South Africa Arson Attack Leaves 13 Dead

Factional fighting flared in the coastal province of Natal on Friday, leaving 13 women and children dead in an arson attack on houses in a black squatter settlement, police said.

The incident occurred in the settlement of Cottonlands near the Indian township of Verulam, 15 miles north of Durban, an official police report said. Nearby Indian residents said they fear becoming involved in the fighting.

Six boys, four girls and three women died when their houses were torched in fighting between the conservative Zulu tribal organization of Inkatha and the more radical anti-apartheid umbrella group known as the United Democratic Front (UDF).

Police could not determine which group was responsible for the arson attack. Officials said two people had been arrested and the investigation was continuing.

A local businessman, who declined to be named, said three houses had been burned down and one man had his hands chopped off with a machete.

People in the area were armed with homemade firearms, he said.

“This place is terrible. There is fighting between Inkatha and the UDF, and the blacks are turning on the Indians,” said an Indian resident.

“I think it is time for us to leave,” he said, recalling a bloody anti-Indian riot by blacks in Durban in 1949, when 142 were killed and over 1,000 injured.

More than 150 people were killed in factional fighting last month near Durban.

Internecine strife between Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha and the UDF, which began in September, 1987, has claimed the lives of about 2,000 people.

The violence is exacerbated by competition for work and scarce resources between established urban dwellers and new arrivals from the countryside who establish squatter settlements on the outskirts of black townships.

Both the UDF and Inkatha oppose the white-controlled government’s system of discrimination known as apartheid, but their tactics differ. UDF favors boycotts, strikes, sanctions and other confrontational measures which Inkatha does not endorse.