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FT 10 JUL 92 / Storm clouds over S Africa: Growing fear and suspicion in a
divided society
By MICHAEL HOLMAN
LIKE the smell of damp earth that warns of approaching rains, yesterday's
news from around South Africa carried the whiff of stormy political weather
ahead.
No single item was especially remarkable - not for a society used to
violence and tension. But taken against a background of stalemate in
constitutional negotiations, vituperative exchanges between leading
political figures and a looming campaign of strikes and civil disobedience,
they seem portents of what may be to come.
'A policeman was shot dead in Kathlehong on the east Rand', the South
African Press Association (Sapa) reported. The day before, said Sapa, men
armed with AK47 rifles shot dead one policeman and fatally wounded another.
'Strangers of all races are warned to stay away from the violence-torn
township of Sebokeng, near Vereeniging', said Sapa. Unruly youths had set up
roadblocks and were committing 'acts of lawlessness', according to a police
spokesman.
In the nominally independent homeland of Bophuthatswana, 'about 10,000
workers at Impala Platinum Bafokend South mine did not turn up for work on
Thursday morning,' reported Sapa. A mine official said the stayaway 'would
appear to be related to management action taken to prevent an unauthorised
mass meeting' the day before.
From Port Elizabeth came reports of a statement from the management of the
Toyota car plant, which earlier this week dismissed 6,000 striking workers.
'If the union does not present firm and reasonable proposals for the
re-employment of dismissed workers by 1600 hours Friday 10 July, Toyota will
commence the re-manning of its production facilities on a permanent basis'.
In a Johannesburg report, Sapa quotes Mr Jay Naidoo, general secretary of
the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and key organiser of the
planned August 3 general strike as saying: 'Unless every aspect of society
acts decisively to break the logjam, we are going to drift into total
anarchy, and possibly even civil war.'
From Durban there is news of further killings in Murchison township, south
of the port - at least four people dead, bringing the unofficial tally to 20
so far this month. 'The latest violence comes after scores of ANC supporters
who fled the violence in Murchison over the past two years returned home',
says Sapa.
'Seventy-six violent deaths in South Africa were recorded by the Human
Rights Commission in the first week of July,' another bulletin began
yesterday, 'up on the 43 deaths of the previous week'. The death toll was
higher in Natal than in the Johannesburg region.
Let the last item in this far from complete list come from Cape Town: the
Goldstone Commission, the judicial inquiry into political violence, warns
that South African society is 'dangerously divided by suspicion and fear'.
The Financial Times
London Page 4