Newsgroups: biz.americast.samples
From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com
Organization: American Cybercasting
Subject: \HD ANC said to share blame in bloodbath
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 09:14:26 EDT

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\SE A;NEWS ANALYSIS
\SS (WS)
\HD ANC said to share blame in bloodbath
\SH Protesters sent as 'cannon fodder'
\BY Anton Ferreira
\CR REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
\DT JOHANNESBURG

JOHANNESBURG - The Bisho bloodbath was predictable and preventable, and
some of the blame must be laid at the doorstep of the African National
Congress (ANC), political analysts said yesterday.

They criticized Ciskei homeland leader Oupa Gqozo for the killing of at
least 24 ANC protesters Monday but said the ANC must take its share of the
blame for forcing the confrontation.

"The marchers were nothing other than cannon fodder, despite the ANC's
protestations about their democratic right to march," said political
consultant Wim Booyse.

"The bottom line is power, which the ANC plans to achieve by
destabilizing the homeland leaders who oppose it," he said.

About 60,000 ANC members led by South African Communist Party (SACP)
officials marched on Bisho, capital of the nominally independent black
homeland of Ciskei, to occupy the town and force Mr.  Gqozo from power.

Mr.  Gqozo's troops opened fire after a section of the crowd broke
through a razor wire barricade.

"The ANC knew Gqozo was likely to react in an intemperate way," a
diplomat said.  "The movement might have thought the march would bring
things to a head and have a useful political spin-off."

South Africa's biggest daily, the Star, said in an editorial that Mr.
Gqozo might be a repressive dictator, but the ANC was wrong to protest "in
a manner so provocative that casualties become almost inevitable."

"The ANC's militant mass action proponents must have decided that the
blood price was worth paying.  If so . . . this is political cynicism of an
extreme kind," it said.

The financial daily Business Day said:

"Elements in the ANC leadership have embarked on a revolutionary course
. . . if ANC president Nelson Mandela is to abandon his commitment to
negotiation and be led by militants and hotheads, the future holds little
hope."

The editorial said Mr.  Gqozo's sin was not that he headed a homeland
regime spawned by apartheid but that he did not agree with the ANC.

"No marches have been planned in neighboring Transkei, whose leader
Bantu Holomisa, is publicly sympathetic to the ANC," it said.

John Kane-Berman, director of the independent South African Institute
of Race Relations, said the ANC had asked for tragedy and got it.

"But it's distressing that security forces have not yet learned to deal
with provocation without loss of life," he said.  "Until they do, the cycle
of violence will continue."

The ANC, which described the shooting as an unprovoked massacre of
peaceful protesters exercising their democratic rights, has targeted Mr.
Gqozo as one of three homeland leaders it plans to topple.

The others are President Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana and Chief
Mangosuthu Buthelezi of Kwazulu, who also leads the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Inkatha is locked in a war with the ANC that has killed 13,000 blacks in
eight years.

Mr.  Gqozo, who seized power in March 1990, is regarded as the most
vulnerable.  His homeland lies in the eastern Cape, where support for the
ANC and SACP is strongest.

Mr.  Booyse said the march appeared to be deliberately timed to
overshadow a conference President Frederik de Klerk hosted Monday to
discuss a federal system for the new South Africa.

The ANC opposes federalism, demanding a strong central government in a
unitary state.  The issue was the main rock on which multiparty
constitutional talks foundered in May.

"The ANC must have decided no compromise on federalism was likely
through negotiation, so they are taking another avenue," Mr.  Booyse said.


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