Tutu Trial Possible for Alleged Urging of Violent Overthrow of Regime

Archbishop Desmond Tutu faces possible prosecution under South Africa’s security laws for statements in which he allegedly advocated the violent overthrow of the white-led minority government.

The police said Friday in Pretoria that they are investigating a series of reported comments by Tutu, who heads South Africa’s Anglican Church, that he would call for violence to end apartheid if he felt that peaceful attempts at change had failed.

“I will announce the day when we have reached the end of our tether,” Tutu has been quoted as telling a news conference in Maputo, capital of neighboring Mozambique, at the start of a visit there this week. “I will tell you when we have to use violence to remove an unjust system.”

Security police seized television videotapes of Tutu’s press conference when they were transshipped through Johannesburg. They said the tapes may contain evidence of a suspected crime, possibly high treason. But after a court hearing, the police were ordered to return the tapes to ABC News and the West German television network ARD.

Adriaan Vlok, the minister of law and order, asked in a speech at a police graduation ceremony Friday whether Tutu had been discussing South Africa’s “destruction” in his talks with Mozambique’s President Joaquim Chissano, who has also been meeting this week with Joe Slovo, general secretary of the South African Communist Party and a top leader of the outlawed African National Congress.

Drawing the Line

Meanwhile, pro-government newspapers have begun calling for prosecution of Tutu on charges of sedition, subversion and possibly treason, although his statements have not been confirmed and their context has not been clarified.

“Archbishop Tutu would certainly go too far if he called for violence,” the right-wing Johannesburg newspaper The Citizen said in an editorial Friday, “for it would then be the duty of the police to charge him, irrespective of the reaction overseas.”

But the government, mindful of Tutu’s immense stature abroad as the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, does not appear to want a direct confrontation.

Last year, a Cabinet minister said that Tutu’s calls for economic sanctions against South Africa bordered on treason, but the government quickly backed away from any suggestion of prosecution for “economic subversion.”

Even The Citizen commented in its editorial that the police would have to have “a watertight case” and that prosecutors might still hesitate.

“The archbishop, after all, is an international celebrity, and any action against him would cause an outcry second to none,” the newspaper said.

A spokeswoman for the cleric said Friday in Cape Town that Tutu was visiting remote rural areas in Mozambique and could not be reached for comment on the growing controversy over his remarks.

Some Statements Untrue

In a major court test of press freedom in South Africa, a leading newspaper and a former reporter were convicted Friday of defaming the police by publishing allegations two years ago without what the prosecutor said were reasonable grounds for believing them to be true.

The Eastern Province Herald, which is published in Port Elizabeth, and Jo-Ann Bekker, who is now a free-lance journalist, were fined the equivalent of $50 and $100, respectively, but both sentences were suspended. A magistrate found that they had wrongfully published a report alleging that the police fired tear gas into a church in the eastern Cape town of Cradock during a religious service.

The magistrate, Gert Steyn, ruled that some of the statements in Bekker’s story were untrue, though they were reported as allegations and not fact, and that none of the three tear-gas grenades fired into the air to disperse a crowd outside the church had entered the building, though tear gas had blown inside and forced people to flee.

The case has been watched closely by the country’s English-language press. Editors involved say the government is trying to force them to toe its line by harassing them with drawn-out and expensive legal actions. A similar case is currently under way in Cape Town against a reporter for the Cape Times, one of the country’s most liberal newspapers.