Executions Underscore Bophuthatswana Chaos

The three white men in ripped khaki uniforms and boots lay sprawled Friday beside their bullet-riddled blue Mercedes-Benz. One man was dead, his head in a pool of gore, while the other two bled slowly into the red earth as they talked.

They were from Naboomspruit, a farming town farther north, said Fanie Uys, his face contorted in pain and sweating in the brutal midday sun. And they had come with several thousand other armed right-wing Afrikaners to lend support to the embattled black homeland regime of Bophuthatswana’s tin-pot dictator, Lucas Mangope.

Beside him, face down in the dirt, Alwyn Walfaardt lifted his bearded head. No, no, he said, it wasn’t a mistake to come, even though they had been shot in a fierce firefight with Mangope’s own security forces.

“We came because the Afrikaner Volksfront asked us to come,” he said weakly.

Suddenly, a young black man in a green police uniform walked up and without a word shot Uys in the chest with an assault rifle from two feet away. Uys jerked and slumped down, his eyes half open in death. Then the man turned and shot Walfaardt in the back of the head.

The cold-blooded execution, in front of a Times correspondent and more than a dozen other stunned reporters and photographers, was a grim example of the anarchy that seethed in the tense streets of this homeland capital in the wake of a right-wing invasion before dawn Friday to put down a popular uprising by anti-Mangope protesters.

Less than an hour later, Mangope capitulated. He announced in a statement released here that he would join South Africa’s first all-race elections next month and agreed to reincorporate his nominally independent territory into South Africa after the April 26-28 voting, as the protesters had demanded.

South African President Frederik W. de Klerk subsequently announced in Pretoria that he was sending 1,500 armed troops to restore order here, with more soldiers standing by, if necessary. He said the deployment of troops would “stabilize the situation and ensure the unacceptable situation is immediately brought to an end.”

Whether the army and the political compromise will end the bitter strikes, rioting and bloodshed that have turned this once-neat town into an ugly urban war zone remains to be seen.

Police and medical authorities confirmed at least 22 people were killed in clashes, but the final toll could be higher.

De Klerk met in a crisis session with Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress, and both leaders pleaded for peace.

No one is discounting revenge attacks or other violence.

By nightfall, armored personnel carriers with South African combat troops escorted convoys of Afrikaners to the border.

Thousands of other armed whites retreated from a Bophuthatswana air force base that they had occupied beside the main airport. An uneasy calm settled on the riot-torn city, punctuated by occasional gunfire.

The rout of the right-wingers, who had been urged to come by Mangope to save his regime, appeared a victory for the government and ANC.

Put simply, the new South Africa had survived its first violent challenge from the old.

Both the South African military and the Bophuthatswana security forces had remained loyal in the first major showdown with the extremists who have long threatened to launch a civil war rather than submit to democracy and black majority rule. The right wing clearly had miscalculated.

And Mangope, installed as president in 1977 by the white minority regime in Pretoria, had finally buckled to pressure.

Bophuthatswana, one of 10 homelands and territories created under apartheid to permanently separate blacks from whites in South Africa, will officially disappear in less than seven weeks.

The outcome was not always clear. The crisis began Monday when teachers joined other striking public servants here. Their initial demand was for pay raises and pensions, but the spontaneous protests quickly spread to a general anti-Mangope uprising that paralyzed the capital.

But on Thursday afternoon, many of the police who had wounded scores of protesters and filled the streets with choking tear gas suddenly defected, joining the demonstrators and demanding free elections.

It was unclear if Mangope’s 5,000-member defense force would crush the revolt or move against him.

The chaos worsened early Friday when hundreds of cars and trucks filled with armed and angry members of the Afrikaner Volksfront, the alliance of white supremacists opposed to the elections, roared in to offer support.

South African officials and reporters estimated anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 white militants had arrived.

Mangope had welcomed their help, but specifically asked that the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a vicious neo-Nazi faction, stay away. The three whites who were killed were all members of the pro-apartheid extremist group.

Within hours, roving bands of whites had fired indiscriminately at blacks on the street, killing at least two men and one woman in central Mafeking, twin city to the capital. Others paraded through town, guns bristling. Several cars chased reporters and television crews through the streets at high speed, firing shots in at least one case.

Paul Taylor of the Washington Post and John Battersby of the Christian Science Monitor were pulled three times from their car, punched, kicked and beaten by screaming whites with guns and knives outside the occupied air base. Both reporters were cut and bruised in the melee. Other journalists had their cameras, tape recorders and other gear stolen at gunpoint.

Throughout the day, gunfire echoed throughout the hot, still air, and barricades of burning tires sent plumes of acrid black smoke billowing into the air near the charred hulks of burned-out cars and trucks.

Gangs of young black looters ran through the debris-strewn streets, hauling cases of beer and bulging sacks and boxes from shattered storefronts. Women clutching clothes ran out a broken window at the Guys & Girls Boutique. One man attempted to wheel a huge, white exercise bicycle down the street.

At one point, several dozen youths ran down a street and through a field. Fast behind them was a pickup truck, with someone inside firing shots at the fleeing youths. Other cars and pickup trucks filled with local youths cruised the deserted streets, guns poking out of their windows.

By sunset, law and order had collapsed in the central business district. Hundreds of looters openly loaded cars and trucks with new carpets, mattresses, washing machines, furniture and other goods from the MegaCity shopping center. Two men struggled to carry off a plastic-covered couch, while another man wheeled away a portable heater.

Part of the once-glitzy shopping center still smoldered from a fire set earlier. The South African Press Assn. reported that riots had begun in other far-flung towns in Bophuthatswana, from Taaung in the northern Cape to Hlabane, northwest of Pretoria. Homes of government officials, including a local governor and Cabinet minister, were reported razed in Itsoseng.

The only major skirmish here occurred about 12:45 p.m. at a dusty intersection just outside the city center.

A convoy of 18 vehicles filled with right-wingers roared by a roadblock set up by the Bophuthatswana army. Someone in the convoy fired into a crowd of blacks, killing a woman. The soldiers ordered the group to stop; a tense standoff ensued.

Suddenly, fierce gunfire erupted. The soldiers fired volley after volley with assault rifles from their armored vehicles. The whites fired back from their cars with hunting rifles and shotguns. Terrified civilians and reporters scrambled for cover behind low brick walls as shots stitched the ground.

All but the blue Mercedes escaped. At least eight bullets had smashed the windshield and flattened a tire. One man, identified only as Fourie, lay crumpled and dead in a pool of blood on the left side. He wore the camouflage fatigues of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, with the group’s swastika-like emblem on his sleeves.

Uys, a balding, middle-aged man with a mustache, pushed himself slowly out of the back seat, holding his hands up in surrender. He slumped to the ground, resting his head painfully against a rear tire. Blood oozed from a wound in his left hip.

Walfaardt, a big man with a bushy beard, crouched by the front seat, his hands up as well. He was bleeding on both arms but otherwise appeared uninjured. As police and soldiers ran up with guns, he threw himself face down in the dirt and pleaded for help.

“That guy is wounded,” he said, pointing to Uys. “Can you just get us some help, please? Can somebody get us an ambulance? We need an ambulance for this guy.”

At least 15 minutes went by, as the two wounded men lay in the hot sun and police rifled the car and confiscated their weapons. Photographers gathered round in a ghoulish scene, snapping endless photos of their agony. A crowd of blacks taunted the pair. “Are you sorry now?” one man shouted.

Moments later, they were executed.

Homeland in Turmoil

Bophuthatswana is one of four nominally independent black homelands that were created by the white-led government in an effort to keep blacks and whites separate. Its government has opposed taking part in South Africa’s all-race elections in April.