By Norm Dixon
Apartheid collaborator Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party has intensified the appalling violence in South Africa's Natal Province and his KwaZulu bantustan fief. Inkatha is attempting to drive the African National Congress from Zulu-majority areas.
More than 100 people have been killed over the past month in Natal, including a top regional ANC leader, Reggie Hadebe, assassinated on October 26.
Hadebe was vice-chairperson of the Natal Midlands region of the ANC and a former treasurer of the Inkatha Youth Brigade. According to the progressive South African weekly New Nation, he was seen in Natal as Buthelezi's most serious opponent.
Despite years of Inkatha and state violence that has caused more than 10,000 deaths, support for the ANC in Natal continues to increase. Buthelezi's support is now concentrated around his northern Natal/KwaZulu heartland, where he uses the KwaZulu police as a private Inkatha army.
In the sprawling townships of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, many of which KwaZulu administers, the most recent opinion poll registered ANC support at 44% compared to Inkatha's 12%. The support for the ANC in urban Natal was obvious during the August 3-4 general strike when the predominately Zulu population defied Inkatha's orders to ignore the strike.
In rural KwaZulu, where conservative traditional Zulu leaders have in the past delivered the population's support to Inkatha, ANC membership has doubled since the mass action campaign was launched on June 16.
Several violent attacks on Inkatha members have the trademarks of covert operations by Pretoria's security forces. Inkatha and Pretoria have blamed these attacks on the ANC.
The attacks resemble the infamous Trust Feed massacre in December 1988. Four South African Police were convicted earlier this year of murdering 11 Inkatha supporters, including women and children, in their home in the Pietermaritzburg township of Trust Feed. Police at the time blamed the massacre on an ANC-aligned residents association whose activists were then driven out by angry residents. The area was taken over by Inkatha.
Hadebe, immediately prior to his murder, announced he had evidence that the apartheid state had brought Renamo guerillas into Natal from Mozambique to bolster and train Inkatha forces for their war against the liberation movement.
The government responded to the upsurge in Inkatha violence by dispatching an extra 2000 troops to Natal. The ANC described the move ll ANC members ... De Klerk is ... targeting the ANC for victimisation."
A special meeting of the ANC's National Working Committee and the Regional Executives of the three ANC regions in Natal met on November 4 in Pietermaritzburg. In a statement, the ANC said "the violence is being used by forces opposed to the democratisation of South Africa ... Natal has been selected as a testing field on which the advance of democracy will be blocked and a campaign for the dismemberment of our country will be launched."
The ANC stressed that the differences were not "tribal": "The strategy of destabilisation of the national liberation movement involves the misuse of the cultural identity of the Zulu people by those forces opposed to democracy. This policy is opposed by the majority of the Zulu people and does not represent their interests. When given the opportunity to express their views in a free and fair election, they will reject the leadership that tries to impose this upon them. That is why it is used to deny free political activity in Natal."
ANC president Nelson Mandela, addressing 15,000 mourners at Reggie Hadebe's funeral on November 8, sought to cool passions. He told the angry but disciplined crowd, "Do not put on the still shoulders of the dead the responsibility for more deaths ... Reggie went to Ixopo to discuss ways and means of saving lives and not causing more deaths ... To honour his memory and pay tribute to this young hero, we must cast ourselves in the mould of the peacemakers and not the warmongers.
"There are some in our country who seek to project the Zulu speaking people as lovers of war and violent conflict ... We must stand up and challenge these false and insulting images ... Throughout their known history they have never resorted to weapons of war for terrorist purposes. When they took up arms, it was for a just cause ... Today there is no cause more just than the struggle to end the criminal system of apartheid and transform South Africa into a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist country."
Mandela called for a special meeting of the Natal-KwaZulu Regional Dispute Resolution Committee, to be attended by members of the National Peace Accord Executive Committee, the National Peace Secretariat and members of the international observer missions. This meeting would formulate a set of emergency interim measures that would be binding on all participants, aimed at ending the violence.