South Africa Bashing Heads Before Balloting

By William E. Smith

"Go to blazes!" That was South African Defense Minister Magnus Malan's response last week to those who criticized his army's latest commando raid into black-ruled Zambia. The soldiers had allegedly attacked installations of the outlawed African National Congress, South Africa's largest black political movement. But Malan's angry words, uttered only days before South Africa's white voters were set to go to the polls this week, epitomized the attitude of State President P.W. Botha's government toward all opposition, both domestic and international.

The raid into Zambia, where South African soldiers killed five people in the town of Livingstone, near Victoria Falls, undoubtedly strengthened the Botha government's standing among its right-wing supporters. So did a crackdown on demonstrations by students in Cape Town and Johannesburg. At the University of Cape Town, where some 300 white, black and mixed-race students gathered to protest the commando raid, police used tear gas, leather whips and bird shot to break up the meeting. On May Day, fearing another wave of unrest, the government banned rallies called by 20 black unions.

In Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg, at least five fire-bomb attacks took place last week against commuter trains, and an explosion ripped apart the rail line at Soweto's Nancefield Station, preventing thousands of black officeworkers from reaching their jobs in Johannesburg. The violence grew out of a six-week-long strike by 16,000 black transport workers.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the black labor organization whose offices had previously been raided by police, last week won a court order against such harassment. But the next day police found the bodies of four black railway workers, who had been stabbed and burned, in the Johannesburg rail yards. A fifth body was discovered in Tembisa township, to the east of the city. White officials charged that the five had been killed by blacks for refusing to join the strike. Police once again raided the COSATU offices, this time armed with search warrants, and arrested twelve people.

The Botha government was also having troubles last week with the country's independent judiciary. Court rulings in Natal struck down two emergency regulations, one that prohibited campaigning for the release of detainees and another that restricted press reporting and public comment on unrest. The government is certain to appeal the rulings.

But despite the violence and legal challenges to Botha's policies, the results of this week's parliamentary elections were not in serious doubt. The National Party, which has ruled the country since 1948, was expected to win again, and perhaps even register a slight increase in its 116-seat majority in the 166-member House of Assembly. The opposition Progressive Federal Party, in league with the small New Republic Party, could not hope to add more than a handful of seats to its present 30. P.F.P. Leader Colin Eglin said he saw "the emergence among upwardly mobile city Afrikaners of a new spirit demanding new deals and moving away from the old shibboleths of Nationalist apartheid." That may be true, but such a spirit does not necessarily translate itself into immediate parliamentary victories.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg