the campaign to free the country’s political detainees.

“I would so much like to see stickers appearing on cars all over the country in the next few days,” he said. “I would like to see posters in every church by Easter Sunday.”

On Monday evening, faced with the prospect of arresting Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and perhaps provoking a major confrontation between church and state, Gen. Johan Coetzee, South Africa’s national police commissioner, backed down. He said the new regulations were not intended to “prohibit prayers for the release of a detainee during a bona fide religious gathering.”

Curbs Clarified

Coetzee, whose orders have the force of law under the country’s state of emergency, also said that the new regulations do not apply to candidates campaigning in the May 6 whites-only parliamentary election. The opposition Progressive Federal Party had declared its intention to ignore Coetzee’s orders, threatening the government with a serious political crisis if opposition candidates should be charged with violating emergency regulations by raising what they consider a central issue of the campaign.

The Botha government, which has been under intense criticism over Coetzee’s ban of the protests, relented further by making clear the right to appeal through the courts and other legal channels for the release of detainees. The apparent prohibition against this in the weekend orders might, under South African law, have invalidated the regulations.

Coetzee’s original order, published Saturday, makes it a crime, punishable by 10 years in prison, to encourage anyone to protest the imprisonment of political detainees, to honor them, to call for their release or to perform publicly any symbolic act of solidarity with them.

5,000 Currently Detained

About 30,000 people, including at least 7,500 children under 18, have been detained without charge under the emergency regulations, according to the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee and other civil rights groups here. Although the government refuses to say how many people are currently detained, the number is believed to be about 5,000. Some have been in solitary confinement since last June.

The strong and widespread reaction to the new regulations plunged the government into deep discussions Monday. Botha consulted with his ministers and other top officials on ways to avoid the looming, multilevel confrontations, then decided on the “clarifying statement” by Coetzee. He and other officials were not available for direct comment.

Present in the congregation at the prayer service, which itself was perhaps illegal under the new regulations, was U.S. Ambassador Perkins, who strongly condemned the measures as a further “erosion of fundamental liberties in this country.”

“It is sad,” Perkins said, “that a government that claims to uphold the values of human dignity and that portrays itself as secure and strong should be so intimidated by the peaceful protestations of its citizens that it declares those protestations to be illegal.”

Breaks 6-Month Silence

In speaking out, Perkins broke a self-imposed silence he has maintained since his arrival in November.

“Freedom of assembly, the freedom to speak out and the freedom to give and receive information deemed vital to the community are in serious jeopardy,” the ambassador warned in a statement that was distributed to the congregation at St. George’s Cathedral as well as to the press.

Perkins, who joined in the singing of the black protest anthem “Nkosi Sikele i’Afrika,” originally a Methodist hymn entitled “God Bless Africa,” said later he participated in the service to demonstrate his government’s opposition to detention without trial, its “outrage over the continued detention of large numbers of children” and its dismay over the government’s new restrictions on peaceful protests.

ANC Member Sentenced

In Pietermaritzburg, meanwhile, a self-confessed member of the military wing of the outlawed African National Congress received a triple death sentence after being convicted of murder and terrorism in connection with a bombing campaign in Durban last year that left three dead and many wounded. His girlfriend and accomplice was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Robert McBride, 23, who is Colored--of mixed-race ancestry--had testified that he took the government’s state of emergency imposed last June as a “declaration of war” and reacted out of anger and frustration with a bombing campaign, not authorized by ANC leaders, that was intended to punish whites.

In Daveyton, a black township east of Johannesburg, a 26-year-old black was “murdered by a mob of radicals” who stoned him to death, the bureau said. Two teen-age girls, apparently believed to be government informers, were attacked but saved by police, according to the report. Under South Africa’s emergency regulations, news reports are largely restricted to information provided by the government, and most other material on the continuing political violence is effectively censored.