South Africa: Gunning For Apartheid

After right-wing Conservative Party whites won victories in several districts in last month's local elections, they talked boldly of reinstituting "petty apartheid" regulations that segregate public facilities, such as toilets, libraries and parks. Under pressure from the U.S., South African State President P.W. Botha charged that such policies would spark fresh pressure for international sanctions. Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht, Botha told a conference in Transvaal, "does not have to look his persecutors in the eye in the conference halls of the world."

But the Botha government's slow reforms face a far more menacing threat from the ultra-right. Last week, in a mad act of violence, Barend Strydom, 23, an Afrikaner ex-policeman, gunned down blacks on a street in downtown Pretoria, smiling as he killed six and injured 17. Strydom belonged to the neofascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (A.W.B.), whose members openly whip up racial feelings. Public shock led the government to ban a still more radical group, the tiny so-called B.B.B., or White Liberation Movement, as a clear warning to the A.W.B. and other avowed right-wing groups that the government wants them to tone down their militancy.