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FT 20 APR 93 / Restraint marks Hani burial after fears of bloodshed
By PATTI WALDMEIR
BOKSBURG
SOUTH AFRICA last night appeared to have pulled back from the brink of
disaster after the funeral of Mr Chris Hani, the slain black leader,
provoked few significant incidents of violence.
No event in South African history - not even the release from prison in 1990
of Mr Nelson Mandela, African National Congress leader - has inspired such
emotion and mobilised such large crowds.
ANC marshalls battled to control 80,000 mourners who packed a soccer stadium
near the black township of Soweto and the tens of thousands who drove in a
funeral cortege to the white cemetery where Mr Hani was buried.
Peace monitors said most of the 100,000 people who took part in the day's
events were restrained, with only 200 to 400 youths involved in violence.
The monitors had feared the funeral, the largest of many in the history of
the liberation struggle, could spark off heavy violence.
But in spite of stone throwing, arson and looting, the toll of dead and
injured was much lower than expected. Six people were reported to have died,
with one of them killed by police. Three others were killed by shots fired
from a migrant workers' hostel, the sort of incident which occurs almost
daily in the low-intensity war between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom
party, its main black political rival.
Before the funeral began, 19 people died overnight in the black township of
Sebokeng, deaths which the ANC blamed on the so-called 'third force' linked
to the government security apparatus. Main motorways around Johannesburg
were closed for two hours at midday as hundreds of cars and buses travelled
to the Elspark cemetery near the multi-racial suburb where Mr Hani lived and
died.
Outside the cemetery, a handful of armed members of the far right Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) looked on as a guard of
honour from Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC army, paraded
outside the graveyard. Most white residents kept a low profile.
Speeches by ANC leaders at the funeral and by President FW de Klerk in
parliament illustrated the deterioration in relations between the two
parties since Mr Hani's death.
Mr Mandela and Mr Joe Slovo, chairman of the South African Communist party,
delivered militant addresses which blamed the murder on the government. Mr
Slovo twice asked the crowd: 'Who killed Chris Hani?', inviting the reply
which he received: 'FW de Klerk.'
The president warned that the spate of killings which had followed Mr Hani's
death could ignite a race war.
With whites more despondent and fearful than at any time in the past, Mr de
Klerk condemned the ANC's planned six-week campaign of mass protest action,
saying it would 'set the stage for further violence'.
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The Financial Times
London Page 24