Anti-Apartheid Coalition Defies S. Africa Curbs

This country’s biggest coalition of anti-apartheid groups said Wednesday that it will defy restriction orders and start operating openly to test the South African government’s new tolerance of public dissent.

Leaders of the United Democratic Front, forced underground by the imposition of emergency rule 3 1/2 years ago, said it will start reopening its regional offices and its leaders will travel the country to campaign in public.

“This would be our first challenge of the year to test (President) F. W. de Klerk’s sincerity on a new South Africa without apartheid,” UDF publicity secretary Patrick Lekota told a news conference.

De Klerk launched a five-year plan of reform in 1989 to give the voteless black majority a say in national government, departing from the “grand apartheid” vision of confining black political life within ethnic groups or geographical structures.

When De Klerk came to power last September, he relaxed rules against anti-government demonstrations while sharply increasing restriction orders on individual activists.

He has hinted that he may lift the emergency rule imposed in June, 1986, but has given no undertaking to legalize outlawed groups such as the African National Congress or repeal cornerstone apartheid laws such as the Group Areas Act, which decrees where people can live according to skin color.

The UDF has sometimes been accused by government officials of acting as the internal wing of the banned ANC, the main organization fighting white-minority rule.

Almost all of the UDF’s 750 affiliated groups, which have a combined membership of 2 million and range from obscure regional associations to the high-profile Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, are banned under emergency legislation.

“The notion that apartheid resistance can be killed off by bannings is ludicrous,” said UDF official Murphy Morobe.

“If South Africa’s history of the past 30 years is any guide, opposition will dissolve, regroup and eventually re-emerge in a different way, probably in a more dangerous form.”

Meanwhile, in Namibia, state-run white schools opened their doors to blacks for the first time Wednesday as one of the last pillars of apartheid crumbled in advance of independence later this year for the South-African-controlled territory.

South Africa scrapped most forms of segregation in Namibia in 1977, but apartheid remained in schools and hospitals.