S. African Police Turn Guns on Whites Trying to Wreck Black Squatters’ Shacks : Apartheid: Top aide halts unprecedented clash, in which two farmers are shot.

For the first time in modern South African history, police turned their guns on right-wing whites Saturday, injuring two white farmers who were trying to demolish black squatter shacks.

The unprecedented clash set up a tense, daylong confrontation on the dry farmlands outside this conservative town, 80 miles west of Johannesburg, between more than 100 heavily armed police and soldiers and an encampment of more than 500 angry right-wing farmers.

It ended only after President Frederik W. de Klerk’s law and order minister, Adriaan Vlok, arrived by helicopter and, wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes, negotiated with the farmers for nearly two hours.

The dispute centered on 80 black families who last month moved to reoccupy farmland forcibly taken from them 13 years ago. The land is now owned by the government but leased to white farmers, who had vowed to force the squatters out.

After hearing Vlok’s pleas, the farmers agreed to wait until a court decision on the blacks’ claims to the land, expected later this month.

But the violent clash between white police and white farmers is sure to inflame far-right extremists, who bitterly oppose the white government’s moves to end apartheid and fear that the government intends to take their land and give it to blacks.

The farmers here were surprised and angered by the police attack, which also damaged several cars. Although most of the farmers were armed, they said they had not returned the police fire.

“For months, we’ve been saying you can’t allow squatters on this farmland,” said Wilco Beukes, a local farmer who acted as the group spokesman. When the government declined to act against the squatters, he added, “We decided we must take steps to stop it.”

“We’ve told him (Vlok) that if he doesn’t remove these people, we’ll be back again,” said one of the farmers as he departed in a convoy of heavy trucks.

Vlok said the police “were only doing their job, protecting life and property.” But he promised to conduct an investigation into the shooting and said he felt “very sorry for the farmers who were shot.”

Nevertheless, Vlok said, the dispute had been settled without further incident. “Reason is the victor today,” he said.

The standoff began late Friday, when right-wing farmers from across the country converged in the middle of a field, setting up camp about half a mile from the squatters.

“We had planned a military-style operation to take these people back to Bophuthatswana,” said Beukes, the farmer spokesman. The blacks were forced off the property in 1978, stripped of their South African citizenship and moved to Bophuthatswana, a nominally independent black homeland.

The farmers began to move into the squatter settlement shortly after midnight, firing tear gas and beating residents with sticks. Four shacks were burned and residents fled into the bush.

Police and soldiers repelled the attack with rifle fire, marking the first time police had opened fire on white protesters since the violent strikes at the country’s gold mines in the 1920s.

One white farmer was injured and treated at the scene; another was taken to a Pretoria hospital with a more serious gunshot wound in the chest.

A few hours later, a group of the right-wing whites wearing ski masks attacked the black township of Tshing, 8 miles away, tearing down 16 shacks and severely beating 14 residents, including an 18-month-old girl, who was struck on the face with a rubber whip.

The attackers, who fled before police arrived, were chanting, “AWB, AWB,” the Afrikaans initials of the extremist Afrikaner Resistance Movement. The AWB draws most of its support from rural white farmers who want the government to create a separate “homeland” for whites.

“I don’t know why they attack us,” said Dinah Matinyane, 25, whose shoulder was dislocated in the assault in Tshing. The men had broken down the door to her two-room shack, where she lives with her mother and 14 children.

More than 3.5 million blacks have been forcibly removed from their homes over the past two decades, and most have been forced onto remote, unproductive tracts of land with little or no compensation. The government says it will end that policy, but it has strongly opposed any redistribution of land and has assured white farmers that their property is safe.