Botha Renews State of Emergency a 2nd Year

CAPE TOWN, South Africa —  President Pieter W. Botha on Wednesday renewed South Africa’s state of emergency for a second year, saying the country faces an undiminished threat to its national security despite a sharp drop in political violence in recent months.

Government intelligence on the plans of the outlawed African National Congress “indicates that the whole of the republic remains a target area and that the security of the state itself is at stake,” Botha told Parliament.

“I am convinced,” he said, “that the safety of the public and the maintenance of law and order is threatened and that the ordinary laws of the republic remain insufficient to counter this threat.”

He said the government intends to step up its campaign against the African National Congress, the principal insurgent group fighting white rule, and will pursue it into any neighboring countries used to mount terrorist attacks in South Africa.

“The government possesses information relating to planned acts of terror and subversion, in view of which steps will have to be taken,” he said. “We will not talk to these people--we will fight them. They are part and parcel of the terrorist curse besetting the world today.”

Criticized by Black Leaders

Botha’s renewal of emergency rule had been expected, and it drew immediate criticism from the country’s black leaders.

“We are not scared,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said. “They know they can arrest us, but in the end they will be like Hitler, who bit the dust.”

By renewing the national state of emergency, which was proclaimed on June 12 last year, Botha extended the broad powers, amounting almost to martial-law authority, that he had given the police and army to quell civil unrest.

Under the emergency regulations, which informed political observers expect to be tightened in the month ahead, the police may detain anyone indefinitely without charge. An estimated 30,000 people have been held at various times over the past year, some for months at a time.

The police and army have the power to make searches without warrants, to close areas of the country to non-residents, to impose curfews, to seize businesses, to censor the press and to take whatever other action they believe is necessary to restore order.

Their orders have the force of law under the emergency regulations, and transgressions may be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

Although the courts have curtailed some of these powers and declared a number of specific regulations to be invalid, Botha’s authority to declare a state of emergency and issue such sweeping regulations has been upheld despite opposition protests that the country is moving away from democracy, not toward it.

Urged Not to Renew

Anti-apartheid groups, including the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, had urged Botha earlier this week not to renew emergency rule. They said it is harsh and, in view of the declining unrest, no longer necessary.

The government Bureau for Information said Wednesday that the tough measures taken under the state of emergency had already restored a significant degree of calm to the country’s black townships and reduced the number of people killed in political violence from 157 in May, 1986, to only eight last month.

But the bureau also argued, in a lengthy review of the civil unrest since last June, that “lifting the state of emergency under the present circumstances would quickly result in a renewed cycle of violence and unrest.”

“Radical organizations are still doing everything in their power to politicize, mobilize and intimidate the masses in their attempts to achieve their revolutionary objectives,” the bureau said.

Botha reiterated that the government, although it is attempting to open a dialogue with black political leaders, will not talk with the African National Congress unless it abandons its armed struggle and forswears violence.