Towns Calmer Than Year Ago : S. African Violence Drops Under State of Emergency

The small children are playing in the street. Their older brothers have a soccer match going in a field on the corner. Their parents are relaxing in the warm mid-afternoon sun, chatting with neighbors and visiting relatives.

White City seems at peace.

Only a year ago, however, the impoverished neighborhood was one of the most troubled in Soweto, the sprawling black satellite city outside Johannesburg, and one of the hottest front lines in the virtual rebellion of South Africa’s blacks against apartheid.

Police entered White City only in armored convoys then. Clashes with the neighborhood’s militant youths were frequent. Barrages of stones and often firebombs were answered by volleys of tear-gas grenades, birdshot and sometimes automatic rifle fire. The area had the look, smell and feel of a war zone.

Angry youths, known as the Comrades, often succeeded in barring security forces from White City, erecting burning barricades across streets and trapping those army and police who did enter in ambushes until reinforcements arrived. Last August, at least 21 blacks died in one all-night battle with police in some of the worst violence in South Africa’s nearly three years of civil unrest.

“This was a fierce place last year,” said Isaac Nkosi, 59, a widowed factory worker who lives with his daughter and accountant son-in-law, their five children and several other relatives in one of White City’s small, four-room “matchbox” houses. “Fierce, I tell you--fierce, fierce, fierce.

“Every day, the police and the army were here, every night there was shooting. Our young Comrades thought they were going to take on the whole system and defeat it right here in White City. Well, they couldn’t win, not yet anyway, but fight they did.”

Much of that has changed now. A substantial measure of calm has returned to White City and most of South Africa over the past six months. The violence that sometimes appeared to be propelling the country toward revolution and a racial civil war has declined significantly as a result of the national state of emergency proclaimed by President Pieter W. Botha on June 12 last year.

According to the government’s Bureau for Information, the number of unrest incidents reported by the police has dropped more than 80% from a peak of nearly 90 a day in May of 1986. The number of deaths has declined from 160 in May and June last year to an average of about 35 a month so far this year. Attacks on security forces are down almost 90% to about two or three a day.

In White City, although the scars of last year’s fighting are still evident on almost every block, the atmosphere these days is almost placid.

Neighborhood schools, which largely stood empty a year ago, are again filled with bright-faced children. Most of the burned-out shops have been reopened. Buses and taxis full of commuters clog the streets at rush hour. The neighborhood’s churches, from which so many of White City’s youth were buried in the past two years, are now full of joyful weddings and christenings.

“We don’t have peace, but at least we have some calm,” said Johannes, 44, a local resident and a bank clerk who asked that his surname not be used. “Sometimes things get very tense here, sometimes there are what the police like to call ‘incidents’ and sometimes there is shooting, but this happens only once or twice a month. . . .

“We will never have true peace until apartheid is ended and we have what rightfully belongs to us. . . . I don’t like the way they brought us this calm, with their tanks and their guns, but at least we are no longer living in a Beirut.”

The white-led minority government, recognizing both the fragility of the current calm and the high price paid to attain it, is now moving into the second phase of a strategy based on redefining the conflict as between moderates and Communists rather than between whites and blacks.

Using its sweeping emergency powers, the government believes it can remove the basic causes of the unrest by eliminating many of the grievances of the country’s black majority; after that it would move toward satisfying black political aspirations through still-to-be-negotiated “power sharing.”

“Security action is of the utmost importance,” said Adriaan Vlok, the minister of law and order and an architect of the government’s multilevel strategy. “This is the way we can create stability, but if you stop at this first step you are lost. A just deal must be given to every person in this country irrespective of color or anything else.”

In contrast to the partial state of emergency imposed in July, 1985, and lifted in March, 1986, the government’s goal was not simply the restoration of order, senior officials say, but the defeat of what they saw as the early stages of a Communist-led revolution that had gained considerable momentum since the start of the unrest in September, 1984.

“History is against a government,” said Vlok, whose study of how revolutions are won and lost has made him a forceful advocate of faster and broader reform, not just police action. “In general, the revolutionary struggles have won against government, and only occasionally has the government succeeded. . . . We must find a constitutional solution acceptable to the majority, or we will lose the struggle.”

Despite recent upsurges in the level of unrest, senior government officials say they believe the “revolutionary situation” that was seen a year ago as an increasingly serious threat to the country’s security now “has been largely stabilized and is being gradually reversed.” They credit tough actions taken under the state of emergency that gave the police and army virtual martial law powers.

“The relative calm we have had, the limited amount of unrest, has proved that the state of emergency has been effective but is still necessary,” Stoffel van der Merwe, deputy minister of information, said last month. While saying that political violence has been reduced to “a relatively low level,” he argued the need to retain the broad powers that the government has assumed in order to deal with “the underlying tensions” and to proceed with reforms that will “remove the basic causes of the unrest.”

To the government, one of the most important results of the crackdown has been the sharply diminished belief among blacks, particularly the militant young Comrades, that their long struggle against apartheid was on the verge of success, needing only one final push. As long as this was the common black perception, government officials say, there was an incentive to increase political violence and, consequently, little chance for the government’s strategy of step-by-step reforms.

The government’s opponents, although decrying its methods as “fascist” and deploring the costs as “horrific” in human terms, acknowledge the effectiveness of the crackdown.

“It has been pacification through war,” Nicholas Haysom, a leading civil rights lawyer, said.

Albertina Sisulu, co-president of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups with 3 million members, said in a recent interview that, “in the short term, brutal repression is usually effective, and the system has had some success in the past year with its military occupation of our townships, through the detention and imprisonment of thousands upon thousands of our people and through killing hundreds of our youth.”

The government’s measures have indeed been harsh.

Police and soldiers were deployed last June in unprecedented numbers in most of the country’s black townships with the authority to take whatever actions they felt necessary to restore law and order. The initial resistance by many militant youths, particularly in Soweto, other townships around Johannesburg and in long-troubled eastern Cape province, was crushed quickly.

A total of more than 25,000 people were detained without charge over the past year, including more than 10,000 in the first three weeks of the state of emergency. Only 1,400 people are still detained, according to a government announcement last week, but some anti-apartheid activists have now been held for almost a year. More than a dozen major political trials, involving nearly 400 activists on charges of treason, terrorism, sedition and murder, have followed.

Black schools, once the centers of protest, were purged of many student leaders, and education officials were empowered, like the police and army, to take whatever actions they regarded as necessary to restore order and resume regular classes. Political debate and press freedom have been severely curtailed, and whites have increasingly developed a siege mentality.

“The special actions taken by the police and army were both necessary and effective,” Roelf Meyer, deputy minister of law and order, contended in a recent interview. “That we had to arrest people and detain them calmed the situation in the townships. Although we don’t like to do it--all these measures are not things one would want in a normal society--if you have to detain 4,000 for the sake of millions of others, then it is worth it.”

Yet the current tranquility in White City, as elsewhere in South Africa, remains fragile.

Police still clash with neighborhood youths several times a month, and each incident brings the danger of a renewed confrontation on the scale of last August’s street battles. Municipal authorities threaten to evict families who have not paid their rent, utility charges or local taxes as part of a yearlong rent strike throughout Soweto, actions that could bring even more serious conflict.

Right-wing vigilantes, believed by anti-apartheid activists to be government agents, are waging what amounts to a secret war of assaults, abductions and even assassinations in many black townships. And occasionally the intense rivalries among anti-apartheid groups themselves flare into a series of attacks and counterattacks that leave activists dead or wounded.

“We have considerably reduced the visible violence, and for that we are thankful, because it has saved many lives and much damage to property,” Meyer said. “But that does not mean the unrest climate has calmed that much. The revolutionary climate has changed, and we see it in other forms, including strikes, boycotts and similar actions.”

In White City, militants who escaped detention in the repeated police roundups of activists in the neighborhood have reorganized clandestinely. Local street committees, formed a year ago as the basis of community organization, are stronger than ever, according to residents.

Anti-apartheid groups across the country have slowly gathered themselves together to continue what blacks simply call “the struggle,” the fight against South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule. But in the process, leadership has largely passed from the youth groups to labor unions and broader community organizations, and the focus has shifted from mass protests to what activists describe as “greater mobilization and more appropriate strategies and structures.”

“The authorities tried to decapitate our organizations and intimidate the masses through the arrests and detentions,” Murphy Morobe, a top United Democratic Front official, said in an interview, “and the state of emergency undeniably had a big initial impact. . . .

“But we have regrouped, rebuilt our structures and recovered our strength. Mass struggle is still viable, a force that galvanizes people, and it is important that we hold on to the gains we made in the last four years and to the political ‘space’ we created.”

The government crackdown also brought a counteroffensive by the outlawed African National Congress, the principal insurgent group fighting minority white rule. Police acknowledge a sharp increase in the number of urban bombs, land mines and guerrilla attacks since last June.

“The men with the AKs have taken over,” said a Soweto teacher and community leader, referring to the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles used by ANC insurgents. “That’s a tragedy because it intensifies the violence. Each action by one side leads to some countermeasure by the other. It’s a deadly cycle. . . . And so our chances for a peaceful evolution, a peaceful transition, which were already so slim, have been reduced.”

Senior government officials disagree.

“The stability achieved should allow us to proceed with political reform,” Meyer, the deputy law and order minister, said. “A year ago, it would not have been possible to proceed because no one in the black community would be allowed to even talk with us; today, we think we can maintain the degree of law and order necessary for such a dialogue.”

Botha, opening Parliament last month, said he would personally take part in the proposed negotiations. Government officials hope to start with preliminary talks in a few months, leading to the establishment next year of a “national council,” which in turn would become the forum for drafting a new “power-sharing” constitution.

Key Element in Strategy

A key element in the government strategy is the election of new municipal councils in the country’s black townships. These officials could then be brought into the talks as representatives of the country’s 12 million urban blacks. The government has set itself a target date of October, 1988, for the election, although the United Democratic Front and other anti-apartheid groups seem likely to oppose it.

Before then, a major effort will be made, officials say, to remove many of the blacks’ grievances--high unemployment, poor housing, inferior schooling--that are now seen by the government as underlying causes for the unrest.

Huge urban renewal projects are under way in many of the most troubled black townships in an attempt to dramatically improve the living standards of urban blacks: $140-million worth of housing, schools and shopping centers around Port Elizabeth, $46 million in power lines, roads, sewers and street lights in Alexandra, outside Johannesburg, and $250 million in new or improved housing around the country.

But the task is awesome.

To cope, the government has relied on its National Security Management System, a pyramid of committees, dominated by army and police officers, that stretch from the Cabinet and State Security Council down to virtually every community in the country. These committees work largely in secret.

Government officials, encouraged by the results of the state of emergency over the past year, say plainly that they will keep their special powers as long as they believe them necessary.