FT933-2434 _AN-DISAKAC8FT 930918 FT 18 SEP 93 / On patrol in the townships of death: Patti Waldmeir spent a night on South Africa's front line with the 'self defence unit' of one embattled black community By PATTI WALDMEIR 'We killed him and then we burned his body'. SHALL I bother to ask why, as though reason can comprehend the primordial hatred that spurred the deed and the bloodlust that carried it through? But I cling to reason in this land driven half-mad by violence. I insist on a rational motive for the deed and it is chillingly simple: this South African township, Katlehong, is at war, one of the focal points of a conflict that has left 10,000 blacks dead since 1990. And the dead man was the enemy. He was a resident of a migrant workers hostel - which means he was probably also a Zulu and a member of the Inkatha Freedom Party. And his killers - these young black men who tell the tale in a cramped township kitchen, while I perch on a Formica stool and glance nervously at their AK-47 rifles - are residents of the area surrounding the hostel, who owe allegiance primarily to the African National Congress. They are obviously filled with a sense of righteousness at their deed, a victory in the just war against the cruel aggressor: 'hostel dwellers' they explain, have killed scores of residents in this section of Katlehong; burned, looted and destroyed their homes; forced them to flee. Now the residents have formed a 'self-defence unit' to protect their territory; and anyone found on the wrong side of the invisible line that separates 'residents' and 'hostel dwellers' - or ANC and Inkatha, if you prefer neater, though less accurate labels - courts a gruesome death. The dead hostel dweller was found well behind enemy lines: at the taxi rank, in 'residents' territory. On his way home, he was caught, killed and set alight. When I ask who killed him, the reply is obvious: 'the community'. Thabo, 27, is the leader of this band of urban guerrillas. Disarmingly shy, with a slow wide smile and a gentle manner, he inspires no fear; he does not even tell me to disguise his identity, but I have done so. Still, he is the one who instructs the others - young men with hard, wild eyes which have seen too much atrocity - in the art of loading an ammunition clip on to an AK-47. It is near midnight, and we are in the kitchen of an abandoned house that the self-defence unit uses as a base, on the front line with a neighbouring area colonised by hostel residents. (The latter have established security zones around the hostels, driving out the residents and setting up their own, ostensibly defensive bases). On one side of the eerie, empty street, young men from the self-defence unit sit in darkened rooms behind incongruous net curtains, their weapons trained on the houses opposite - where other (usually older) men from the hostels do the same. Thabo claims to have 15 such bases, 150 fighters, and to have killed 200 hostel dwellers. We both know he exaggerates, but his point is clear: the self-defence unit is extensive and relatively well-armed - and it is winning the just war against the hostels. (Some 200 people were killed in Katlehong and its contiguous townships of Thokoza and Vosloorus last month, as well as 400 the previous month, but police do not record the allegiance of corpses). Thabo guides me into a pitch-dark sitting room, and cautiously shifts the net curtain a few centimetres to point out the enemy base opposite. He recounts numerous recent incidents of police collusion with the hostel-dwellers - on such-and-such a day they brought Inkatha men in armoured cars to attack the residents, another night they brought guns to the hostel fighters, or attacked the residents entirely of their own accord. Some of the stories must be apocryphal, but they cannot all be untrue. And it is clear that Thabo's motives for launching the self-defence unit were in his view unassailably righteous: the community, a tight-knit group that developed a strong collective identity under apartheid, was under attack from the hostels; he could not stand by while defenceless women and children were killed. But the worst savagery often proceeds from the purest motives, and the just war is notoriously hard to end. Thabo's troops may not thank him for ending it, even if he would; for they are the 'lost generation', teenagers who have known only the fight against apartheid, and now the battle against police and Inkatha. They clearly enjoy the exalted status which SDU membership brings, prefering the romanticised life of the guerrilla to the desperate boredom of the hopeless unemployed. These young men are my bodyguards as I join one of the unit's nightly patrols, following a maze of paths between houses that crowd upon each other, wall to wall, past malodorous outdoor toilets (the water was switched off earlier in the day), under washing lines in backyards crammed with rubble, taking cover from snipers behind half-demolished walls. All the houses are dark - residents observe the SDU's 8.30pm curfew, and black out windows with blankets - and Thabo explains that he will shoot at anything that moves. Luckily, nothing does. It is a quiet night. Occasionally, Thabo scratches quietly at a back door, and a resident lets us silently into a warm kitchen where the patrol deposits me for a while. One terrified resident after another tells a horrifying tale of daily life in Katlehong: the fear, the nights of shooting, the ever-present danger; the gratitude to the SDU, which has substantially improved security. Then we are out again into the night, squeezing through fence gaps, waking up the dogs, sprinting across wide dirt streets open to snipers. A police armoured vehicle trundles by, with its powerful spotlights trained on the houses; we freeze, a single shot rings out (not aimed at us, they have not seen us), and then move on. When I decide I have had enough, sometime in the early hours, Thabo sends two young runners to negotiate my safe passage out of the township with the neighbouring self-defence unit; they might otherwise shoot at an alien vehicle breaking curfew. But before I go, he has some serious complaints to lodge against Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader. Thabo was a member of the South African Communist Party, the ANC's staunchest ally. But the SACP 'betrayed the struggle of the working class' to the ANC, whose moderation he condemns, and so he has joined the 'Communist International'. He opposes negotiation, resents Mandela for suspending the armed struggle and leaving Katlehong residents unprotected, and thinks the ANC should go back into exile. Mandela cannot control him, and neither can the police; how will the new South Africa survive him? But it would be wrong to suggest that Thabo is the only, or even the worst, threat to post-apartheid Katlehong. For every party to the conflict believes that right is on its side; they excuse the most ghastly acts on the grounds of just cause. That cause is not ideological, nor theological, nor even truly 'political'; their battle is for survival. Wilson, a young resident of Madala hostel in Thokoza, puts it simply: 'They think we are going to attack them and we think they are going to attack us.' Residents think the hostel dwellers want their homes; and hostel residents think the residents want the hostels demolished. For both, poor people who live perilously close to the edge of survival, housing is a life-and-death issue. Even the police have seen 1,000 of their members killed in the past decade as part of an anti-apartheid strategy to kill security force members, and they too know fear. But the triple township - Katlehong, Thokoza and Vosloorus are known administratively as 'Katorus' - was relatively quiet until 1990, in spite of its desperate poverty, intense competition for housing, high population density and low employment. Something set them at each other's throats, and no one knows for certain what it was. Most experts believe that the already high level of socio-economic rivalry was ignited by the political competition set off by the release from prison of Mandela in 1990. ANC branches were formed, IFP strengthened its presence, and political leaders from both sides inflamed passions with aggressive rhetoric. Repeated massacres, carried out by shadowy characters never apprehended by police, kept tensions at boiling point and suggested the involvement of a 'third force' from the right wing or the police. Though Judge Richard Goldstone found no evidence of such a force in a 1992 report into Thokoza violence, most township residents still believe it exists. Inkatha, for its part, says the ANC launched a campaign to 'wipe out the Zulus', giving the early conflict a strong ethnic flavour as Zulus in the hostels fought Xhosas in squatter camps and in the main township. Since that time, the hostels have been ethnically cleansed, with only Zulus daring to remain and many Zulus from the township withdrawing into the hostels for protection. But though an ethnic element remains, it is far from clear-cut: many of the SDU members are also Zulus, including Thabo. Hostel dwellers now feel just as threatened as Thabo and his residents: besieged within the hostels, they believe the ANC wants their homes demolished (Thabo is certain they will be levelled before next year's elections); they also complain of police harassment, and ask why - if the police are on their side - they have not defeated the ANC-supporting residents long ago. Peter Harris, director of the Wits-Vaal Peace Secretariat, which maintains permanent peace monitors in the area, says: 'There is a powerful cocktail of ingredients in the social makeup of (the area) that contributes to the violence: a complete disintegration of civil society; a large criminal element that uses violence as a shield; a total breakdown in law and order; intense political confrontation; conflict around housing.' The list goes on and on. But possibly the worst problem of all is the belief among residents that the police are the real enemy, worse even than Inkatha. Residents do not believe police will protect them, so they form self-defence units; they will not co-operate with police, so crimes are not solved. Until they trust the security forces - and until police give them cause to do so - violence can only drag on. * * * 'Time for our regular dose of adrenalin,' says Police Sergeant Jakes Bleeker, as he pulls up beside the moonlit shacks of Thokoza's Phola Park squatter camp. He is driving a Nyala armoured personnel carrier filled with members of the police riot unit, the Internal Stability Division. 'If we sit here long enough they always shoot at us,' he says; behind us, their assault rifles at the ready, young constables taunt the shack residents in Afrikaans: 'Come, shoot at us,' they cry out, not even trying to conceal their lust for action. If they will go this far with a journalist present, I wonder what they will do when I have gone. During eight hours of night-time patrol, I (not surprisingly) see them commit none of the much-rumoured atrocities. But I leave with a new understanding of why township residents complain of harassment, intimidation, insults. And the events I saw at Phola Park lends credence to the claim that police often shoot at residents - with little, or no provocation. But the real problem is their attitude. Maybe they too have been brutalised by violence; but when we stop to collect a dead body, they laugh and joke in the face of the bereaved husband and sister; when they dump the body on to a stretcher, they do not notice that the wind has blown her skirt up above her waist (the husband hastily reaches forward to make her decent); they look for no witnesses, ask no questions, merely collect a cartridge for ballistics testing. They assure me that 'these people' don't even notice death any more; and neither do the police, nor, one suspects, do they try very hard to stop it. With the best will in the world, they could not in any case: there are too many guns, too much hatred, too many scores to be settled. One can only weep for the people of 'Katorus'; their lives are unending nightmare. The new South Africa, from which they expect so much, can do little for them. Countries:- ZAZ South Africa, Africa. Industries:- P9711 National Security. P9229 Public Order and Safety, NEC. Types:- CMMT Comment & Analysis. The Financial Times London Page I