Nine More Killed in S. Africa’s Natal Province; 3-Week Toll 60

A squad of gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles attacked a house in a black township outside the South African city of Pietermaritzburg and killed five men, the police reported Tuesday.

The incident reflected a further escalation of the fighting between rival black groups in Natal province. Four other people, also black, were shot or stabbed to death in other incidents in the Pietermaritzburg area, the police said, bringing to more than 60 the number of people killed in Natal in the last three weeks.

Tension has risen sharply in the region with rumors that Inkatha, the predominantly Zulu political movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, intends to re-establish its supremacy in the area under a central government initiative to restore order by returning power to tribal chiefs, most of whom are loyal to Buthelezi.

268 Killed Last Year

Inkatha again blamed the Natal clashes, in which 268 people were killed last year in the Pietermaritzburg area alone, on the outlawed African National Congress and the United Democratic Front. The latter is a national coalition of anti-apartheid groups that the government and Inkatha view as the ANC’s legal surrogate.

Supporters of the United Democratic Front say, however, that the fighting has resulted primarily from Inkatha’s efforts to recover the considerable ground that it lost in the area because of its conservative stance and that these attempts, in turn, had sparked a tough resistance from its opponents.

“Mostly, however, the situation is out of control and has been so for more than five months,” a black clergyman said by telephone Tuesday from one of Pietermaritzburg’s embattled townships asking not to be quoted by name. “There are attacks, reprisals, counterreprisals . . . and each morning we pick up the bodies.”

South African police, despite their virtually unlimited powers under the country’s state of emergency and the sending of reinforcements to the area three weeks ago, have so far been unable even to reduce the violence.

As black youths returned to school in the area this week, community leaders expressed their fears that even more serious clashes were coming between supporters of Inkatha and those of the United Democratic Front and the African National Congress.

“When AKs are being used, the violence is growing, escalating,” the black pastor said, observing that most of the weaponry has been homemade, a deadly assortment of knives, machetes, spears, firebombs and an occasional pistol.

Police headquarters in Pretoria refused to provide details of the shooting in which the five men were killed late Monday in Mpumalanga, a black shantytown outside Pietermaritzburg. However, police said they are investigating the possible involvement of guerrillas belonging to the African National Congress.

The house in which the five were killed was badly damaged in the fusillade, and police said they found numerous AK-47 cartridges at the scene. The body of a sixth man, killed by an execution-style shotgun blast to the neck, was also found nearby, they said.