ANC Faithful Bury 12 Victims of Ciskei Killings

Tens of thousands of African National Congress supporters, cheering militant messages from their leaders, on Friday buried 12 of the 28 blacks killed by Ciskei homeland troops during a protest last week.

The mass funeral in King William’s Town was peaceful, police said, but angry blacks heading back to their homes in the nearby Ciskei homeland looted a casino-hotel and burned down a post office, several businesses and private houses. One person died in the melee.

ANC leaders, reflecting the growing rage of their members in the region, told an estimated 40,000 supporters that protests against the South African government and the black homelands created by Pretoria would continue.

A resumption of negotiations is impossible “as long as Pretoria and its puppets cling to power in the face of opposition,” ANC Deputy President Walter Sisulu told the mourners, who were packed into a cricket stadium about a mile from Ciskei and the scene of the shootings.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, addressing a meeting of his ruling National Party in Johannesburg, criticized the ANC’s protest campaign and warned: “You are playing with fire.” It is not his party, he added, that “assaults, intimidates and murders political opponents.”

Chris Hani, a key figure in the ANC and leader of the South African Communist Party, led the crowd in chanting: “We hate De Klerk. We hate (Foreign Minister Roelof F.) Pik Botha. We hate (Law and Order Minister) Hernus Kriel. We hate apartheid. We hate capitalists.”

Other radical leaders, including Peter Mokaba of the ANC Youth League, had told mourners that “the time for us now is to fight and fight and fight. The time has come for us to return fire with fire.”

Hundreds of South African police and soldiers stood by during the peaceful funeral and burial service. Caskets holding the bodies of the Ciskei shooting victims were escorted to the cemetery by youths wearing the uniform of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). As they marched, the youths sang, “Go well, Spear of the Nation.”

The government blamed the violence that erupted in Ciskei later Friday on radical blacks who, it said, were out of the ANC leadership’s control.

“It is increasingly clear that the Communist leadership within the ANC alliance is acting according to its own agenda and is inciting violence and revolution,” said Wynand Bryetenbach, the government’s deputy defense minister.

He called Hani’s statements “an open declaration of war. The (Communist Party) program of violence cannot be reconciled with the ANC’s desire to resume negotiations. Arson and looting cannot be the foundation of a democratic new South Africa.”

Earlier, Sisulu defended the ANC’s alliance with the Communist Party, which has several dozen members on the ANC’s policy-making body.

“No amount of bad-mouthing or lies will undermine the bond of friendship between the ANC and the SACP,” Sisulu said.

Ciskei’s military ruler, Brig. Gen. Oupa Gqozo, whose troops opened fire on the ANC demonstrators last week, told Reuters news agency that he was fed up with the ANC’s tactics.

“If they think they can just thrust things down our throats, we will resist until the last of us here is dead,” Gqozo said.

And the Ciskei leader, who took power in a military takeover in 1990, defended his troops’ actions last week, saying the ANC’s march had been “a military invasion and abortive coup d’etat “ aimed at unseating him.