AFRICANEWS

South Africa

Violence rocks SA province

Violence

South Africans are preparing for their second all-race election early next year. Amid the anxiety, killings have resumed in the volatile Kwazulu-Natal province where the ruling party- African National Congress (ANC) has no base. Our correspondent says this could just be a taste of what to expect come early 1999.

With general elections due in South Africa in the next 12 months tension in Kwazulu-Natal is rising. The country's security authorities are struggling to contain the upsurge in violence in the province's strife-torn town of Richmond. More security service personnel have been deployed to the town following the latest upsurge of violence which is threatening to turn the area into a war zone.
To combat the violence, 240 police reinforcements from outside the region have been brought in as well as 120 specially trained troops. Several Richmond police officials have been transferred.
Political party leaders and peace monitors fear violence will escalate in the area. In the decade before South Africa's transition to majority rule in 1994 more than 10,000 people were killed in Kwazulu-Natal in fighting between the African National Congress activists and the mainly Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party supporters.

The government has issued a statement saying the attacks were the work of sinister forces and professional killers. The ruling African National Congress has reiterated its view that the violence in the area remains the work of a 'third force', using Richmond as a test-run with a view to spreading destabilisation to the entire province in the run-up to the 1999 national elections.
President Nelson Mandela has accused "rotten elements" in the South Africa Police Service of helping fuel the violence in an attempt to destabilise the new dispensation in the run-up to next year's election.

A senior African National Congress official in Kwazulu-Natal, Mr Bheki Cele, commenting after the killing of nine people on July 28, said there was reason to to believe the attackers were whites. He says men speaking Afrikaans and English were seen in the area.
"There is a terrorist group operating in Richmond and killing people." 40 people are estimated to have been killed in Richmond since June. Witnesses reported seeing police vehicles nearby at the site of some of the killings in Richmond. One witness said he saw a police car shine a spotlight at a house so a killer could find his way at night. Although apartheid ended with the nation's first all-race elections in 1994, the police and army are being integrated, a minority of whites long for the days of white rule. During the 1980s, apartheid security forces did supply Intake with weapons for its clashes with the African National Congress.
However, the Intake Freedom Party has rejected assertions that the attack was carried out by a sinister third force operating in the area.

"These sort of comments merely serves to incite racism in the province. The Inkatha Freedom Party rejects all attempts by the African National Congress to fan the flames of racial hatred and intolerance," says Inkatha Freedom Party's Lauen Winchester. Mr Winchester thinks, the violence in Richmond is rooted in the establishment of the African National Congress' Self Defence Units that were trained by MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe)
"It seems as though the African National Congress is resolved to bring about another revolution in South Africa-this time not free, but to divide the people of this country."

The new round of violence came after Mr Sifiso Nkabinde, was fingered as an informant for the apartheid-era security forces and expelled as local African National Congress chairman. Weeks before Mr Nkabinde's expulsion from the ANC in March, last year, a military intelligence report handed to the Kwazulu-Natal province's safety and security sub-committee alleged Mr Nkabinde had unusually close links with several Richmond and Pietermaritzburg police units.
Mr Nkabinde earlier this year was acquitted of charges that he killed 16 people.

He later joined the rival United Democratic Movement, a new opposition party, of which he is the national secretary.
The UDM is led by another exile from the political mainstream, Mr Bantu Holomisa, a former deputy minister in Nelson Mandela's government who was forced out of the ANC after accusing leading party members of corruption.
Police are investigating the rivalries between the African National Congress and the opposition United Democratic Movement as a motive for the killings.

Most people here blame the shootings and other killings on a simmering feud between the ANC and UDM, which has become a beacon for disaffected ANC supporters.
Mr Nkabinde blames leaders of the ANC, for inflaming passions by branding him a traitor and claims they fear his popularity. "The ANC must be prepared to swallow their pride and realise that the only way to solve this is through negotiations. They must realise human beings are not just ANC members.''
Mr Nkabinde repeatedly has called for peace talks. But the African National Congress has refused to negotiate.
Political observers say, 'there are maniacs on all sides who are itching to have a go at each other".
Leading political commentator, Mr Tom Lodge, believes "agent provacateurs" may still play a role, but thinks that turf battles are more of a driving force.
"In some areas politics is fought at the level of terriotary, not ideas," he said.

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