South Africa Enemies Within

By JANICE C. SIMPSON.

It is an innocent-looking document that resembles an ordinary passport, but for South Africa's 24 million blacks, the passbook is the most hated symbol of the apartheid system. It allows the government to enforce the pass laws, regulating where blacks can live, work and travel in the country. Last week, however, State President P.W. Botha told Parliament that effective April 23, he will suspend those laws and release all those jailed on pass offenses. About 100,000 blacks were arrested last year on pass-law violations.

Antiapartheid activists welcomed the announcement but warned that Botha's new proposals, which include identity books that all South Africans will have to carry, could mean the same old restrictions under a smoother-sounding name. Said Bishop Desmond Tutu, who last week was elected Archbishop of Cape Town, making him the first black man to lead the Anglican Church in South Africa: "I hope there is not a sting in the tail. One has to be very careful that they are not going to find another way of harassing blacks."

Like the other reforms that Botha started announcing in January 1985, this one was designed to ease the racial tensions that have rocked South Africa's black townships during the past year and a half. Some 1,450 people have been killed in clashes with police and by fire bombings and brutal "necklacings," in which young radicals place gasoline-filled tires around the necks of suspected traitors to the antiapartheid cause and burn them alive. But the anger is deeply rooted, and recently a new strain of violence has begun to emerge in the black communities. Groups of conservative blacks, angered by radical tactics, are starting to strike out at other blacks. No one knows exactly how many of the locally organized vigilante cells exist. Their main targets are leading antiapartheid activists.

One morning last week Sam Morotola, the president of the local antiapartheid students' congress, was awakened by gunshots outside his small home in Atteridgeville, a black township near Pretoria. Seconds later, a marauder hurled a hand grenade at his house, blowing a hole in one wall. Morotola, who had been sleeping in a room in another part of the house, escaped harm, but his 18-year-old cousin was injured in the blast.

In Leandra, a township about 60 miles east of Johannesburg, vigilantes last January burned down the house of Chief Ampie Mayisa, a local antigovernment leader, and then hacked him to death with axes when he tried to flee. Two days later, one of Mayisa's attackers told a local reporter that they had killed him because he was "responsible for some of the youths' deaths in the township . . . for some of us missing our (school) examinations." At the beginning of this month, vigilantes in Winterveld bombed the houses of four activists who had organized a protest meeting in that tiny town near Pretoria in the independent homeland of Bophuthatswana. In the Pretoria area alone, 56 antiapartheid activists have been the targets of attacks during the past ten months. Says Nicholas Haysom, a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand and author of a new book on the growing phenomenon: "Vigilante activity has been directed at the destruction of opposition institutions and policies."

Some of the vigilantes are reportedly off-duty black policemen, and many blacks suspect that these groups are working with government security forces. The critics say that police, who regularly clash with leftist protesters, seldom appear when right-wing vigilantes are on the prowl and are slow to investigate charges against the groups. "There are right-wing elements of our community ready to be used by the authorities to blunt the edge of liberation forces," says Murphy Morobe, chief spokesman for the United Democratic Front, the national umbrella organization for more than 600 antiapartheid groups. "These vigilantes are no different from the death squads of Latin America."

The police deny any direct involvement with the vigilantes. "The South African police are in principle against the formation of vigilante groups," says a police spokesman. But, he adds, "we have no problem with any group prepared to help the police within the confines of the law." Conservative black, colored and Indian businessmen and politicians, who have borne the brunt of the rage expressed by the young people leading the protest activities in the townships, insist that they need the vigilantes because the police fail to provide adequate protection. The possibility thus exists that while the government conveniently looks the other way, continued clashes between the groups could grow into something resembling a black-against-black civil war.

With reporting by Bruce W. Nelan/Johannesburg