South Africans, Declaring War on Violence, Observe Anti-Crime Day : Protest: Citizens across nation demonstrate against soaring brutality. President Mandela vows to ‘stamp out this evil.’

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  It seemed a routine traffic violation when police Lance Sgt. Kobus Esterhuizen pulled over a white Toyota that had run a red light near Pretoria early Wednesday.

But the driver knocked the police officer to the ground with his door, then shot him to death with a 9-millimeter pistol, police said. Other officers then killed the driver.

It was a tragic, but sadly typical, start to a day that was anything but typical here. In cities and towns across the country, top police officials, politicians, religious leaders and angry citizens donned black ribbons and stood in silence for a minute at noon to declare war on the violent crime that has made South Africa one of the world’s most murderous societies.

“Let us in our millions say no to crime,” President Nelson Mandela said in Pretoria, the administrative capital.

Mandela led the nation’s first anti-crime day with a vow to “stamp out this evil” and a stern warning to criminals.

“Your days of preying on citizens are numbered,” he said.

Whether the high-powered rhetoric and emotional symbolism of the church-sponsored campaign will help end the growing sense of urban terror and anarchy here is hard to say. What’s clear is that lawlessness--or at least mass paranoia about it--has reached crisis levels in Africa’s richest and most promising nation.

“Crime in South Africa has created fear, it has created panic,” Tokyo Sexwale, the provincial premier in Johannesburg, told several thousand people who gathered at noon in a downtown plaza to link hands and stand in somber silence.

“Crime has frightened foreign investors,” said Sexwale. “Crime has undermined our job-creation strategy. Crime threatens tourism. Crime threatens our total economic activity. Crime threatens our lives.”

Nearly everyone in the crowd had his or her own gruesome crime story to tell, because violent crime --especially carjacking, armed robbery and burglary--cuts a grim swath across racial and economic lines.

Aron Mohapi, a 40-year-old deliveryman from the black township of Soweto, was robbed on a busy street at gunpoint recently on his way to deposit his paycheck at a bank.

“There were people all around,” he recalled. “Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything.”

Gordon Calmeyer, a white minister, has had his car radio stolen five times this year, most recently on Saturday while the car was parked in his yard. Last year was even worse.

“I was hijacked, pulled out of my car with a gun at my head,” he recalled.

And Samuel Jurie, a retired teacher, said his teen-age children now carry guns for protection after their home was robbed.

“When I go to church, I am afraid to take my car,” he said. “There are so many criminals now.”

In the first six months of this year, 948,064 violent crimes were reported--5% more than during the same period last year. The murder rate fell after last year’s democratic elections, as political violence plummeted, but sharp increases were reported in rapes, robberies, assaults, thefts and especially carjackings.

Experts warn that statistics are notoriously unreliable here, especially in rural areas and black townships. And growth in reported crime may be partially the result of a new willingness by blacks to cooperate with once-hated police.

Still, the danger is real. A recent study sponsored by a local bank found that South Africa has 45 murders per 100,000 people. That compares to 5.5 per 100,000 internationally, and 9 per 100,000 in the United States.

Experts blame the violent crime here on a surfeit of guns, at least 40% unemployment among blacks and a culture twisted by the ravages of apartheid, when liberation groups sanctioned violence against a brutal police force used largely to oppress nonwhites.

In addition, the opening of South Africa’s borders after the end of apartheid last year has led to a sharp increase in organized crime, especially from international drug trafficking and car-smuggling rings.

For now, the 121,868-member police force complains it is understaffed, underequipped and overwhelmed. Courts are jammed. And prisons seem little help--20 maximum security prisoners escaped from the Pietermaritzburg prison this month alone.

On Sunday, a national television audience watched a real-life horror as four gunmen suddenly invaded a championship boxing match near Cape Town and shot a cashier to death in a botched robbery attempt. Spectators dived for cover; boxers and broadcasters cowered by the ring, and the men escaped.

Except for the cameras, the incident was not unusual. More than 300 police officers have been killed this year. Nursery schools have been robbed, school buses have been hijacked at gunpoint and deadly gun battles have erupted on major roads as rival taxi companies battle for lucrative routes.

One result has been a flood of patients seeking trauma counseling after being victims of crime, psychologists say. Another has been Stay Alive, a Johannesburg company that opened last year and offers a four-hour course in anti-carjacking techniques.

Wealthy whites, who are the most obvious targets of economic crime, have resorted to other desperate means as well.

Johannesburg’s plush northern suburbs have seen a sudden surge in what builders here call “siege architecture”--fortress-like cluster communities guarded by high walls, vicious dogs and high-voltage electric fences.

Older communities are following suit. Residents’ groups in two crime-hit suburbs announced plans this week to erect prison-like walls around their communities and hire armed guards.

But black communities are hardly immune. A furniture delivery crew wore bulletproof vests Monday, for example, as they unloaded a moving van in Lamontville, a trash-strewn slum outside Durban. A guard cradled a shotgun.

And blacks in some areas have turned to vigilante violence, beating, hacking or torturing to death suspected murderers and thieves with growing regularity.

Last week, for example, a vengeful mob in a township outside Johannesburg pulled a suspected murderer from a police van and “necklaced” him, burning him alive with a tire around his neck. No arrests were made.

To be sure, the government hasn’t ignored the problem.

About 7,000 army commandos help patrol crime-ridden townships. Roadblocks and police crackdowns regularly net thousands of illegal weapons, stolen vehicles and fugitives. And Parliament is expected to pass a tough package of anti-crime laws, including longer sentences for violent crimes, and stiffer bail procedures.

At the anti-crime ceremony Wednesday, business groups pledged to donate vehicles, cellular phones and other equipment to police. Community groups promised to launch neighborhood watch programs. And speakers urged the public to turn in criminals, even if they are friends and neighbors.