South Africa Campaign of The Iron Fist

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Many critics, including Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, and Helen Suzman, a leading opposition Member of Parliament, said they would ignore the restrictions and continue to speak their minds. The secretary- general of the South African Council of Churches, the Reverend Beyers Naude, called on the churches to do their duty and pray for the detainees. "If these actions, undertaken in obedience to God's demand, lead to possible charges and imprisonment, so be it," said Naude.

To protest the government action, Archbishop Tutu held a prayer service at St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town that drew a crowd of more than 700. Tutu told the gathering: "Beware when you take on the Church of God. Others have tried and have come a cropper." He added, "The government has gone crazy. I want to tell them that I am not going to stop calling for the release of detainees in or out of church." Said another clergyman at the service, the Reverend Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches: "My plea quite openly is to rise up and revolt against this ban . . . Our integrity is at stake. This is an assault on the very purpose of God for this country. We should never accept it."

Among those at the Cape Town service was the American Ambassador to South Africa, Edward Perkins, who has kept a low profile since he took up his present post last October. Though the State Department maintained that its policy toward South Africa had not changed, Perkins' presence was an unmistakable signal that the U.S. disapproved of the Botha government's recent actions. In a prepared statement, Perkins expressed Washington's "shock and outrage at the continued detention of large numbers of children." He also said that the latest crackdown points to "the erosion of fundamental liberties in this country."

Faced with such a fiery reaction by so wide a range of clergymen, opposition politicians and Western countries, the Botha government staged a hasty strategic retreat. Two days after his first statement, General Coetzee declared that the new policy was not intended to infringe on a person's right to "make representations" regarding a detainee's release, nor was it intended to "prohibit prayers for the release of a detainee during a bona fide religious gathering." Rather, said Coetzee, the new policy was aimed at any action that might "incite" the public to "participate in a campaign" aimed at the release of detainees. Apparently this meant that while individual efforts and prayers might still be legal, concerted actions and campaigns were not.

But the suddenly outraged opposition refused to back off. Tutu and 46 Anglican ministers signed a letter calling on President Botha either to release or bring to trial all those now being detained without charge. The group said they knew they were breaking the ban on campaigning against the detentions, but were doing so because the new regulations were immoral and dangerous and "take us into the realms of totalitarianism." On Good Friday another group of church leaders carried crosses through downtown Durban to protest the detentions. In Cape Town and its suburbs a group of white women from the civil rights group Black Sash openly defied the new restrictions by standing on street corners with posters demanding, "Why can't we call for the release of detainees?"