S. Africa Blacks Called Ready to Face Sanctions

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Black workers in South Africa are prepared to accept unemployment and other suffering that international economic sanctions could bring if such steps hasten the end of apartheid, several top Western labor leaders said here Sunday after discussions with black trade union officials and community representatives.

The American and European labor leaders said that, as a result of their talks here, they will urge their governments to adopt a “meaningful program of action” to bring apartheid to as quick an end as possible.

“We have supported this (U.S. sanctions) legislation and will continue to do so until it is enacted,” AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, a member of an international labor delegation visiting here, said Sunday at a press conference held by the group. “If anything, the need for U.S. action is greater than ever . . . and that is what we will tell Congress and tell the Reagan Administration.”

Decision for Black Workers

In the debate abroad over sanctions against South Africa, the question has always been raised: Would this country’s black majority be helped by them or suffer from their effects? The leaders of the West’s biggest trade union federations concluded that this is a decision for black workers to make and that the latter support sanctions.

After talks with the three black labor federations and with such community leaders as Bishop Desmond Tutu, the delegation from the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions said there is “overwhelming evidence . . . of a willingness by the victims of apartheid to endure further suffering in the interests of achieving the transformation needed in their society so urgently.”

“I get quite fed up with the hypocrisy of the notion that the issue is hardship occasioned by sanctions,” Kirkland said. “It ought to be clear that it is not sanctions that cause the hardship--it is apartheid that causes the hardship.”

Although the union leaders were clear about the specific kinds of sanctions they favor, government regulations under the five-week-old state of emergency here prohibit reports of direct calls for sanctions.

“The world community is now confronted by crucial decisions about effective economic sanctions as a result of the intransigent refusal of the South African regime to contemplate real change,” said John van der Veken of the Netherlands. Van der Veken is president of the International Federation of Free Trade Unions, which has 134 affiliates in 94 countries claiming 85 million members.

Van der Veken added that federation members will press their governments for tougher measures against South Africa.

In a statement, the 12-member visiting delegation said that it has found “a society presently on a course for cataclysmic disaster with incalculable human consequences that can only be averted by fundamental change.”

Norman Willis, general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, quoted a black South African labor leader who told the delegation: “ ‘Those who will suffer have the right to decide what suffering they are prepared to take--and not anyone else.’ ”

Willis spoke in reference to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s frequent statements that black workers and their families would suffer the most from sanctions and that sanctions would not really end apartheid.

Will Lobby Parliament

He said the Trades Union Congress will lobby hard with Parliament and with the Commonwealth for concerted international action against South Africa as long as apartheid continues.

Willis and Ernst Breit, head of the West German Trade Union Federation, said that the problems of black South Africans were dramatically illustrated for them and other delegation members in a Sunday visit to a squalid, eight-men-to-a-room hostel for black workers in Alexandra, adjacent to Johannesburg’s affluent northern suburbs.

“Just for a few minutes, foreign white VIPs had a little flavor of what it is like to be black and living in those places (the ghetto townships) and without redress against (uniformed people) holding all sorts of guns,” Willis said. (Details of what happened to the group may not be reported under emergency regulations.)

Breit said that a German is “always sensitive today to the use--and sometimes the abuse--of the term Nazi, but here I think it may be justly applied.”

Arrests, Brutality

In their remarks about the current situation of black trade unions here, the labor delegation said in its statement: “There is a pattern of unjustified arrest, often followed by systematic brutality and torture that amounts to a massive violation of human rights. The delegation has seen the physical evidence in the scarred bodies of the released (union) detainees to substantiate the harrowing accounts.”

About 270 union officials are being held without charge, often in solitary confinement, under the state of emergency, and union members have constituted a large proportion of the 5,000 to 8,000 people detained under the emergency regulations since June 12.

Bishop Tutu, 1984 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, told the delegation that most blacks see labor unions “as the cutting edge in their battle for freedom,” despite the government’s current crackdown.

Tutu, who is scheduled to meet President Pieter W. Botha today in Pretoria, later criticized the use of violence by both the state and those fighting apartheid here.

“We won’t have peace coming from the barrel of a gun, whether fired by the police or security forces or by the freedom fighters,” he said in a sermon.

“We won’t have peace with necklaces, coming from either the comrades or the vigilantes,” Tutu added, referring to gasoline-soaked tires, the “necklaces” used by many black groups to kill their rivals.

The government’s Information Bureau on Sunday reported six more deaths in the country’s continuing civil strife.