Police Wage Losing Battle to Keep Peace in S. Africa : Violence: Security units see themselves as townships’ guardians. Blacks blame them for worsening bloodshed.

The sun was setting, and the long light cast a reddish glow on the corpse. He was black, about 20, and had been shot twice in the face. Then his shoes were stolen. He lay in gray socks, muddy pants and a torn white shirt beside a fly-infested trash heap.

Walking up, police Lt. Schalk Strydom lifted up the Chubby Chicken box that someone had placed over the man’s face. He grimaced. It was his first day at work here.

“This is the fifth corpse we’ve found so far today,” Strydom said softly. “Three were shot. The other two, a man and a woman, were tied to a tree. It seems they were stoned and hacked to death. It was very bad.”

With that, automatic gunfire suddenly crackled nearby. Then came a second burst. Strydom and his six constables in the Internal Security Unit scrambled back into their tank-like armored vehicle and roared off to search for the sniper. Shotguns and R-5 assault rifles bristled out the gun ports on the front, sides and rear.

They didn’t catch the gunman. They rarely do. Instead, the security police, among the most hated white men in South Africa, attempted to patrol what is probably its most violent black township: down street after street of burned-out and abandoned houses, along sabotaged railroad tracks and felled telephone poles, and over deep trenches and stone barricades built to keep them out.

Members of the police’s 35 Internal Security Units see themselves as guardians of law and order in the war-torn townships, where more than 12,000 people have been killed since 1990. But many blacks blame the security SWAT teams--made up mostly of young, white Afrikaners--for worsening the bloodshed. The police stand accused of years of brutal murder, torture and terror in the service of apartheid.

The country’s most respected black leaders, including Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, last week issued their most impassioned plea yet that the security squads be withdrawn immediately from the black townships and replaced by a still-unformed community police force.

The ISUs have employed “a deliberate strategy of destabilization” to undermine those working to bring multiracial democracy to South Africa, the leaders said after a two-day conference on the growing violence.

Lt. Col. Ray Harrald, the police spokesman, denied allegations of brutality. “The perception is that the Internal Security Units are a bunch of thugs, that we commit atrocities, that we’re killing the people, that we’re the bad guys,” he said. “But that’s definitely not so.”

Harrald said the 7,500 men in the ISU division had killed about 20 people this year, compared to more than 220 police of various forces who were killed on duty. Critics say the police have secretly killed far more, however, by supplying arms, transportation or intelligence to warring factions.

So far this year, more than 3,000 people, the vast majority of them black, have been shot, hacked, clubbed or burned to death in political and criminal carnage, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations.

And the worst area by far is the East Rand, a grim sprawl of a million or so people living in tin-roofed shacks, drab concrete boxes, squalid squatter camps and impoverished townships, including Tokhoza, on the rubble-strewn plains southeast of Johannesburg.

More than half of the nation’s violent deaths last month were in this bloody urban war zone, so many that overflowing local morgues were forced to ship unidentified bodies elsewhere for burial.

Even worse was the savage style of death. Not only were trains and taxis attacked, cars and homes burned and mothers and children slaughtered in drive-by shootings. An average of one East Rand resident was “necklaced” each day--doused with gasoline, then burned to death with a tire around the neck.

In a heavily guarded police command post, Harrald read down the log from the previous Saturday, when 19 corpses were found: “Burnt, shot, burnt, shot, burnt, burnt, burnt, oh that one was hacked, shot, shot, shot, shot. . . .”

Given that litany of horrors, at least one veteran, Sgt. Raymond Rich, believes that conditions can’t get much worse even if the police withdraw. “Probably things would be much the same,” he said. “The only thing is nobody would be here to remove the bodies or put out the flames.”

The causes of the violence remain a matter of fierce debate. The fighting appears heaviest between Xhosa-speaking members of the African National Congress and the rival Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party. But it is an ethnic war as much as a political one, fought both with traditional spears and modern AK-47s.

Two nights of joining ISU patrols in the East Rand suggest that many victims are neither political activists nor armed guerrillas, just poor people caught in a deadly spiral of terror and despair that will not end anytime soon.

Tokhoza and adjoining Katlehong, the two worst areas, are checkered with ANC and Inkatha zones.

Lt. Strydom’s gray Nyala, as the eight-man armored vehicle is known, moved slowly through the no-go zones, the men tense inside. Rock barricades had been built, boulders and trees blocked some roads, and deep trenches had been dug and filled with water to keep the police out.

The Nyala turned back a few times, unable to cross a barrier. At one point, it ground to a halt and the vault-like pneumatic doors hissed open so the men could rush out and grab two picks and a shovel left in a freshly dug ditch.

“If we drive and get caught in the ditch, they come and attack us with petrol bombs,” said Constable Francois Beukes, 21, cradling a 12-gauge shotgun and peering nervously into the gloom.

The mistrust on both sides is obvious. Each time the Nyala doors opened, the commandos jumped out with guns cocked, then ran behind trees and rocks and watched for an ambush. At night, the vehicle’s roof-mounted floodlights blind passersby and shine in bedroom windows.

And in two nights, not a word was exchanged between the police and the community.

“People don’t even report the corpses anymore,” Strydom said. “If we don’t find them, the bodies just lay there for the dogs. Sometimes only the bones are left.”

Still, the police have some effect. Several dozen people scattered down a Tokhoza alley as the Nyala turned a corner. Spilled milk, broken eggs and other spoiled foodstuffs littered the ground. A car quickly sped away.

“There is a consumer boycott today,” said the Nyala driver, Ampie Cronje, 21. “People aren’t allowed to buy from white stores outside. So they’re stopping all the cars and taxis coming in, and if they find any groceries, they throw them out and break them.”

The radio crackles that there is a shooting at the Mazibuko Hostel, where violence is a constant between the Zulu hostel dwellers and ANC members who live outside.

But all seems quiet when the Nyala roars up to the barracks-like building, siren blaring and blue light flashing. The police soon depart.

Phola Park, a notorious squatter camp where a number of police have been killed, is also quiet. Tin-roofed shacks are jammed on narrow, trash-filled streets. There is no electricity or running water. A woman, bundled against the cold, scurries past a tiny garden ringed with concertina wire.

Nearby, the Nyala pulls over so its floodlights can illuminate freshly daubed graffiti on a wall: “No peace in Tokhoza.” It is not clear whether it is meant as a warning or a simple statement of fact.