S. African Press Controls Tightened : New Rules Could Forbid Quoting Anti-Apartheid Activists

The South African government, extending a two-year-old state of emergency Friday, tightened already strict controls on the news media, making it illegal in some cases to quote leading anti-apartheid activists.

Under the new guidelines, the news media may not publish the remarks of members of banned or restricted organizations if the government believes such remarks to be a threat to public order.

Narrowly interpreted, the rule could affect reporting on such leading figures as Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu and the Rev. Allan Boesak if they should repeat their frequent calls for international sanctions against Pretoria. Both are associated with anti-apartheid groups whose political activities have been restricted by the government.

‘A Pointless Exercise’

President Pieter W. Botha’s decision to extend the state of emergency for a third year was sharply criticized by many of the government’s opponents.

Tutu called it “a pointless and bankrupt exercise which does nothing to help solve our problems (and) in fact aggravates South Africa’s crisis, creating an atmosphere conducive to more state violence.”

The government said the state of emergency continues to be necessary to protect the public and to create a stable environment for reforming apartheid, the system of racial separation that grants special privileges to the country’s 5 million whites and denies its 26 million blacks a vote in national affairs.

“It is the government’s responsibility to see to it that the reform process is not handicapped by violence and unrest,” the government’s Bureau for Information said in a statement Friday. “The state of emergency has resulted in human lives being spared. It will be maintained as long as it is required to ensure the safe existence of all South Africans.”

The state of emergency gives the authorities broad powers to halt civil unrest. In the last two years, about 32,000 people have been detained, the overwhelming majority without being charged. It is estimated that about 2,500 people are presently in detention.

The emergency was declared after a violent period, from 1984 to 1986, in which more than 2,500 people died in the black townships. Political violence has abated, and most of the unrest-related incidents in the last year have involved fighting between rival black groups in Natal province.

But bombings and other incidents that the government labels “acts of terror” have risen sharply in the last two years. The government says the “revolutionary climate” is one reason that the emergency regulations cannot be lifted now.

Challenge to ANC

The outlawed African National Congress, which for 25 years has been fighting a guerrilla war against the white minority-led government, said at its headquarters in Zambia that the renewal of emergency regulations is a challenge “to intensify the offensive for the earliest defeat and destruction of the Pretoria regime.”

Domestic and foreign news reporters were already operating under a wide range of emergency regulations that restrict coverage of political violence, security force actions and emergency detentions.

The new provisions will affect news coverage of spokesmen and officeholders in 18 organizations whose political activities, from organizing meetings to drawing up petitions, have been curtailed by recent government decrees. Among these groups are the nation’s largest labor federation, with 750,000 members, and the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups that claims about 3 million members.

Many leaders of those groups have been detained, and several others are specifically prohibited from talking to journalists.

“The day-to-day work of journalists is already extremely difficult and hazardous here,” said Bob Kernohan, president of the Southern African Society of Journalists. “The additional regulations tighten the grip on the press even further.”

The Bureau for Information contends that acts of terrorism in South Africa, and elsewhere in the world, are sometimes committed for the sake of news coverage. Restrictions on reporting such matters are necessary, the bureau said, “to protect innocent people from being maimed or killed for propaganda purposes.”

The new rules also give the government the authority to extend the suspension of two anti-apartheid newspapers, New Nation and South, and require most small independent news agencies to register with the government.