2 South Africa Black Groups Torn by Feud

Two of South Africa’s most powerful black political organizations are locked in an increasingly murderous feud that their leaders fear could grow into a civil war.

Scores of blacks have already died in the bitter rivalry between the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups with more than 3 million members nationwide, and Inkatha, the 1.3-million-member, predominantly Zulu political movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

Many of the black townships and squatter settlements around Durban and other cities in Natal province have become armed camps. There are almost daily attacks and counterattacks, making the region, once one of the quietest areas in this strife-torn country, the most troubled in recent weeks.

“When you get up in the morning, you pray your family will get through the day without being shot or kidnaped or hacked to death,” Mary Dube, a department store clerk and the mother of five, said. “And when you go to bed, you pray that your house won’t be set on fire while you sleep. . . .

“All around us, there is a war going on, and the only thing you can do is to try to keep your family safe.”

Members of rival political groups are abducted from their homes or off the street, beaten and sometimes killed, according to reports from the government’s Bureau for Information. Homes, shops and cars are stoned and frequently firebombed, sometimes with loss of life.

Ordinary crime also has risen substantially, residents say, as thugs use the spreading confusion to cover their activities.

Political Killings Frequent

Political murders now occur regularly, and each death brings several more in reprisal. Rifles and hand grenades have become standard weapons in the fighting.

Community “defense committees” are being set up by United Democratic Front groups in many areas with the aim of protecting residents against the rising violence, and Buthelezi, as chief minister of the Kwazulu tribal homeland, is seeking control of local police forces and the authority to issue gun licenses.

“We are on the edge of a very, very dangerous escalation of this conflict,” Lechesa Tsenoli, a top United Democratic Front official in Natal, said. “The violence already is out of hand, and it seems to be growing almost uncontrollably. . . . With Inkatha’s willingness to kill in furtherance of its activities and goals, I am personally very pessimistic about our prospects for reducing the violence and resolving the conflict.”

Oscar Dhlomo, Inkatha’s secretary general, says he also sees “no way out at present,” but he blames the UDF for starting the violence in Natal and for frustrating repeated efforts at reconciliation.

Sees Political Intolerance

“The UDF has come with a kind of politics that does not tolerate alternative viewpoints,” Dhlomo said, accusing the group of trying to force all blacks into a political monolith supporting the outlawed African National Congress and its armed struggle against South Africa’s white-led minority government.

“I fear this violence could be a reflection of things to come in the post-liberation era if steps aren’t taken now to bring a measure of political coexistence.”

Other Concerns

Other black leaders also express concern that the conflict between Inkatha and the African National Congress and its backers here could develop into a civil war if the underlying conflicts are not resolved.

“This violence here in Natal is really a struggle over the future of the country and who will lead it,” said the Rev. Stanley Magoba, secretary of the Methodist Church’s Southern African conference, which has its headquarters here in Durban. “The stakes are very high, and that’s the reason the conflict has become so intense. But we have real fears it may mean a civil war, a black civil war, either before or after liberation.”

Pattern in Other Countries

What worries Magoba and others are the political patterns in many other African countries where rivalries in the struggle for independence or majority rule later led to further violence, including civil war.

After more than a decade of independence from Portugal, the Marxist governments of neighboring Angola and Mozambique, for example, are both still fighting right-wing guerrillas, and Zimbabwe remains politically divided and still troubled at times by “armed bandits” despite efforts to merge the country’s two major black parties.

“We don’t want to go through the struggle we know lies ahead and bring apartheid to an end only to find we have brother fighting brother,” a community worker from Kwamashu, one of Durban’s most troubled black townships, commented recently. “The political violence we have in our townships today is very bad, but what it could become is terrifying, truly terrifying.”

Blacks say that increasingly they are being forced to choose between allegiance to the United Democratic Front or to Inkatha, and that the wrong choice, or even a refusal to be drawn into the feud, can mean an attack on them or their families.

Sought Mediation

So fierce has the conflict become that Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other church leaders to attempt “Christian mediation” between the rival groups in order to end the bloodshed.

Buthelezi welcomed the proposal, saying that “the need for peaceful change, nonviolence and reconciliation is crucial.” A United Democratic Front spokesman replied, “In principle, yes, but we have questions about Inkatha’s sincerity and good faith.”

The fighting has nonetheless escalated sharply in recent months. Last month, more than a dozen youths believed to be members of a UDF youth group were abducted and seven of them were murdered. Thirteen members of a family of another UDF youth leader were slain in January and a senior Zulu chief and member of the Kwazulu legislative assembly was murdered this month, one element in a series of ambushes and hand grenade attacks on local Inkatha officials. Police have also reported increasing clashes with suspected African National Congress guerrillas in several parts of Natal.

Buthelezi, who had earlier warned Inkatha’s enemies that his members would take “an eye for an eye” if attacked, described “this spiral of death and destruction” as “initially politically motivated” but “now clearly out of control” in a statement that appealed for the community’s release from “a grip of terror.”

50 Killed in 3 Months

According to figures compiled by Durban’s Unrest Monitoring Project from official reports, at least 50 people have been killed in the fighting in the first three months of this year, 40 of them members of affiliates of the United Democratic Front or the Congress of South African Trade Unions, five from Inkatha and five without known political affiliation.

“These have mostly been propaganda killings, the kind intended to have a very intimidating effect on those aligned with the UDF,” Tsenoli of the UDF said. “Each incident leads to more clashes, more deaths, in a whole chain of events. To us, it looks like premeditated, preplanned mayhem for political purposes.”

But Inkatha officials dispute the figures, saying their losses include seven senior members of their organization and “two or three times” that number overall since Jan. 1.

“We tend to be victims,” Dhlomo said, “but our victims are not known to the same extent as those of the UDF. . . . We have lost people, senior people, good people. We have buried many of our members, as has the UDF, and one wonders where it will all end.”

The tensions between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front go back to the front’s formation in 1983 and even earlier, to Buthelezi’s break in 1979 with what he calls the “external mission” of the African National Congress in Lusaka, Zambia, over the basic strategy of the anti-apartheid movement.

Excluded From Coalition

United Democratic Front leaders from the outset rejected Inkatha as a member of the new coalition, accusing Buthelezi of collaborating with the minority white-led government as the chief minister of the Zulus’ tribal homeland of Kwazulu. They also dismissed him as a political has-been with diminishing support, even among the country’s 7 million Zulus.

Much more was at stake than Buthelezi’s considerable pride, according to experienced political observers here. Inkatha’s legitimacy as an important element of the anti-apartheid struggle had been challenged--it claims to be the ANC’s “true successor” inside the country--and a leadership role for Buthelezi in a post-apartheid government was put seriously in doubt.

“The UDF started to occupy more and more political space in the black community, and with its quite apparent links to the ANC, all the older organizations were suddenly on the defensive,” a political scientist here said, asking not to be quoted by name to “preserve my neutrality.”

“Inkatha was the hardest hit by the establishment of the UDF. It was forced to justify every action as well as its decision to form the Kwazulu government. It had to defend its moderate philosophy in an era of militancy. And it had to explain why it had chosen to follow a separate course when the cry was for ‘black unity’ as an essential condition to bring apartheid to an end.”

Inkatha Defended Its Base

Repeated tests of strength, often involving clashes by youthful supporters and recently attacks by armed men, have followed in Durban’s black townships as the United Democratic Front has tried to build its organization on what had been Inkatha turf and Inkatha has defended a vital power base.

The first clashes were over the incorporation into Kwazulu of areas sympathetic to the United Democratic Front and then over UDF efforts to organize in communities where Inkatha was strong. Then came a week of rioting around Durban in August, 1985, after the assassination of Victoria Mxenge, a politically prominent lawyer with longstanding ties to the African National Congress.

Suspecting Inkatha involvement in the Mxenge murder, angry young UDF supporters attacked the homes and shops of Inkatha members in several Durban townships. The Inkatha members, turning out in force, retaliated with an attack that killed a dozen mourners at a memorial service for Mxenge. That in turn brought a new counterattack, in what has become the pattern for Inkatha-UDF clashes here.

At least 70 people were killed during those August, 1985, riots in what remains some of the worst violence in nearly three years of civil unrest here. The fighting created what so far has been an irreparable breach between Inkatha and UDF supporters.

Each Side Blames Other

For nearly a year and a half, the death toll has averaged more than three a week, according to police reports, and each side says the other has been the aggressor.

A study by a University of Natal political scientist of 358 unrest incidents reported by police in the province last year found that 24% were initiated by Inkatha, 11% by security forces, 11% by “youths,” 7% by vigilantes, 4% by members of United Democratic Front affiliates and 36% by unidentified people. (The remaining 7% were attributed to other groups or not attributed at all.)

“In contrast to those initiating the unrest, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the UDF and the youth appear to be the main targets of the unrest,” according to Michael Sutcliffe, the researcher who analyzed the police reports. “UDF affiliates and youth were involved in proportionately far fewer incidents of unrest than Inkatha and the vigilantes combined.”

Another academic study put the total number of deaths in the UDF-Inkatha feud at “plus-minus 260” in 1985 and 1986, and suggested that “repeated UDF defeats on the township ‘battlefields’ ” prompted the African National Congress to send more cadres into the region and provide more arms to its supporters there. This study also speculates that the recent upsurge in violence might have been intended to force the United Democratic Front into talks with Inkatha.

Blames UDF for Turmoil

Inkatha does not accept the validity of such analyses and argues that over the past three years the UDF has brought turmoil and conflict to the community, but no progress in ending apartheid.

“We don’t think it is possible for black groups to always act uniformly,” Dhlomo said, “but we should understand each other’s strategies and cooperate where we can. Unfortunately, there has been little on which we have been able to cooperate with the UDF.”

Past reconciliation efforts have failed, according to those involved, largely because of the difficulty in resolving the underlying causes of the original conflict, particularly Buthelezi’s differences with the African National Congress and the results of Inkatha’s decision to participate in the Kwazulu government.

But these have been compounded by the bloodshed in nearly three years of internecine fighting.

“With all we have suffered at the hands of Inkatha,” said a local labor leader whose trade union has close links with the United Democratic Front, “it’s impossible to pretend that it never happened or that it doesn’t matter or that it should be put aside.

“If we don’t fight these people now, we could find ourselves being governed by them, and that could be every bit as bad as what we have under apartheid.”

His sentiments were mirrored in the comments of an Inkatha organizer, Samuel Jamile, after his herbal medicine shop was set on fire and he was attacked with hand grenades last month.

“It’s better we fight a small war now,” he told an Inkatha meeting, “than delay and have to fight a bigger war later.”