South Africa Police Raid Homes of 85 Anti-Apartheid Activists : Leaders Arrested as Cape Town Riots Flare Again

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Security police raided the homes of at least 85 anti-apartheid activists today in Cape Town and took them into custody as racial violence flared anew near the city.

The detentions came the day after the worst rioting in South Africa’s second-largest city in a decade, and the government’s action was denounced by the opposition United Democratic Front.

A police spokesman in Pretoria said the arrests were made because of the “intensity of the lawlessness” in the Cape Town area.

Attorney Essa Moosa, representing the 85 people detained, said they were taken from their homes before dawn and held under the 1950 Internal Security Act, which allows an unrenewable 14-day period of preventive detention. Prisoners must either be charged or released.

Strongest Opposition

The United Democratic Front, with more than 1.5 million members and the most powerful multiracial opposition body in South Africa, said in a statement: “The UDF wants to warn (Minister of Police) Mr. Louis le Grange and (Cape Town Police Chief) Brig. Chris Swart that this indiscriminate detention and harassment will evoke a response that they may not be able to handle.”

Stuart Saunders, vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, which is mostly white but which has a minority of blacks, Asians and students of mixed racial ancestry, said he was appalled that two of his staff members were reportedly among those arrested.

Colleagues identified them as Lionel Louw, chairman of the Western Province Council of Churches, and Charles Villa-Vicencio of the school’s religious studies department.

Leaders in Custody

Several members of the front’s Western Cape executive group were among the clergymen, students, and church and civic workers detained, legal sources said. The sources said most of the movement’s Cape Town leaders were in police custody.

“The detentions,” said Murphy Morobe, a front spokesman in Johannesburg, “are an open declaration of war upon the people of Cape Town. By detaining leading clergymen this Christian state has . . . extended its reign of terror to the church.”

White opposition parliamentarian Roger Hulley said the “detention of leaders means that the leadership vacuum is increasingly filled at the level of gangs in the streets.”

The detentions came a day after at least eight people were killed in anti-government riots in and around Cape Town in that city’s worst racial violence in a decade. Armored trucks sealed off a section of central Cape Town on Thursday as police, using whips and a water cannon, battled crowds of black, white and mixed-race demonstrators.

Police reported widespread incidents of stone-throwing overnight in mixed-race suburbs surrounding Cape Town and on highways into the city and said demonstrators today set fire to a truck in the black township of Langa.