Death Squads Accused of Killing Key S. Africa Blacks

Death squads are killing black community leaders, labor union officials and other anti-apartheid activists in South Africa with increasing frequency and apparent impunity, the colleagues of one victim charged at his funeral here Saturday.

Eric Mntonga, 35, a community organizer and labor leader in East London, was not even the latest victim. Since his death two weeks ago, two more activists have been reported killed.

“This no longer surprises us,” said Thozamile Gqweta, president of the South African Allied Workers Union. “ . . . Such killings, murders and assassinations have become a fact of life for all members of the democratic struggle in South Africa.”

Mntonga was found beaten and stabbed to death with his hands and feet bound, and his killing has drawn widespread attention.

One of East London’s most prominent anti-apartheid activists, Mntonga was a local director of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa, which has been promoting a political dialogue between whites and blacks and which organized last month’s conference for 50 whites with the outlawed African National Congress in Dakar, Senegal. Mntonga himself had helped organize a breakthrough conference between whites and blacks on Easter in Port Elizabeth. He was killed the weekend before the white delegation returned from the controversial Dakar meeting.

Vows All-Out Effort

Expressing “deep revulsion and horror,” Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the institute’s director and the former leader of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, vowed an all-out effort to “expose the evil-doers responsible.”

Gqweta and other speakers at the funeral recalled that scores have died in death squad attacks during the past three years and that, although the police have often said they had identified the murderers and were about to make arrests, no one has ever been charged in any of the cases.

Suspicion is widespread within the black community that “the system,” as the community refers to the government and security forces, is responsible for the activists’ deaths, although no speaker blamed the South African government directly on Saturday.

In Mntonga’s case, local activists said they have collected affidavits from witnesses in Mdantsane, which is in the nominally independent Xhosa tribal homeland of Ciskei, who said they had seen him taken into a local police station the day before his battered and bound body was found in his car far from the sprawling Mdantsane township.

Sees Sign of Desperation

Gqweta said that the lengthening list of slain activists, who include many prominent community leaders from the eastern Cape, is evidence that those who support apartheid realize that they have lost the political initiative and are desperate to regain it, even if they must commit murder.

Another speaker, Mluleki George, asked the 2,000 mourners on a wind-swept soccer field: “How many more Mntongas must die--how many more deaths will it take to move the Pretoria regime? And how many more deaths will it take to prick the consciences of those, here and abroad, who support this regime?”

George is regional president of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups in which Mntonga was active.

George, Gqweta and other speakers cited the sacrifices of black activists and challenged white liberals to become active opponents of President Pieter W. Botha’s government. They said that white South Africans must choose between full participation in the anti-apartheid movement or implicit support of Pretoria.

A Choice for Whites

“Our white brothers and sisters must make a determined and clear break with apartheid,” Gqweta said. “They must make war on apartheid. They must make clear their choice for freedom and democracy, a South Africa where all will live in peace, if they are the democrats that they claim to be.”

Alex Boraine, a founder of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa for which Mntonga worked, said that his organization will try to persuade whites that “South Africa must be changed, that freedom and justice cannot wait any longer.”

Speaker after speaker declared that the choice before blacks is “submit or fight.”

“To submit is not the language, not the style, not the way of our people,” a local youth leader said. “We will fight.”

“Gone are the days when our people could be killed without any fear of retaliation,” he continued, promising that Mntonga’s death will be avenged. “ . . . We have reached the stage in our country where there are only two choices . . . , and no one can remain neutral any longer.”