‘Hostile Intent’ Seen in Townships : S. Africa Aiming Treason Charges at Black Councils

The old black township of Alexandra was a bloody, angry wasteland. The town council had resigned because its members were afraid the voters would kill them. Burning homes lit the night sky. Soldiers patrolled the streets and, in the alleyways, “people’s courts” meted out justice.

It was during those lawless days two years ago that Moses Mayekiso set up the Alexandra Action Committee to create some order for the 100,000 people squeezed into this 21-block-long community.

He wanted to air the people’s grievances, organize neighborhood crime watches, open day-care centers and soup kitchens, upgrade the township’s roads--and, the South African government alleges, seize control of the township.

Now Mayekiso and four other committee officers are accused of high treason, among the most serious crimes in South African law.

In a downtown Johannesburg courtroom only a few miles from here, South Africa has spent the past 10 months trying to prove that Mayekiso’s committee was organizing the community with “hostile intent” to set up its own government, a charge the defendants deny.

The case could create an important precedent, labeling as treasonous the actions of some of the thousands of street committees in black townships that form the organizational backbone of the struggle against apartheid.

High treason is not an uncommon charge in South Africa these days, however.

A total of 50 people are on trial in five treason cases. In addition, more than 550 people are on trial in 65 other courtrooms on a variety of charges, from sabotage and arson to intimidation and murder, stemming from two years of violence nationwide in 1984-86. Several thousand people already have been tried, and about half convicted, on lesser offenses related to the unrest.

Civil rights leaders say the trials are a government attempt to prove that its fears of a Communist-inspired black revolution are well-founded and to keep key anti-apartheid leaders out of circulation for the months, often years, that these trials run.

Even if the defendants are exonerated, the act of making its accusations in court helps the government highlight the security threat and justify the detentions of hundreds of people over the past two years, legal experts say.

“A few acquittals is the price of legitimizing the government’s actions,” said John Dugard, a University of Witwatersrand law professor whose Center for Applied Legal Studies tracks political trials.

Government Defends Cases

Government prosecutors insist that, aside from the numbers, there is nothing out of the ordinary about these cases. Each criminal charge is brought on the basis of the facts in the case, without regard to politics, they say.

“Treason is treason,” Chris Human, prosecutor in the Mayekiso trial, said recently, pointing out that taking over even a lone township qualifies. The reason South Africa has so many cases of it, he added, is that “not many other countries are faced with the terrorist onslaught we face.”

South Africa’s longest-running treason trial is now approaching its third year in Pretoria’s cavernous Palace of Justice, in the courtroom where imprisoned black nationalist leader Nelson R. Mandela was convicted of sabotage 24 years ago.

In the current case, 19 men are accused of trying to overthrow the government by conspiring with the outlawed African National Congress to organize riots in black townships south of Johannesburg during 1984. Those riots touched off two years of nationwide unrest.

The government also claims that the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups, was in fact the internal wing of the ANC. The defendants, among them top officials of the front, deny the charges and say their group supports nonviolent change.

Verdict Expected Soon

After about 30,000 pages of court transcript and hundreds of witnesses, the defense is presenting closing arguments, and a verdict is expected in a few months. But even if the men are acquitted, their organization will not be waiting for them. The government banned the United Democratic Front earlier this year.

In the 133 political trials that ended last year, 563 of 792 defendants were acquitted or charges against them were dropped, according to the Center for Applied Legal Studies. So far this year, 37 political trials have been completed and 94 of 219 defendants have been released, the center says.

Some of those acquitted, though, were detained immediately, without charge, under the country’s two-year-old state of emergency regulations.

Many of these cases stem from the deaths of black town councilors, policemen or suspected government collaborators, 300 of whom were killed in 1986 by “necklacing”--the practice of placing a gasoline-soaked tire around a victim’s shoulders and setting it on fire. The government says that 1,100 people have been charged with “necklace” murders since 1984.

Unusual Charges

What makes the treason charges against Moses Mayekiso unusual, however, is that the government has not accused him of any act of violence.

The government says that by forming the Alexandra Action Committee, Mayekiso and his colleagues were attempting to turn the small township into a “liberated zone,” as urged by the ANC from its headquarters-in-exile.

“To revolutionize a township is far more dangerous to the state than a bomb in a shopping mall,” said Norman Manoim, a member of a team of five lawyers representing the defendants.

In January, 1986, the Action Committee was born amid near-anarchy in this 76-year-old township. Alexandra is a settlement in a valley only blocks away from the swimming pools, tennis courts and electric security systems of Johannesburg’s wealthiest, whites-only suburbs.

Over the years, the government had allowed the township’s roads, houses and services to deteriorate while it urged people to move to new townships farther outside Johannesburg. The people balked, and the government eventually promised better living conditions.

Town Council Collapses

But by 1986, conditions had not improved, and the people were angry. The black town council, elected in widely boycotted elections, collapsed. A white administrator was running the township and the South African Defense Force was policing it.

Clashes between the authorities and residents soon boiled over into what became known here as the “six-day war.” Several dozen people were killed, including two black policemen. Two months later, 200 vigilantes, said by residents to include policemen, stormed the township, beating and even killing political activists.

The Action Committee was intended to act like a labor union, representing the people’s desires to the authorities, the defendants said. But the group also wanted to help with more urgent problems facing the community. Minutes of its meetings indicate discussions of such things as the growing crime rate, unlighted streets, unemployment and the uncontrollable youth.

“We wanted to improve living conditions and represent the people’s wishes,” Richard Mdakane, the committee secretary, testified as the defense case opened a few days ago. He said the committee wanted to set up a day care center for children of working parents, for example, “but our arrest interfered with it.”

Two Years in Custody

The tall, bearded defendant, dressed in a double-breasted gray suit, has been in custody for more than two years.

Mdakane said the committee was worried about the “people’s courts,” formed by teen-agers when the police refused to listen to residents’ complaints. Eight young men from Alexandra are on trial in the same courthouse for holding a “people’s court.”

The government claims that the Action Committee encouraged the “people’s courts,” but Mdakane, fielding questions from both his attorney and the red-robed judge, said the angry young men who ran the courts wouldn’t listen to their elders or committee members.

The wheels of justice have turned slowly for the Alexandra men. Compared to U.S. criminal proceedings, South African trials are particularly painstaking and tedious. In the Alexandra trial, for example, each question must be translated from English to Sotho for the witnesses, and then the answers must be translated back into English.

International Attention

The case has drawn international attention because Mayekiso is a former auto worker and powerful union leader. A committee of American lawyers, including former Atty. Gen. Griffin Bell, was formed by the United Auto Workers to monitor the case.

The legal defense team, at a cost of several hundred dollars a day, is being paid by international union organizations. Some lawyers think the government has used this case to warn black trade unions in South Africa to back away from anti-apartheid politics.

Like many political figures in South Africa today, Mayekiso and the other four defendants were detained for nine months before they were charged. Requests for bail for the five have been denied.

The maximum sentence for treason is hanging, but the judge has ruled out the death penalty in this case.

The defense acknowledges that the Alexandra Action Committee was involved in the struggle for black political rights. Its intentions, though, “were free of the faintest traces of treasonable purposes,” David Soggot, the lead defense attorney, told the judge. “At no stage did the (defendants) nurture the fantasy that they could or should replace the Alexandra Town Council.”

But Human, the prosecutor, says that the defendants were following an ANC plan to take “a small part of the state” away from South Africa and its white-minority rule.

“You don’t need violence. You can topple a state and form a new regime without it,” Human said. “And in this case, all the indicators of high treason were there.”