Police Launch Crackdown on Black Factional Fighting : South Africa: Mandela condemns Operation Iron Fist. The measure includes roadblocks and mounting machine guns on law enforcement vehicles.

Police launched Operation Iron Fist on Monday to quell factional fighting in South Africa’s black townships, but the crackdown was immediately condemned by African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela as a “license to kill” for security forces.

Mandela said the ANC’s national executive committee would discuss the police measures at a meeting today and hinted it could call for supporters to arm themselves.

“From now on we can expect indiscriminate shootings whenever there are demonstrations, no matter how peaceful,” Mandela said.

“When they talk about agitators they are talking about our activists, about our freedom fighters,” he told reporters at Cape Town airport. “I regard this as a license to kill our people.”

President Frederik W. de Klerk said he would announce further measures this week intended to halt street clashes in black townships near Johannesburg that have killed almost 800 blacks since Aug. 12.

“The violence we have now is violence . . . of various black political factions trying to get the upper hand within black society so that they can play a leading role in the negotiation process,” De Klerk said.

A police spokesman said Iron Fist had already showed some success, with a marked reduction in reports of violence.

“We have not heard of one serious incident overnight,” the spokesman said.

The new police measures, code-named Operation Iron Fist, were announced Saturday.

They include more police and soldiers in the townships; roadblocks; searches for weapons; use of dye dropped from helicopters to identify participants in clashes; equipping police vehicles with mounted machine guns; isolating workers hostels and squatter camps with razor wire, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Police spokesman Col. Frans Malherbe said all the measures except the curfew would be implemented this week.

The government previously declared the Johannesburg-area townships unrest areas and poured in additional police and soldiers in a bid to halt the fighting. But the street clashes continued.

Mandela, on a one-day tour of four small towns near Cape Town, said the new police measures would be ineffective. He was most upset by the mounting of machine guns on armored patrol vehicles.

The ANC leader said police only need tear gas and water cannons to control demonstrations. He also said it was not necessary to surround black camps with wire.

“If fire were to break out in squatter camps, hundreds of people would be trapped inside,” he said.

In addition, Mandela reiterated charges that a “sinister task force” had participated in recent attacks on blacks intended to destabilize the situation. Witnesses have reported seeing white men with blackened faces participating in the attacks.

The government has said it would investigate such charges.

Mandela said the government’s failure to halt the unrest could upset planned negotiations on power sharing. But he added: “To abandon the talks now would be to play into the hands of this task force.”

“But we will not stand by and see our people mowed down like dogs,” Mandela said, reiterating a threat to arm ANC supporters. The ANC, however, is not believed to possess a large arsenal of weapons.

Most of the fighting has been between Zulus who support the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party and Xhosas and other blacks who support the ANC.