S. Africa Troops Restore Calm to Homeland

Hundreds of heavily armed South African army commandos patrolled this riot-torn homeland capital on foot and in huge armored vehicles Saturday, welcomed for the first time as liberators against a repressive regime that had tried to keep blacks from voting in next month’s democratic elections.

Sent to restore order after a popular uprising here, the army’s role is likely to grow following an unprecedented decision in Pretoria to oust Bophuthatswana’s despotic leader, Lucas Mangope. South Africa’s multi-party transitional executive council announced that it will install an interim local government until the nominally independent territory is reincorporated into South Africa.

Early today, Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha announced that diplomat Tjaart van der Walt had been put in charge of running the homeland.

Botha said he and African National Congress official Mac Maharaj visited Mangope late Saturday to tell him that he was no longer in charge.

Also Saturday, the government’s law and order minister, Hernus Kriel, declared 52 cities and towns, including Pretoria and Johannesburg, as “unrest areas” for an indefinite period to clamp down on rising racial tensions following the weeklong crisis and bloodshed in Bophuthatswana.

The designation gives the police extrajudicial powers to detain people without trial, order curfews and disperse crowds. While the emergency powers have been used against blacks in the past, many of the towns covered under Kriel’s order are dominated by the militant white supremacists who had stormed Mmabatho early Friday to prop up Mangope’s corrupt rule.

At least 24 people were reported killed Friday, many in nightmarish scenes after marauding bands of Afrikaner vigilantes, some wearing balaclavas and other masks, terrorized the town by firing wildly from pickups at black pedestrians and reporters.

The invasion of white racist gunmen finally unified Mangope’s mostly black security forces, who had shifted loyalties all week. They killed at least three neo-Nazis, including two wounded men who were summarily executed at point-blank range in front of journalists by a uniformed Bophuthatswana policeman. TV cameras captured the horrifying scene for the world.

Thousands of the self-styled white warriors were then forced to retreat by the Bophuthatswana and South African defense forces. It was a humiliating defeat for the belligerent white leaders who have terrified the country for months with threats of armed resistance to wreck the transition to democracy and black majority rule.

In the first fallout from the debacle, retired Gen. Constand Viljoen quit the leadership of the Afrikaner Volksfront, an uneasy alliance of militant white-power groups, opening a major rift in the right wing. He said he would instead align himself with the Freedom Front, a hastily created party that he said is committed to using nonviolent means to protect white minority rights and win a self-ruled Afrikaner state.

A delegation from the Freedom Front rushed to submit a list of candidates for the national election 15 minutes before a deadline expired at midnight Friday, ensuring that the party will be listed on the April 26-28 election ballots.

Viljoen had ordered the white extremists into Mmabatho at Mangope’s urging. The attempted rescue of the tyrant from the anger ofhis own people was meant to be a replay of February, 1988, when Viljoen, then head of the South African Defense Forces, led his tanks and troops to suppress a coup against Mangope.

Now, with both Bophuthatswana and Viljoen’s all-white party finally in the election, the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party led by conservative Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi remains the only major party outside the democratic process. The IFP registered last week, but without a list of candidates, its name will be stricken from the ballots, officials said.

Election officials insist the twice-postponed deadline can’t be delayed again if the 80 million ballots required are to be printed in time by a London-based company.

ANC President Nelson Mandela said he will visit Bophuthatswana on Monday. He blamed Mangope’s “selfish views” for the violence that has swept the region, one of 10 so-called homelands and territories created under apartheid.

With angry black mobs looting the town center and swaggering white gunmen careening through residential areas, Mangope finally agreed Friday to allow the homeland’s more than 2 million residents to take part in the elections. But he later apparently reneged in a meeting with Judge Johann Kriegler, who heads the Independent Electoral Commission. That prompted Mangope’s removal Saturday by the transitional executive council in Pretoria.

Mangope and his erstwhile right-wing defenders had few friends in Mmabatho on Saturday morning. As they surveyed the damage and did their first shopping in days, blacks and whites smiled and waved at the South African soldiers in helmets and flak jackets who patrolled the debris-strewn streets and deployed outside deserted government buildings.

“We welcome them, but we think they took a long time to come,” said one black university student as a convoy of armored personnel carriers rumbled by.

Mangope should be tried in a court, another student complained. “His ruling has been terrible,” he said angrily. “We could replace him with Idi Amin. Anything would be better in his place.”

Several people defended the orgy of looting and vandalism, insisting it was directed mostly at shops owned by Mangope’s family or cronies.

By all accounts, race relations always have been good here, a neatly laid town of cozy brick homes and grandiose government buildings. But many said the arrival of the white extremists, especially the neo-Nazis in the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, had suddenly fanned a political crisis into a potential racial blood bath.

Calvin Supin, a black city councilor and former mayor who boasts that he has been jailed every year for the last 15 years by Mangope, complained that more white vigilantes weren’t killed. “We should have never let any of them leave alive,” he said angrily.

Some, especially whites, are unsure if the racial furies will now subside. “I’m looking, today and tomorrow, to see whether to stay or go,” said Di Mauro, 50, a white building contractor.

Riana von Wyk, who watched as workers emptied the remains of her brother’s vandalized auto parts store, shook her head. “This was the most wonderful place,” she said. “No problem with blacks. Very calm. Now it’s a nightmare.”