S. Africa Labor Group Calls for Resignations

The nation’s largest labor movement on Saturday threatened the government with strikes and a tax boycott to protest secret government payments to a rival group affiliated with the Inkatha Freedom Party.

In a declaration at its national conference, the 1.25-million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions joined a growing list of anti-apartheid groups calling for the resignation of President Frederik W. de Klerk’s government amid the growing scandal over the secret payments.

A focus of criticism in the scandal, Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok, said Saturday that he did not feel that he should have to resign. “I think that I am not really responsible for the problems we are experiencing. I’ve told the president . . . and he has accepted my viewpoint.”

Vlok, who commands the police, has come under fire because security police requested the money for Inkatha. The African National Congress--Inkatha’s bitter rival--says this bolsters ANC allegations of police bias toward Inkatha in factional battles that have killed more than 6,000 people in the last five years.

Police said Saturday that three people had died, 10 were wounded and five arrested in political unrest throughout the country during the previous 24 hours.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, which has close ties to the ANC, issued a declaration saying: “This illegal war is not a project of individual ministers: The government as a whole . . . is involved and bears collective responsibility for the massacres, destruction and destabilization.”

The ANC has long accused the government of working with Inkatha to foment violence and destabilize the black opposition movement. It says the payment disclosures could break its relations with the government, which denies the charges and says the payments to Inkatha were part of a campaign to fight international sanctions against South Africa.