A Show of Force, a Show of Anger in Phola Park : South Africa: Debate over police campaign in squatter camp mirrors a national struggle that jeopardizes talks on multiracial government.

The doors of Thambekoso Bhalindlela’s shack exploded inward at 9 a.m. under the boots of five white policemen. They proceeded to turn his room upside down in search, they said, of firearms. When they left, he discovered that his I.D. card and 100 rand, or $30, were gone. The police had moved on to a neighbor’s shed.

On the dirt path in front of his shack lay a flyer flung out the window of an armored police cruiser earlier that day.

“This operation is aimed at removing the criminal from within the community,” it read. “Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. We apologise for any inconvenience.”

“Is this law and order?” Bhalindlela asked, showing visitors the damage to his one-room shack. “I think we haven’t got police at Phola Park. The government is employing criminals.”

In the last week, this football-stadium-sized parcel southeast of Johannesburg has become host to perhaps the largest concentration of force now deployed anywhere by the South African government.

On May 29, the South African police cordoned off the entire camp with razor wire, leaving a handful of narrow exits through which residents and visitors could pass--only after being searched and questioned.

Then 1,200 police, backed up by South African army troops and Angolan mercenaries, began ransacking the place 24 hours a day in search of weapons, criminals and possibly renegade members of the African National Congress’ military wing, Umkhonte we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

Phola Park has the reputation of being one of this country’s most crime-ridden settlements. Its estimated 30,000 residents, most unemployed, live in one- or two-room shacks devoid of running water or electricity.

Virtually the only moving vehicles in the camp are armored police carriers, including Casspirs, whose triangular bodies are specifically designed to withstand land-mine blasts, and the smaller, yellow-and-blue-striped armored trucks nicknamed Mellow Yellows. They lumber ceaselessly through the camp’s dirt streets on patrol.

It was not always so. As recently as a year ago, Phola Park was the closest thing in South Africa to what authorities called a “model” squatter camp. With the help of local businesses and academic leaders, it had become one of the country’s best-organized black communities. Self-help programs and manufacturing co-ops were being established.

But by this February the atmosphere of peace had evaporated, thanks to the violent pressures that are inescapable elements of South African society.

Moreover, the latest police campaign has turned the camp into a wedge widening the rift between the ANC and the South African government, whose relations have become so bitter they jeopardize negotiations aimed at establishing a multiracial interim government by the year’s end.

ANC President Nelson Mandela and five other top leaders judged Phola Park important enough Sunday to interrupt a crucial ANC policy conference for a special visit here, where they proclaimed that residents are innocent victims of police harassment solely because of their race.

“How is it,” Mandela asked during the visit, “that when the police are claiming to be overextended, so much of their resources are committed to the harassment of such a small community?”

The debate over who is responsible for the violence in Phola Park is a perfect reflection of the same debate on a national level. It embroils the same three major players--the government, ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Movement--in a carousel of charges and countercharges, in which each blames the other two and mundane questions of law and order are overwhelmed.

The trouble began more than two years ago, when squatters in the camp--most of them Xhosa with tribal affinities to the ANC--felt themselves coming under attack from residents of a neighboring hostel associated with Inkatha, the Zulu-based movement headed by Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

The squatters responded violently, taking the hostel apart and forcing its residents to rebuild a few miles away.

Then came peace talks and Phola Park’s brief moment of tranquillity.

But attacks soon erupted again on both sides. The police tended to favor Inkatha in the fights, the squatters felt. They established their own armed self-defense unit, which patrolled the camp, often trading gunshots with the police and military. Over the last year, five policemen, one Angolan soldier and at least seven camp residents have been killed in the gunplay.

Many who have worked with the squatters see the latest raids as police retaliation for exactly these kinds of incidents.

“The police are trying to teach them a lesson,” said Paul Spoor, a lawyer who last year defended seven members of the self-defense unit against weapons possession charges. (They pleaded guilty and got suspended sentences.) “They’re trying to show that there’s no place in South Africa where the police can be driven away, where they don’t have a presence.”

Police officials acknowledge a similar goal.

“We oppose any group that wants to take the law into its own hands,” said Capt. Eugene Opperman, a South African police spokesman. “That’s not acceptable in a civilized society.”

Opperman argues further that the camp’s self-defense unit is responsible for 112 organized ambushes of police.

Armed bandits implicated in violent crimes in areas miles away have taken refuge in the camp, they say, and buses, trucks and cars using nearby public streets are regularly attacked.

“Phola Park is basically a war zone at this stage,” Opperman said.

For its part, the ANC contends that the police have targeted Phola Park because it is a known ANC stronghold that registered a clear victory over a police proxy, Inkatha, in the hostel battle.

And residents acknowledge that the camp’s self-defense unit counts the police among the enemies from whom it aims to protect the squatters. “Sure we have guns,” said Eric Siswana, the ANC camp representative. “When the police shoot us we shoot back, and we’re not afraid to say it.”

This atmosphere of conflict has made the residents’ existence one of permanent tension punctuated by outbreaks of open warfare.

The most serious of these occurred on the night of April 8, when the South African Defense Force’s notorious 32 Battalion came under fire when it entered Phola Park to investigate reports of shooting.

The battalion is made up of Portuguese-speaking black Angolan soldiers from the South African side in the now-ended Angolan civil war. It was immediately clear that their training as bush guerrillas was inappropriate for a densely populated urban community.

By many accounts, the battalion returned fire indiscriminately, killing at least one woman and injuring more than 100 residents. Six women later claimed they were raped by the rampaging soldiers.

The next day, Tokyo Sexwale, the ANC’s regional chairman, raised the temperature by advising the residents to defend themselves in the future. “Use any weapon and hit back next time,” he said. “Deal with them.”

The raid by 32 Battalion has since become a principal rationale for the presence of the self-defense unit in Phola Park. Residents say the level of petty police harassment has also remained high.

“Early in the morning when you’re going to work they search you and sometimes turn you back,” said Newton Ntlathi, 27, a three-year camp resident. “They do the same thing when you come home. That’s the life you have here.”

But the stringing of razor wire, a high-tech improvement on barbed wire, and the subsequent police raid, is viewed as an even greater affront. “The razor wire is dehumanizing, and the raid is disturbing,” said Simon Tsotetsi, a regional ANC official. “When the police go into a shack and just tear clothes apart, then their purpose is not what they say it is.”

This week, dozens of residents displayed broken doors, their padlocks hanging limply by the hasp; they said their homes were stormed by the police.

Inside many shacks, steel bed frames had been upended and a home’s contents ransacked and dumped in the middle of the floor. Many in the camp said the police had pilfered money or stolen televisions or other goods, responding to objections with obscenities. Police spokesman Opperman called such charges “propaganda.”

For all that, the official police seizures were modest. By midweek, they said they had confiscated 29 oil filters (useful as hand-held projectiles), unspecified ammunition, a two-way radio and what Opperman described as “a few” weapons; one man was arrested for illegal possession of a hand grenade and about 25 others for various crimes.

“Of course they’re not going to find our guns,” said Eric Siswana, the ANC camp representative. “They’re hidden.”